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Asia, Africa, and Latin America 1450-2000
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Today, the majority of the world's Christian population lives in the Global South. Knowledge of their history is therefore indispensable. This textbook offers a compact and vivid overview of the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America since 1450, focussing on diversity and interdependence, local actors and global effects. Maps, illustrations and numerous photos as well as continuous references to easily accessible source texts support the reader's own reading and its use in various forms of academic teaching.
Asia, Africa, and Latin America 1450-2000
Author:
Today, the majority of the world's Christian population lives in the Global South. Knowledge of their history is therefore indispensable. This textbook offers a compact and vivid overview of the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America since 1450, focussing on diversity and interdependence, local actors and global effects. Maps, illustrations and numerous photos as well as continuous references to easily accessible source texts support the reader's own reading and its use in various forms of academic teaching.
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Abstract
This article offers new evidence on commercial financing in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It examines the little-known role of cash waqfs (nukud-ı mevkufe), Islamic trusts, in supporting Ottoman trade with Europe in the sixteenth century. Most of scholarship on cash waqfs considers this institution exclusively as a provider of micro-credit to consumers because the Islamic legal framework allegedly hindered capital accumulation from this institution. By focusing on the cash waqfs of Sarajevo in Ottoman-Venetian trade in the Adriatic Sea in the 1580s, I demonstrate that this institution could also operate as a source of commercial capital supporting large-scale business ventures. I argue that this was the case in Sarajevo because of the absence of other major capital providers in that city and of the specific role played by local artisanal associations (esnaf) in the foundation and administration of these endowments as well as in the conduct of international trade. These findings for Sarajevo are another demonstration of the operational diversity and flexibility of Islamic credit institutions in the pre-modern period.
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This article presents an overview of Chinese-language historiography concerning ancient maritime trade between the Mediterranean and East Asia. It examines the impact of institutional structures, political context and wider questions within the Chinese research environment, revealing inter-disciplinary intersections and recent trends, including towards the intensive study of numismatic evidence and the centring of the (maritime) Silk Road as the focal point of a growing research community. This article aims to enable future research collaboration, in a contemporary context in which scholars working in China are often more aware of key debates in western scholarship than vice versa.
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Current and past historical research on Russia and China’s borderlands heavily relies on the concept of ethnicity. Both the Russian and Qing empires ascribed to an “ethnic mode of ruling” in their borderlands, reflected in the estate inorodtsy and the Eight Banner system. In view of how strongly state-determined categories of ethnic identification can influence historical analysis, this paper observes that the focus of research is shifting from “ethnicity” to “regionality”. The paper also explores how the communist regimes in Russia and China of the 20th century handled the legacy of the multiethnic empire with the politicization of ethnic groups.
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This article examines the shifting lines between ethics and law in the policing and punishment of prostitution in nineteenth-century Tehran. It begins by exploring Tehran’s urban policing and legal institutions before examining how illicit sexual acts were defined alternatively as sins or crimes, depending on the relative publicness of the act, in prescriptive and legal texts. It then turns to how this played out in practice by analyzing a first-hand account of a private party and a rare testimonial document signed by neighborhood residents complaining about a pimping and procurement ring in their midst. Prostitutes and pimps regularly evaded penal sanction through close contacts with the police, which prompted an array of government strategies to address prostitution. Finally, the article ends by discussing known cases of punishment for prostitution and pimping in Tehran, including two Tehrani prostitutes whose crimes drew the attention of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh.
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Genesis and development of ethnic and national identities have been topics of continual interest and importance for historical research but, as taken for granted, may obscure the similarities between populations now recognized as separate groups and blur social and cultural boundaries between distinct sub-groups within a community. This article explores how the scope and application of identities as determined by “place” and by “people” as well as a combined emphasis on both place and people have evolved in the modern history of Northeast China, with broader implications for the study of Asia through comparison with other regions of the world.
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While Shāh Walī Allāh’s political letters have been the subject of much scholarly discussion, they are still deeply misunderstood. These misunderstandings are due, primarily, to erroneous attributions of recipients, misidentified individuals in the letters, and the failure to read these “political letters” alongside Walī Allāh’s broader epistolographic corpus, contemporary biographical texts and political chronicles of the period. This article argues that far from being a critic of the Mughal Empire per se, Walī Allāh was closely associated with leading members of ʿĀlamgīr II’s court. Moreover, his famous “invitation” to the Afghan ruler Aḥmad Shāh Abdālī, ostensibly asking him to invade Hindustan, should properly be understood as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to attract the favorable attention of a military leader in order to mitigate the danger posed by his troops.