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Abstract
As the scholarly border between China and Southeast Asia has dissipated, so the vast region from the Yangtze River to Malaysia has been integrated into a whole. There was an inexorable expansion of copper-base expertise southward, reaching Lingnan and Yunnan by 1400-1200 bc, and Southeast Asia one or two centuries later, with ultimate origins in the Asian steppes via the Chinese Central Plains and Sichuan. As prospectors identified and exploited the Southeast Asian copper mines, a limited range of copper-base artefacts moved along established exchange routes, including socketed axes, bangles and spears. At first rare and used to advertise status in communities advantaged by a strategic location, with increased production and in situ casting within consumer settlements, bronzes were no longer associated with social elites. Only with different regional stimuli during the Iron Age, were bronzes again employed by societies characterized by social inequality.
Abstract
The Bronze Age was a time of pivotal economic change when new long-distance trading networks became associated with a macro-regional division of labour and decentralised political complexity. These developments occurred against the background of a shifting mosaic of subsistence patterns, which included the east-west exchange of crops across Eurasia and (in some areas) greater use of secondary products. As Bronze Age economies became more specialised and diverse, it might be assumed that there was also an increased emphasis on the procurement and trade of fish and other marine resources. However, archaeological analyses of such resources are limited in contrast to land-based subsistence patterns and many questions remain. This essay aims to build a broad interpretive framework for analysing the role of marine resources in the Bronze Age. Our provisional results find that an increased emphasis on specialist systems of agropastoralism reduced the use of marine resources in many parts of Eurasia during this period. However, evidence from Japan and the eastern Mediterranean suggests that, at least in some regions, marine resources became commodities traded over long-distances by the late Bronze Age, though this requires further quantification. Island Southeast Asia displays a different pattern from other regions considered here in a greater continuity of marine resource use from the Neolithic into the historic era, perhaps due to a lower reliance on agropastoralism.
Abstract
In this essay, I look at a curious intersection – the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the interwar era and the end of indentured labor. A genealogical reading suggests that Indian diplomacy takes “birth” primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of the new, seemingly upper caste Indian, in contrast to the lower caste “coolie” of the past. Diplomacy here becomes a practice through which this difference between the upper caste Indian migrant as a rights-bearing individual, and the lower caste Indian migrant as a non-rights bearing individual is enacted. This interrogation of Indian diplomatic practice is primarily an effort to reveal the ways in which caste, rarely explored as a factor in Indian diplomacy, is indeed central to its making.
Abstract
The exchange of gifts was an important aspect of the relations between the Safavid Empire and the Republic of Venice. Drawing on Venetian archival documents, the article aims to explore the nature and significance of Safavid diplomatic gift-giving to Venice in the first third of the seventeenth century. In particular, it examines the place and importance of precious objects in gift exchanges, looking at specific types of gifts given such as carpets, textiles, and weaponry. The article sheds light on the role religion played in the determination of a Shah’s choice of a gift to the Doge. Furthermore, this article examines how the diplomatic gifts from the Safavid rulers were viewed and conceived in Venice. Using a comparative perspective, the article explores the differences between the Safavid gift-giving strategies towards Venice and Ottomans. It reveals that the Safavids and Venetians had a common understanding of what was worthy of giving.