Tamerlane’s Career and Its Uses
Beatrice Forbes Manz
Abstract: Tamerlane has remained an important figure in world history, both because of the impact of his career on the world of his time and because he remains fascinating and useful to many people. This paper explores the facts of Temür’s career and the uses made of his image following his death, showing how his actions together with the stories circulated during his lifetime served to create a charisma that survives into our time. Tamerlane belonged to two worlds, the Islamic and the Turco-Mongolian, but was not eligible to hold the highest office in either one. To compensate for his low formal position, he deliberately created a persona which bordered on the supernatural. The dynasty he founded reworked earlier traditions to create the figure of a dynastic founder within both the Islamic and the Turkic traditions. Subsequent dynasties in the Middle East and Central and South Asia used Tamerlane to bolster their legitimacy, while European writers and historians found fascination in the contradictions of his personality and the monumentality of his ambitions. Many of the myths recounted later have their origins in stories apparently deliberately circulated by Tamerlane and his entourage. There is a striking continuity in the portrayal of Tamerlane and the use to which he has been put, from medieval Iran and India through the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to Russian, Soviet, and finally Uzbek formulations of history.
Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500-2000
Abstract: Kashmiri shawls serve as a material vector to trace how European assumptions of geographical determinism, racial hierarchy, and gender essentialism underpinned the seemingly disparate nineteenth-century narratives about design history and various theories about an “Asiatic mode of production” in labor history. The continuing strength of these assumptions is demonstrated by the contemporary marketing in 2001 of pashmina (“woven goat hair” or cashmere) shawls, using the recycled tropes of exoticism and fantasy ethnography crafted during the heyday of British colonialism.
Governing Growth: A Comparative Analysis of the Role of the State in the Rise of the West
Abstract: In explaining the fact that Western Europe was the first region in the world with industrial economic growth, numerous authors have referred to the existence of a type of state and a state-system that presumably were uniquely European. In this article this thesis is put to the test through an analysis of how in the early modern period they are supposed to have brought about a “European miracle” and through a systematic comparison of the Western European polities and the context in which they operated with those of China, India, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan in the same period. The author concludes that the role of the state in explaining the emergence or non-emergence — in contrast to the diffusing and sustaining — of modern industrial growth has been much smaller and much less self-evident than is often claimed.
From Mexico to Copenhagen to Nairobi: The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985
Judith P. Zinsser
Abstract: This essay describes the increasing radicalization of the United Nations-sponsored Decade for Women from 1975 to 1985, as seen in the final documents from each of its three conferences: the Mexico Declaration and Plan of Action, the Copenhagen Programme of Action, and the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies. The essay also argues that the Decade for Women demonstrates the significance of the United Nations to the creation of a truly international women’s movement, to the acceptance of many varied definitions of “feminism,” and to the advancement of all peoples’ human rights.
Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History
Peter A. Coclanis
Abstract: This essay attempts at once to perform three interrelated tasks: to provide a brief sketch of the development of the field of Atlantic history; to document and assess Bernard Bailyn’s monumental contributions to this field; and to issue a respectful but spirited critique of Atlantic history from a global perspective.
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reviewed by Daniel R. Headrick
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reviewed by Steven Matthewman
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reviewed by Robert B. Marks
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reviewed by Alan Lebaron
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reviewed by Haleh Vaziri
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reviewed by Alfred W. Crosby
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reviewed by Andre Gunder Frank
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reviewed by David G. Atwill
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reviewed by Edward R. Slack Jr.
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reviewed by Lynn Swartz Dodd
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reviewed by James R. Corcoran
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reviewed by Laurence J. C. Ma
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reviewed by James R. Corcoran
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reviewed by Keith Camacho
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reviewed by Max Quanchi
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reviewed by Haunani-Kay Trask
Alon Confino. The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918.
Susanne Zantop. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870.
reviewed by Rainer Buschmann
Fredrik Logevall. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam.
reviewed by Pierre Asselin
Michael Willis. The Islamist Challenge in Algeria: A Political History.
reviewed by Donald Holsinger