The second volume in the American Historical Association's global history series introduces readers to the cross-cultural study of ancient and classical civilizations. The opening essay by Jerry Bentley surveys methodologies and critical interpretations that have been essential to the development of comparative historical analysis. These include contributions from the fields of sociology, archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology, and recent investigative practices that honor previously neglected groups and validate testimony passed down through oral traditions. The first set of essays highlight predominant themes in global history by examining the ongoing interactions between ancient agrarian and nomadic societies as well as the impact of these exchanges on economic development and cross-cultural adaptation. The essays in the second section focus on regional patterns in the dissemination of ideas, institutions, and material culture.
By highlighting key historical transitions and recurring cultural patterns, this book provides an engaging introduction to the complexities of human development. Written by leading scholars in the field, the historiographic essays in Agricultural and Pastoral Societies in Ancient and Classical History offer students and teachers a comprehensive overview of the arguments, applications, and resources that inform comparative global history.
In the decades following its annexation to the Indian Empire in 1852, Lower Burma (the Irrawaddy-Sittang delta region) was transformed from an underdeveloped and sparsely populated backwater of the Konbaung Empire into the world’s largest exporter of rice. This seminal and far-reaching work focuses on two major aspects of that transformation: the growth of the agrarian sector of the rice industry of Lower Burma and the history of the plural society that evolved largely in response to rapid economic expansion.
Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission.
Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East.
Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.
Essays on Twentieth-Century History
Edited by Michael Adas for the American Historical Association Temple University Press, 2010 Library of Congress D421.E77 2010 | Dewey Decimal 909.82
In the sub-field of world history, there has been a surprising paucity of thinking and writing about how to approach and conceptualize the long twentieth century from the 1870s through the early 2000s. The historiographic essays collected in Essays on Twentieth Century History will go a long way to filling that lacuna.
Each contribution covers a key theme and one or more critical sub-fields in twentieth century global history. Chapters address migration patterns, the impact of world wars, transformations in gender and urbanization, as well as environmental transitions. All are written by leading historians in each of the sub-fields represented, and each is intended to provide an introduction to the literature, key themes, and debates that have proliferated around the more recent historical experience of humanity.