Global connection is often best understood at an intermediate scale: not through separate civilisations, but neither through an undifferentiated whole world. Seas, caravan routes, languages, ports, courts, schools and merchant networks created durable zones of contact in which knowledge could travel and change.
The resources below follow several such connected regions. They are not intended as exhaustive regional bibliographies, but as examples of what becomes visible when historical inquiry is organised around movement and encounter.
The Globalization of Knowledge in the Post-Antique Mediterranean, 700-1500
Open-access edited book | Edited by Sonja Brentjes and Jürgen Renn
Examines the routes, institutions and practices through which knowledge travelled around the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Its subjects include mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy and textual scholarship.
A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History
Edited book | Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette
Reconstructs the medieval Mediterranean as a multilingual literary field in which Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and European vernaculars interacted. It offers an alternative to literary histories organised solely by modern national languages.
Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance
Book | Dag Nikolaus Hasse
A detailed investigation of the presence of Arabic philosophy, medicine, astronomy and astrology in Renaissance Europe. Hasse also examines the later processes through which parts of this inheritance were criticised, suppressed or forgotten.
Scholarly network, seminars and publications
An interdisciplinary network treating the Mediterranean as a connected historical region spanning Europe, Africa and Asia. Its website provides information about seminars, workshops, conferences and publications.
Edited book | Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon
Studies the circulation of paper, manuscripts, scholars and ideas between North and sub-Saharan Africa. It places West African book culture and Arabic literacy within a large regional history of trade and learning.
Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa
Book | Ousmane Oumar Kane
Challenges the reduction of West African Islamic learning to Timbuktu alone. It reconstructs a much larger intellectual geography of schools, scholars, texts and scholarly lineages extending across West Africa and into the wider Islamic world.
Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia
Book | Ronit Ricci
Follows an Arabic narrative through Javanese, Malay and Tamil adaptations. The book presents translation as a creative process through which texts, languages and religious communities were mutually transformed.
Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World
Book | Elizabeth A. Lambourn
Beginning with a medieval merchant's packing list, Lambourn reconstructs the social and material world connecting the Mediterranean, North Africa, Arabia and India. It demonstrates how ordinary objects and documents can reveal extensive histories of commerce and migration.
The Music Road: Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India
Edited book | Reinhard Strohm
Traces the movement of musical instruments, repertoires, practices and ideas across a broad zone extending from the Mediterranean through the Middle East and Central Asia to India.
Book | Catherine Jami
Studies European mathematics and Jesuit learning at the Qing court. Rather than telling a simple story of Western diffusion, Jami examines how imported knowledge was selected, reorganised and used within Chinese political and intellectual structures.
Kings College Silk Roads Programme
An interdisciplinary research programme to study the history and culture of the countries of the Silk Roads
An interdisciplinary research programme to study e history and culture of the countries of the Si