How can global history can be applied instead of advocated? The new volume The Prospect of Global History examines this question and explores the fast growing field of global history across a wide geographical and chronological range.

I I I . G L O B A L N E T WO R K S 7. Global History from an Islamic Angle Francis Robinson 8. he Real American Empire Antony G. Hopkins 9. Writing Constitutions and Writing World History Linda Colley Afterword: History on a Global Scale John Darwin Bibliography Index Med Tabriz it Eu Granada erranAthens ph Baghdad Tunls ean Herat ra Damascus S tes Fez ea Isfahan Kabul Jerusalem R P Cairo Basra ers ia n Gulf Medina Se Sh. Bira, Mongolian Historical Literature of the XVII–XIX Centuries Written in Tibetan, trans. Stanley Frye (Bloomington: Tibet Society, 1970), 29. 26 David Brophy, ‘he Kings of Xinjiang: Muslims [sic] Elites and the Qing Empire’, Études Orientales: Revue Culturelle Semestrielle 25 (2008), pp. 69–90, p. 69. 27 Qing shilu, vol. 5, p. 955 (KX 183.2b–3a), KX36/4/5 (24 May 1697); vol. 5, p. 964 (KX 183.20b–21a), KX36/5/24 (12 July 1697). 28 Ma Tong, ‘A Brief History of the Qâdiriyya in China’, trans. Jonathan Lipman, Journal of the History of Suism 1, 2 (2000), pp. 547–76; Ma Tong, Zhongguo Yisilan jiaopai menhuan suyuan (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1986), pp. 83–92. 29 For more on Sui and Muslim networks, see Francis Robinson in this volume.

Going global does not mean dumping comparative histories in favour of entanglements and connectedness. Indeed, a recurring theme for the field is the xylophone of convergence and divergence. It is laid out in Kevin O’Rourke’s confessions of an economist, which chart the ways in which historical evidence can illuminate economists’ quest for insights into when and how societies broke out of traps and lunged ahead of others, or slipped behind. He makes the case – which more global historians should heed – that prices can tell us stories about the pace, depth, and unevenness of market integration. Included are ways to understand better the winners and losers. Bukhara and Samarkand as a bridge between Persia and Gansu.36 Although this project failed, Jesuits in Persia, relying in part on Armenian merchants, were able to augment overland itineraries from Isfahan to China via India and Siberia with a third running through Herat, Balkh, Bukhara, and Turfan.37 Another scholar sifting the various currents of information at Beijing in this period was Chen Lunjiong. His father, a Fujianese merchant with experience abroad, had advised the Qing court on how to capture Taiwan in 1683 and was rewarded with a high position in the Qing military. French Jesuits, in a 1717 letter home, described their debates with him over his ierce opposition to Christianity. Chen Lunjiong, whom he had once taken on a mission to Japan, served in Kangxi’s bodyguard in the early 1720s and around the end of that decade composed an account of the eastern hemisphere. Although principally concerned with the maritime world, Chen’s map and text described Central Asia, including the Caspian Sea, Siberia, and territories he described as ‘Galdan’ (the Junghars), ‘Samarkand’ (Muslim Central Asia), and Persia.38 Chen seems to have had conidence in his knowledge of Central Asia, for in 1736 he memorialized about Siberia’s important strategic position relative to the Junghars.39 Chen’s case reminds us that Inner Asian developments were by no means overlooked on the maritime frontier. Galdan’s death in the foothills of the Altai on April 4, 1697, irst reported to Kangxi on June 2, was reported at Nagasaki by a Chinese ship that had put to sea from Ningbo on July 14.40 Taken individually, none of the conduits of information reviewed here is a certain source for Ghombojab’s list of the ‘sons of Chaghatai’. his is perhaps not surprising. A year after Ghombojab completed his work in Beijing, another genealogy of the descendants of Chinggis, the Histoire Généalogique des Tatars, was published at Leiden. his was the work of Abu ’l-Ghazi Bahadur Khan (1603–63), ruler of Khiva, like Ghombojab a historian and descendant of Chinggis. he content of his work was gleaned over the course of a life in which he had travelled throughout Central Asia and lived in Persia and among the Qazaqs and Torghuts (Kalmyks). Originally written in Chaghatai Turki, the text was interpreted into Russian by a Muslim scholar, and then into German by Swedish prisoners of war. If it is, as the modern scholar Bertold Spuler has judged, ‘widely defective for the earlier periods’, this is surely due to the heterogeneous sources from which its author assembled it.41 It seems likely that Ghombojab’s work was formed by a comparable fusion of diferent sources of information ricocheting around the Qing Empire, particularly Kangxi and Yongzheng-era Beijing. 36 For an overview of these Jesuit eforts see Felix A. Plattner, Jesuits Go East, trans. Lord Sudley and Oscar Blobel (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1950), pp. 166–215. 37 [Jacques Villotte], Voyages d’un Missionaire de la Compagnie de Jesus, en Turquie, en Perse, en Armenie, en Arabie, & en Barbarie (Paris: J. Vincent, 1730), pp. 643–5. 38 Chen Lunjiong, Haiguo wenjian lu (no location: no publisher, 1730), 1.28a, 41b. 39 Qing shilu, vol. 9, pp. 516–17 (QL 21.32b–33a), QL1/6/29 (6 Aug 1736). 40 Hayashi Shunsai, Ka-I hentai (Tokyo: Tōyō bunko, 1959), vol. 3, p. 1921. 41 Cliford E. Bosworth et al (eds), he Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1967), vol. 1, p. 121. ways in which Muslims have come to write the life of the Prophet. he inal theme in the new Muslim self is the growth of self-consciousness and the relective habit. A willed Islam had to be a self-conscious one. It opened up an internal landscape where the battle of the pious for the good would take place.45 Alongside these new senses of the self, Islamic reform, and its ‘Protestant turn’, undermined the old system of religious authority and opened the way to selfinterpretation of the scriptures. Up to this point, as noted, religious authority rested with religious specialists, to whom knowledge had been passed down person-to-person through time and who monopolized interpretation. hey transmitted knowledge to society more widely by their example, their edicts, and their sermons. Reform with its insistence on personal engagement with scripture, with its translation of scripture into vernacular languages, with its strong support for adopting print, and its fashioning of the individual human conscience, began to change all this. Reform encouraged literacy, as did colonial governments to a lesser extent. Independent Muslim states in the second half of the twentieth century came to invest in literacy to the extent that in Southeast Asia the percentage of the school-leaving cohorts is in the high nineties. Over the past thirty years this has been followed in much of the Muslim world by a move towards mass higher education. hese developments have largely destroyed the old forms of religious authority and opened the way to widespread self-interpretation. A brother- and sisterhood of all believers has begun to emerge. A major feature of the modern Muslim world is the scripture-reading group in particular for women. No one now knows, it is frequently said, who speaks for Islam.46 A striking feature of the ‘Protestant turn’ is the way in which it has been carried forward in Muslim societies by rising social formations. Indeed, I would argue that this process in the twentieth century has represented a reform of Muslim society from below, some might even say a re-Islamization. he context of this has been the presence of Western power with two key outcomes: the co-option of the elites of Muslim societies to serve Western political, economic, and cultural purposes; and revolutionary economic and social change within Muslim societies with the formation of industrial, commercial, administrative, and professional classes. Ulama groups such as the Deobandis in India and the Muhammadiya in Indonesia, Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Arab world, and the Jamaat-e-Islami throughout South Asia have found support in these social formations. As time has gone on they have tended to get the better of socialist and nationalist alternatives espoused by the elites. hese ulama and Islamist groups, with their support in the middle and lower-middle social strata, are those challenging power today, as they have done with success in Turkey and Indonesia, and as they are doing with rather less success amid the complexities of the Arab world. It is helpful to compare their rise with the outcomes of the industrial transformation of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the emergence of new social 45 Robinson, ‘Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia’. 46 Francis Robinson, ‘Crisis of Authority: Crisis of Islam?’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19, 3 (2009), pp. 339–54. and Americanization were tried and eventually abandoned. Congress had little incentive to give imperial afairs priority over the pressing concerns of domestic voters. he insular possessions had no right to vote in mainland elections and were too insigniicant to make an impression on the wider public. he empire became a problem when, unexpectedly, it resisted the agents of freedom; once acquired, it became an increasing burden involving tarif subsidies and military commitments. Congress ignored its obligations as much as it could, and refused the funds needed to create a Colonial Oice and inance development. Professionally trained personnel were in short supply; governors were appointed for political reasons, either to be rewarded or exiled; few stayed in the job for more than two or three years. In these circumstances, crucial aspects of policy were decided not by the needs of the civilizing mission, but by the power of competing lobbies. he American colonies were typical in producing primary products, notably cane-sugar. Republicans favoured reiners on the east coast, who wanted free entry for raw sugar; Democrats supported beet and southern cane producers, who wanted protection against outside competition. he fate of colonial producers thus rested on the electoral cycle, as well as, of course, on uncontrollable changes in international demand. hey competed among themselves and with global producers elsewhere in a market that was steadily weakening throughout the twentieth century as a result of overproduction. Tarif concessions provided subsidies that could make fortunes, or, if withdrawn, break them. he result was a paradox. Formally, US policy aimed at preparing its overseas territories for self-government; efectively, the insular possessions became increasingly dependent on the mainland through the tarif advantages they enjoyed in the US market. Contemporaries were aware of these features from the outset. In 1902, Elihu Root, then Secretary of War, commented that: Philippine questions are so interwoven in the political game that the most curious results follow combinations of inluence . . . . Among a large part of the gentlemen who are actually discussing the subject, the question, ‘What will be good for the Philippines’ plays a most insigniicant part.18

Table 2.2 GDP per capita in Europe and Asia, 725–1850 (1990 international dollars) England/GB 725 900 980 1086 1120 1150 1280 1300 1348 1400 1450 1500 1570 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800 1850 List of Maps 7.1 Long-Distance Trade Routes and the Islamic World, c.1500 7.2 he Expansion of Muslim States and Populations, 900–1700 7.3 European Domination and the Muslim World, c.1920between 1815 and 1914.19 Table 2.1 gives Anglo-American price gaps for a variety of commodities between 1870 and 1913. In the case of agricultural commodities such as wheat and animal products, British prices were higher than American ones, so the price gaps are the percentage by which the former exceeded the latter. In the case of industrial commodities such as cotton textiles or iron bars, American prices were higher than British ones, so the price gaps quoted are the percentage by which prices in Boston or Philadelphia exceeded prices in Manchester or London. In nearly all cases (sugar is the outstanding exception) price gaps fell, indicating that transatlantic commodity markets were becoming better integrated. Nor was price convergence limited to the North Atlantic. Between 1873 and 1913, the Liverpool–Bombay cotton price gap fell from 57 per cent to 20 per cent; the London–Calcutta jute price gap fell from 35 per cent to 4 per cent; and the London–Rangoon rice price gap fell from 93 per cent to 26 per cent. Between 1846–55 and 1871–9, during which period Japan was opened up to trade with the rest of the world, the Japan–Hamburg nail price gap fell from 400 per cent to 32 per cent, and the reined sugar price gap fell from 271 per cent to 39 per cent.20 In the nineteenth century, such declining price gaps were ubiquitous, and often quite dramatic. hey involved all continents, and manufactured goods as well as primary products. Exceptions are rare, and where these occur they involved, as often as not, the intervention of governments trying to substitute ‘artiicial oceans’ 19 O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History. 20 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 404–5. of cotton goods has come to contribute to new industrial revolutions across the world, many new opportunities for exploitation, and environmental devastation such as the draining of the Aral Sea by the wanton demands of Uzbekistan’s cotton monoculture. his thumbnail sketch suggests why the global historian might take cotton seriously. Turning to a more speciic Islamic angle, Richard Bulliet’s recent Yarshater lectures at Harvard ofer a striking demonstration of the impact of cotton on the early Islamic world. he Prophet Muhammad was opposed to luxurious apparel, so a distinct preference for cotton clothing, as opposed to silk, developed amongst Muslims. In the years after the seventh-century Arab conquest of Iran, this led to the establishment of cotton cultivation in the Iranian plateau; the transition of Iranians from being primarily Zoroastrian to being primarily Muslim can in part be measured by the spread of cotton cultivation. For the ninth and tenth century Bulliet talks of a ‘cotton boom’ during which Iran was transformed from a territory of landed estates and autarchic villages to one of towns, trade, and a rich cultural life. hen, there came the ‘big chill’, a hundred years of climate change, which hit Iran’s cotton industry severely and brought a rapid decline in prosperity. he cultivated classes—rich merchants, poets, administrators, and historians— left the plateau to seek their fortunes in Muslim courts from Anatolia to Bengal. hey took with them their language, Persian, and their high levels of skill in government.36 Like cotton, sugar has also changed the face of human history. From its early mass production in places like Tawahin as-Sukka in the eleventh-century Jordan Valley, it was to inluence the formation of colonies, the development of slavery, and the composition of peoples. From the eighteenth century, it has had a substantial impact on diet particularly in the West. In consequence it keeps tens of thousands of dentists in business. Today the average human being consumes 24 kg of sugar a year. In richer societies it is recognized to be a growing general health hazard.37 Cofee emerged from Sui khanqahs (monasteries) in ifteenth-century Yemen to become the top agricultural export of twelve countries today and the world’s seventh largest legal agricultural export by value. It has been prohibited in Muslim societies from time to time but it is also the irst drink one might ofer a guest in contemporary Arabia. hrough much of the world it helps to sustain sociability. here is no agreement as to whether its health efects are positive or negative.38 36 Richard W. Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 37 Graham Chandler, ‘Sugar Please’, Saudi Aramco World 83, 4, (2012), pp. 36–43; Jelle Bruinsma (ed.), World Agriculture towards 2015/2030: An FAO Perspective (London: Earthscan Publications, 2003), p. 119. 38 Ralph S. Hattox, Cofee and Cofeehouses: he Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985); Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, he World of Cafeine: he Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 267–316.

Figure 2.2 Spice and cofee price gaps, Amsterdam relative to Southeast Asia, 1580–1939 Source: Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jefrey G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’ European Review of Economic History 6, 1 (2002), pp. 23–50, p. 33. constitutional history—the one an almost over-fashionable mode of enquiry, the other not fashionable at all—can proitably be pursued in tandem, and I will focus mainly on the long nineteenth century. First, I want to stress the importance of approaching written constitutions as texts, which share many points in common with other forms of manuscript and printed writing. Second, I want to argue that the rapid spread of these instruments was due in part to their capacity for serving diferent and by no means always emancipatory political projects and conigurations. Finally, I want to glance at some of the changes in the geography, forms, and repercussions of constitutions occurring from the 1860s onwards. S P R E A D I N G T H E WO R D he contagion of constitutions has been a heterogeneous phenomenon. Written constitutions have varied markedly in length, durability, format, provisions, and in terms of the aims of their makers and the political systems embedded by them. In the United States and in much of Latin America, constitutions worked from the outset to create and perpetuate republics; but, elsewhere in the world, the majority of these instruments coexisted before 1914 with forms of monarchy. he diversity of written constitutions has unavoidably also been a product of linguistic diference. he most common Japanese word for ‘constitution’, kempo, meaning rules and regulations and itself a compound derived from two Chinese characters, does not have the same political connotations as the Anglophone term; and some regimes anyway consciously shied away from employing the word ‘constitution’ or close equivalents.8 he document granted by the restored Louis XVIII in France in 1814 was explicitly a chartre, so as to distinguish it from its Revolutionary and Napoleonic predecessor constitutions; while the Tunisian ‘constitution’ enacted in 1861 and dismantled three years later was not even called a Dustûr (the Arabic word later used for a Constitution) but rather seen as qanûn (laws).9 Such multiple variations might seem to preclude any useful examination of constitutions across diferent chronologies and geographical contexts, and this kind of argument is sometimes made. A recent valuable set of essays on the Age of Revolutions explicitly rejects any ‘difusionist model’ in regard to democratic movements in diferent parts of the world, stressing the importance rather of paying close attention to local experiences and ‘difering institutional environments and political cultures’.10 Yet this sets up too stark a binary. To a greater degree even than is usual, in regard to constitutions, states and empires ‘lie in terms of Islam, there should be no problem. Indeed, the religiously based systems of connectedness in the Muslim world are an important global story. S H A R E D WO R L D S O F K N OW L E D G E A N D E X P E R I E N C E In the following section, I will highlight those potential global history subjects which low from research on the Muslim world: storytelling, astrology, and astronomy, and the impact of commodities. Astrology Astrology is a second area of shared knowledge and experience worthy of the attention of the global historian. here has been considerable reluctance until recently to consider its signiicance for understanding aspects of Muslim societies up to the nineteenth century. In this respect Muslim societies are little diferent from human societies at large. From the beginning of time humans have sought to ind meaningIza Hussin, ‘Textual Trajectories: Re-reading the Constitution and Majalah in 1890s Johor’, Indonesia and the Malay World 41, 120 (2013), pp. 255–72. 53 On this, see Christina Dufy Burnett, ‘Contingent Constitutions: Empire and Law in the Americas’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Princeton University, 2010). 54 H. A. Will, Constitutional Change in the British West Indies, 1880–1903 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 55 See Robert Devereux, he First Ottoman Constitutional Period: A Study of the Midhat Constitution and Parliament (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963); Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). List of Tables 2.1 Anglo-American price gaps, 1870–1913 2.2 GDP per capita in Europe and Asia, 725–1850 he Real American Empire Antony G. Hopkins I N T RO D U C T I O N he 19 March 2013 marked the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.1 he moment passed in the United States with little notice and no celebration. It is unlikely that the mood at future anniversaries will be any diferent. In 2003, however, the event stimulated an extraordinary outpouring of books and articles featuring the phrase ‘American Empire’. Commentators ranged across the full spectrum of possibilities. For some, the notion of an American Empire was novel; for others, it was the logical culmination of the superpower status the United States had achieved since the Second World War and had consolidated after the fall of the Soviet Empire. All parties eagerly searched for comparisons that would validate their preferred view of this latest manifestation of American power. Some observers regarded the United States as the stabilizer of last resort, as Britain and Rome had been in their day; others viewed the Iraq War as evidence that the Land of the Free was loitering with intent to disturb the peace—just as Britain and other predecessors had done before their ‘glad conident morning’ gave way to ‘life’s night’.2 Nearly everyone agreed that the United States was an empire. Amidst the rush of events, few commentators paused to relect on the meaning of the term, or whether it was necessary to deine it. With one or two notable exceptions, historians absented themselves from this debate. Most historians like events to settle before they comment on them, and even then they are inclined to clothe their observations in qualiications, elaborations, and pleas for further research. From a historical perspective, after all, a decade is no more than a long weekend. Yet, now that invasion has turned into withdrawal and occupation has turned optimism for ‘remaking the Middle East’ 1 his is a revised version of a keynote lecture delivered at the conference ‘New Directions in Global History’ held in Oxford in September 2012. I have made minor revisions and expanded the paper slightly. Given the broad range of the script, I have kept citations to a minimum, though I have referred to some of my own publications, where relevant, for the convenience of readers who wish to pursue some of the issues summarized here in greater detail. Most of the chapter, however, is derived from a larger study on the history of the American Empire I am currently completing, and is based on a much wider range of research produced by other scholars. 2 Robert Browning, ‘he Lost Leader’, in Robert Browning, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (London: Edward Moxon, 1845).