The Silk Road is iconic in world history; but what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting. In The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionized our understanding of these trade routes. Hansen explores eight sites along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. Designed for use in the classroom and based on the award-winning trade edition (OUP, 2012), The Silk Road: A New History with Documents offers a selection of excerpted primary sources in each chapter. The wide-ranging sources include memoirs of medieval Chinese monks and modern explorers, letters written by women, descriptions of towns, legal contracts, religious hymns, and many others. A new final chapter provides coverage of the Silk Road during the period of Mongol rule.

The Silk Road: A New History with Documents

Business & Money

Hansen, Valerie

Economics

Oxford University Press

The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting--as revealed in this new history. In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes. For centuries, key records remained hidden--sometimes deliberately buried by bureaucrats for safe keeping. But the sands of the Taklamakan Desert have revealed fascinating material, sometimes preserved by illiterate locals who recycled official documents to make insoles for shoes or garments for the dead. Hansen explores seven oases along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. There was no single, continuous road, but a chain of markets that traded between east and west. China and the Roman Empire had very little direct trade. China's main partners were the peoples of modern-day Iran, whose tombs in China reveal much about their Zoroastrian beliefs. Silk was not the most important good on the road; paper, invented in China before Julius Caesar was born, had a bigger impact in Europe, while metals, spices, and glass were just as important as silk. Perhaps most significant of all was the road's transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs. The Silk Road is a fascinating story of archeological discovery, cultural transmission, and the intricate chains across Central Asia and China.

The Silk Road: A New History

History

Asia

Year 1000

VIKING

"Typically wide-ranging, informative, and illuminating . . . a lovely book" Peter Frankopan\nWhen did globalization begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the world. This was the 'big bang' of globalization, which ushered in a new era of exploration and trade, and which paved the way for Europeans to dominate after Columbus reached America.\nDrawing on a wide range of new historical sources and cutting-edge archaeology, Hansen shows, for example, that the Maya began to trade with the native peoples of modern New Mexico from traces of theobromine - the chemical signature of chocolate - and that frozen textiles found in Greenland contain hairs from animals that could only have come from North America.\nMoreover, Hansen turns accepted wisdom on its head, revealing not only that globalization began much earlier than previously thought, but also that the world's first anti-globalization riots did too, in cities such as Cairo, Constantinople, and Guangzhou.\nIntroducing players from Europe, the Islamic world, Asia, the Indian Ocean maritime world, the Pacific and the Mayan world who were connecting the major landmasses for the first time, this compelling revisionist argument shows how these encounters set the stage for the globalization that would dominate the world for centuries to come.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began

Africa

Penguin

This intriguing book explores how ordinary people in traditional China used contracts to facilitate the transactions of their daily lives, as they bought, sold, rented, or borrowed land, livestock, people, or money. In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during China's medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of women's rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600-1400

Yale University Press

About the Author 
Valerie Hansen received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. She is Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches courses in East Asian history, especially pre-modern China. Her many scholarly publications include CHANGING GODS IN MEDIEVAL CHINA, 1127?1276 (Princeton UP, 1990) and NEGOTIATING DAILY LIFE IN TRADITIONAL CHINA: HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE USED CONTRACTS, 600-1400 (Yale UP, 1995). She is also author of THE OPEN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF CHINA TO 1600 (WW Norton, 2000) and THE SILK ROAD: A NEW HISTORY (Oxford UP, 2012). As co-author of the Cengage Learning text VOYAGES IN WORLD HISTORY, she contributes Chapters 1-15.\nKenneth R. Curtis received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African and Comparative World History. His research focuses on colonial to postcolonial transitions in East Africa, with a particular focus on the coffee economy of Tanzania. He is Professor of History and Liberal Studies at California State University Long Beach, where he has taught world history at the introductory level, in special courses designed for future middle and high school teachers, and in graduate seminars. He has worked to advance the teaching of world history at the collegiate and secondary levels in collaboration with the World History Association, the California History/Social Science Project, and the College Board's Advanced Placement World History course.

Voyages in World History (MindTap Course List)

Curtis, Ken

Americas

Cengage Learning'

Voyages in World History, Volume I

Voyages in World History, Volume II

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