The event is part of Book at Lunchtime, a series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Such was the debate on the acceptability of smoking in the Ottoman Empire that the great scholar of Damascus, Abd al-Ghani Nabulusi, felt impelled in 1681 to write a long treatise on the subject to say that although he did not like the practice it was perfectly legal. Samer Akkach, Letters of a Sui Scholar: he Correspondence of Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641–1731) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 105–8. 40 Eric Burns, he Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 2007). 41 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (London: John Murray, 2008); River of Smoke: A Novel (London: Penguin Group, 2011). 42 Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). excluded people from the highest levels of political leadership) could exempt the ambitious from it. hese ive examples were all long-lasting and stable political systems (stability being here measured by the survival of the system, not of its individual leaderships—all these political systems in some periods and places, third-century Rome, tenth-century China, fourteenth-century Egypt, ifteenth-century England, had very short-term leaders, who died by violence). hey had in many respects similar political structures—the most distinct was probably the medieval west, which had much simpler structures until the fourteenth century or so. he military vs. civilian balance was not, then, itself of structural signiicance for their durability: an observation which already runs counter to some of the local historiographies for each of these large regions. It should also be clear, even from these highly summary descriptions, that the involvement of the landed aristocracy in military activity, or its absence, was fundamental for determining the parameters of socio-cultural status in each of these systems. Only in the Islamic world, with its unusually total separation between the military and the civilian worlds (in some Islamic polities, ruling military elites were exclusively recruited from abroad), were the military values of non-landed groups not marginal to the rest of society; indeed, only in the Islamic world did landed aristocrats not dominate political practice and most political power. But we can also see that the varying association of much the same elements led to wider political practices whose dynamics were quite distinct. To push this further, we would of course have to add more parameters: the role of taxraising in each system, or the level of centralization (how far did people look to the capital and the supreme ruler for advancement and cultural leadership in each system, and how important were provincial leaderships). We could of course also add more examples; Japan, the Guptas, the Khmers, the Aztecs, would all add variants on these basic patterns, to nuance our hypotheses and our explanations. But we can get a long way in posing, and sometimes answering, questions about how political systems worked in the past by developing just the examples presented here, in a comparative analysis. Looked at with a comparative eye, every society of the past, across the globe, gives us a new set of questions to pose of other societies, and a new set of alternatives. he global becomes, indeed, an array of possibilities. Every society has paths not taken; which, and why? Comparison allows us to see which they might be, and in which ways the ‘normal’ can be reigured as the atypical. he grand narratives which dominate our historiographies will often dissolve as a result. Not always; some of them are strong enough to resist. But the proper testing of each of the storylines which historians like to construct for the past is a testing which encompasses all the possibilities which global comparison can bring. CONNECTEDNESS he history of connectedness, strictly, perhaps, of uneven or diferential connectedness, is, inally, the most distinctive terrain of the global historian. It follows that Britain Netherlands Portugal France Spain Italy USSR Muslim concentrations in USSR Independent Muslim states Muslim concentrations in China

Unnecessary Dependences Illustrating Circulation in Pre-modern Large-scale History Nicholas Purcelland 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 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. MEDITERRANEAN SEA R Tripoli Herat Damascus Baghdad Isfahan Barqa Basra Alexandria Cairo Shiraz Hormuz Wheat Meat and animal fats Cotton textiles Iron bars Pig iron Cotton Coal Copper Hides Wool Tin Cofee Sugar

We live in a world of rapid economic change, of enormous concentrations of economic power, sharp social inequalities, and drastic disparities in the distribution of political power – both between and within states. […] If we, as historians, want to remain relevant to public debate, we need to engage these issues. Footnote 13 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. 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. Iza 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). 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.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. Source: Stephen N. Broadberry, ‘Accounting for the Great Divergence’, LSE Department of Economic History Working Paper 184 (2013), p. 23. A. Commodity detail Liverpool vs Chicago London vs Cincinnati Boston vs Manchester Philadelphia vs London Philadelphia vs London Liverpool vs New York New York vs London Philadelphia vs London Boston vs London Boston vs London New York vs London New York vs London New York vs London essential unity in the centuries between 500 and 1500 that sets them apart as a ‘civilization’ distinct from those before and after, it has a rapidly diminishing efect on their practice. As teachers of undergraduate and still more of graduate students, as organizers of research seminars, even, when commercial pressures permit, as writers of surveys and textbooks, they nowadays prefer to divide that millennium into three parts, though with only rough agreement among themselves as to where the dividing points may be. he middle (or, as we often say, ‘central’) one is still routinely called ‘medieval’, while those before and after shade with varying degrees of subtlety into the late antique and the early modern. his fragmentation is most obviously the result of the growth of knowledge, but also relects conceptualization. hat ‘early’ and ‘later’ middle ages are still widely preferred to the newer terminologies more often relects reairmation of particular readings of those subperiods themselves than championship of the essential unity of the entire millennium.7 All periodizations, of course, risk disguising continuities and inhibiting consideration of things that ought to be considered together. Conversely, they remain useful and vital for as long as they are capable of framing large questions that reward investigation and discussion, or are pressed on the academy by the curiosity of the wider world. It is hard to identify such questions about ‘the middle ages’ at or anywhere near the cutting edge of current or recent debate, either academic or popular. he idea has become for European history efectively useless, and, in most ways, a nuisance.8 It serves mainly to distract attention from continuities with the periods before and after while legitimizing vacuous generalities spanning vastly diferent regions, societies, periods, and cultures. he depressing history of the word ‘medieval’ itself makes the point. Long discarded as a serious analytical category it clings to life as a considerable vested interest, and as a form of intellectual ghettoization that serves to excuse the ignorance of outsiders about what goes on inside its imagined boundaries, and of its devotees about almost everything else. It is a pretty safe rule of thumb, applicable equally whether it is used as a term of approbation or abuse, that the more someone uses the word ‘medieval’ the less they know about the middle ages. It has not always been so. We like to remember that the idea of the middle age was invented by Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni in the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries and elaborated by Cellarius in the seventeenth,9 but it did not catch on straight away. No British historian used the term ‘Middle Ages’ before Hallam, in 7 For instance, David Rollason, Early Medieval Europe 300–1050: he Birth of Western Society (London: Routledge, 2012), explicitly at pp. 6–8; John Watts, he Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 9–42. 8 For a comprehensive and sophisticated assault, to which I am very much in debt, Constantin Fasolt, Past Sense: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern History (Leiden: Brill, 2014), especially at pp. 545–96; Constantin Fasolt, ‘Hegel’s Ghost: Europe, the Reformation and the Middle Ages’, Viator 39 (2008), pp. 345–86. 9 For a convenient summary, see Willam A. Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History’, Journal of World History 3, 1 (1992), pp. 13–53. here is a certain irony in Green’s conclusion that 1500 was no longer a useful dividing point for European history, but (largely under the impetus of world systems theory) had become an essential one for global history.