The Indian Ocean remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward A. Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography.

The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including...

Drawing on materials ranging from archaeological findings to recent studies of migration issues and drug violence, William H. Beezley provides a dramatic narrative of human events as he recounts the story of Mexico in the context of world history. Beginning with the Mayan and Aztec civilizations and their brutal defeat at the hands of the Conquistadors, Beezley highlights the penetrating effect of Spain's three-hundred-year colonial rule, during which Mexico became a multicultural society marked by Roman Catholicism and the Spanish language. Independence, he shows, was likewise marked by...

People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically across time and cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon but an institution with a dynamic history stretching 10,000 years into the past. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner tell the story of this fundamental unit from the beginnings of domestication and human settlement. They consider the codification of rules governing marriage in societies around the ancient world, the changing conceptions of family wrought by the heightened pace of colonialism and globalization in the modern world, and how state...

As Europeans began to move into the Atlantic in the late fifteenth century, first encountering islands and then two continents across the sea, they initiated a process that revolutionized the lives of people everywhere. American foods enriched their diets. Furs, precious metals, dyes, and many other products underwrote new luxury trades, and tobacco became the first consumer craze as the price plummeted with ever-enlarging production.
Much of the technology that made new initiatives, such as sailing out of sight of land, possibly drew on Asian advances that came into Europe through North...

The Indian Ocean remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward A. Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography.

The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including...

Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe. Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted, merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents, including through colonization and forced migrations of subject peoples,...

Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe. Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted, merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents, including through colonization and forced migrations of subject peoples,...