Global History Compilation
Document
Contents
C. Parker - Paying for Privilege; The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early
Modern Societies...................................................................................................................................3
A Cross-Cultural Approach to Religious Toleration............................................................................3
Catholics in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands...........................................................................4
Religious Minorities under Ottoman Rule..........................................................................................6
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................15
The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence – Peer Vries.........................16
Abstract...........................................................................................................................................16
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................16
Eurocentric approaches...................................................................................................................17
The California school.......................................................................................................................17
China as the centre of an early modern global economy.................................................................17
A world of surprising resemblances.................................................................................................18
Problems with the surprising resemblences – thesis.......................................................................19
A World of Surprising Resemblances? A Closer Look.......................................................................19
Neglected differences and differing trajectories: modes of production..........................................20
Neglected differences and differing trajectories: culture institutions and politics..........................20
Concluding remarks.........................................................................................................................21
Summary Global History......................................................................................................................22
Introduction: webs and history........................................................................................................22
The human apprenticeship..............................................................................................................23
Shifting to food production: 11.000 – 3.000 years ago....................................................................26
Webs and civilizations in the old world: 3500 BCE – 200 CE............................................................28
The growth of webs in the old world and America: 200 – 1000 CE.................................................35
Thickening webs: 1000 – 1500 CE....................................................................................................40
Spinning the worldwide web: 1450 – 1800 CE.................................................................................47
Globalisation and the Roman World - Michael Sommer......................................................................58
Chapter 8: OIKOYMENH: longue durée perspectives on ancient Mediterranean ‘globality’ (p 175-
186)..................................................................................................................................................58
Space...........................................................................................................................................58
Law...............................................................................................................................................59
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, Belonging.....................................................................................................................................60
A theory for formation of large empires..............................................................................................63
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................63
Imperiogenesis in East Asia..............................................................................................................63
Cooperation as the basis of society.................................................................................................63
The model........................................................................................................................................64
Application of the model to north China.........................................................................................64
Global patterns of mega-empire occurrence...................................................................................65
Regional patterns: Egypt..................................................................................................................65
The Maghrib....................................................................................................................................65
South Asia........................................................................................................................................65
The Middle East during the Axial Age..............................................................................................65
Eastern Europe................................................................................................................................66
The Great Plains of North America..................................................................................................66
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................66
Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? The Silk Roads in World History.............................................................68
Definitions.......................................................................................................................................68
Historiography.................................................................................................................................69
Trans-Ecological Exchanges and the Geography of the Silk Roads...................................................71
Prehistory of the Silk Roads.............................................................................................................72
The Silk Roads in the Classical Era....................................................................................................75
Expansion to the North....................................................................................................................77
Conclusion: The Silk Roads and World History.................................................................................79
Guiding Questions............................................................................................................................81
Notes...............................................................................................................................................82
Ted talk: the history of our world in 18 minutes..............................................................................86
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,C. Parker - Paying for Privilege; The Management of
Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early
Modern Societies
Journal of World History
A Cross-Cultural Approach to Religious Toleration
Long regarded as a unique feature of Western civilization, religious toleration is a topic that has
enjoyed a venerable (eerbiedwaardig) history. Within European scholarship, the study of toleration
has traditionally been the domain of intellectual historians whose primary intent was to trace the
maturation of the concept from its origins in the heroic religious opposition of the Reformation
period to its growth in the innovative epistemology of the Scientific Revolution, to a fully developed
creed of Enlightenment theorists in the eighteenth century. Because of this intellectualist approach
and owing to the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment, religious toleration is generally
understood to have developed in a linear, progressive fashion and to embody the inevitable triumph
of a modern Western rationality.
In the recent past, a broader range of early modern European historians has shown interest in
questions about tolerance and compulsion in order to uncover the everyday interaction among
people who held divergent religious views as well as the cultural modalities of confessional
coexistence. As one might expect, the findings thus far have been as diverse as the territories and
peoples of Europe. The extremes range from egregious (uitmuntend) popular violence in the French
religious wars to quiet adaptation among local residents in other areas where neighbors worked to
avoid rancorous social division. This wide variation suggests that the social relations around issues of
religious difference followed a rather different trajectory from the linear intellectual development of
toleration. Indeed, this recent scholarship calls attention to the need to ground an understanding of
toleration within contemporary norms to avoid reading modern liberal notions of religious freedom
back into early modern societies. As it related to habitual patterns of political and social discourse,
toleration is better understood as the accommodation of dissent in societies organized around the
ideal of religious unity.
Much of the latest scholarship has concentrated on the Dutch Republic (1572–1795) and particularly
on the province of Holland in the late sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Contemporaries inside
and outside the Netherlands regarded Holland's cities as the most open urban societies in early
modern Europe. Just as the conspicuousness of religious pluriformity struck foreign visitors, the
Dutch have also fêted their own tolerance since the sixteenth century. For all of the exuberance
about Dutch tolerance, Calvinism, a confession not given to indulging ungodly sacrilege or
theological error, became a hegemonic religious force in the republic over the course of the
seventeenth century. Over the past ten years scholars have devoted attention to this paradox and
have shown that ruling elites, many of whom were not keen on Calvinism's theocratic tendencies,
exhibited a marked concern for public order. Their commitment to a well-ordered society kept the
Reformed Church at bay, significantly restricted other Protestant denominations, and marginalized
the Roman Catholic faith.
Because historians are currently rethinking the history of religious interaction in early modern
Europe and the Dutch Republic, it seems useful at this moment to take a step back for a broader,
more global, perspective. A cross-cultural comparison of religious minorities in pluralistic societies
can provide new ways of approaching old problems and open up fresh lines of inquiry. For historians
of early modern Europe, a more expansive scope for the study of religious interaction helps to
counteract prevalent notions of Western exceptionalism and the tendency to identify Christianity
exclusively with the Latin West.
To this end, this study examines conditions for religious minorities in Arab lands of the Ottoman
Empire for what they can suggest to us about the place and function of Catholics in a Dutch
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, Protestant society with particular reference to the province of Holland. In both situations, religious
minorities formed an important demographic presence within a pluralistic society, they interacted
relatively freely with people of other faiths, they shouldered financial burdens to practice their faith
privately and inconspicuously, and they endured varying degrees of marginalization as well as
episodes of violence. The primary difference in these two regions was an important legal one:
Catholicism in the Netherlands was formally proscribed, but in Arab lands Islamic law and tradition
guaranteed the protection of various Christian groups and Jews, known as the ahl al-dhimma. The
specific blend of similarities and differences in these two cases provides an opportunity for
comparisons that offer a broader perspective on religious coexistence in early modern Europe. My
comparison indicates that toleration —or more precisely the accommodation of religious minorities
—grew out of a similar general strategy by governing authorities to minimize conflict in pluralistic
societies.
Catholics in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
Political regimes across Europe responded to the diverse religious movements in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries by forcefully maintaining the principle of religious uniformity that had upheld
the political and social order for centuries. Throughout the high to late middle ages, political and
ecclesiastical powers worked together to combat enemies of the faith, whether they were Moors in
Iberia, Cathars in France, or Lollards in England. Authorities did allow Jews a precarious existence on
the periphery of society, but only because theologians taught that a wholesale conversion of the
Jews would signal the second coming of Christ. Since a general conversion still had not taken place
by the sixteenth century, a festering resentment of Jews manifested itself in renewed theological
condemnations, blood libel accusations, and expulsions.
The militant attitude against Jews coincided with the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, which
fueled war and persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as princes tried to impose
religious and political unity in their realms. At the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the view that
a realm would adopt the confession of its prince, expressed as cuius regio eius religio, not only
became the standard for the empire, but also formed a guiding spirit for religious settlements
throughout Europe. Though the religious struggles of the Reformation shattered the unity of Latin
Christendom, they represented a victory for religious uniformity within a given political territory.
The particular circumstances surrounding the Dutch Revolt against Spain at the end of the sixteenth
century created a pluralistic religious environment in the northern Netherlands that ran counter to
much of the rest of Europe. In 1572, during the early phase of the revolt, the Dutch States General
declared that the Reformed (Calvinist) faith would constitute the public, privileged religion of the
rebellious provinces. This official declaration for Calvinism resulted from pragmatic alliances among
competing interests in the Dutch army, the nobility, and the urban patriciate. The growing absolutist
initiatives by the Spanish king Philip II had provoked armed resistance among nobles and municipal
oligarchs, most of whom were not Calvinist. They were joined by a small band of committed
Calvinists who threw their wholehearted support behind the effort, and many Protestants took up
arms because of Philip's unwavering commitment to Counter-Reformation Catholicism. As a
consequence of this Calvinist support, the States-General gave its official endorsement to Calvinism
in 1572. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt to recognize both Reformed and Roman
communions, the States-General outlawed public Catholic worship in February 1573. It took some
time to grind out all the political, legal, and economic ramifications, but by 1581 the basic legal
outlines of the new society had become fairly clear.
Though the Reformed Church became the official faith, it was not the typical European-style state
church of the post-Reformation period. No one had to become a member or even attend services;
church properties came under the jurisdiction of city and provincial authorities. Political entities,
usually city governments, paid the salaries of ministers and, as a result, exercised considerable
influence over the clergy in any given city. Church ministers regarded most municipal involvement in
church affairs as an unwelcome intrusion, but magistrates nonetheless superintended the affairs of
local Reformed congregations. Though city governments promoted a general Protestant piety and
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