Full Description
With the closure of the overland Silk Road in the fourteenth century following the collapse of the Mongol empire, the Indian Ocean provided the remaining vital link for wider cultural, political, and societal integrations prior to the Western colonial presence. Collectively, these studies explore the history of non-metropolitan urban settings c. 1400-1800 in the Indian Ocean realm, from the Ottoman Empire and the African coastline at the mouth of the Red Sea in the west to China in the east. This was an age of heightened international commercial exchange that pre-dated the European arrival, which in the Indian Ocean paired Islamic expansionism and political authority, and, alternately, in the case of mainland Southeast Asia, partnered Buddhism with new centralizing monarchies.
While grounded in multi-disciplinary urban studies literature, the twelve studies in this collection explore secondary center networking, as this networking distinguishes secondary cities from metropolitan centers, which have traditionally received the most scholarly attention. The book features the research of international scholars, whose work addresses the representative history of small cities and urban networking in various parts of the Indian Ocean world in an era of change, allowing them the opportunity to compare approaches, methods, and sources in the hopes of discovering common features as well as notable differences.
This volume is the result of a 2007 conference on "The Small City in Global Context," hosted by the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, intended to expand the field of urban studies by encouraging scholars of diverse global interests and specializations to explore the history of non-metropolitan urban settings.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Autonomy and Subordination: The Cultural Dynamics of Small Cities
Chapter 2. Suakin: A Port City of the Early Modern Sudan
Chapter 3. India from Aden: Khutba and Muslim Urban Networks in Late Thirteenth-Century India
Chapter 4. At the Intersection of Empire and World Trade: The Chinese Port City of Quanzhou (Zaitun), Eleventh-Fifteenth Centuries
Chapter 5. Clearing the Fields and Strengthening the Walls: Defending Small Cities in Late Ming China
Chapter 6. Secondary Capitals of Dai Viet: Shifting Elite Power Bases
Chapter 7. Coastal Cities in an Age of Transition: Upstream-Downstream Networking and Societal Development in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Maritime Southeast Asia
Chapter 8. Missionary Buddhism in a Post-Ancient World: Monks, Merchants, and Colonial Expansion in Seventeenth-Century Cochinchina (Vietnam)
Chapter 9. Religious Networking and Upstream Buddhist Wall Paintings in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Burma
Chapter 10. The Ottoman Balkan City: The Periphery as Center in Punitive Spectacle
Chapter 11. A Tale of Three Cities: Burhanpur from 1400 to 1800
Chapter 12. Urban Primacy and Urban Hierarchy: Four Examples from Southern India, c. 1000-1800
