Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Louise D’Arcens (bio) The articles in this cluster on Asian medievalisms are part of a broader impetus to explore how we might understand the years between approximately 500 and 1500 ce—that is, the time that in Western periodization is called ‘the Middle Ages’—under the auspices of a deeper historical reconceptualization of ‘the global’.1 This reconceptualization has been going on for the last several years within medieval studies; the 2015 special issue of PMLA co-edited by Sahar Amer and Laura Doyle, for instance, celebrates and calls for greater momentum toward an interdisciplinary and collaborative ‘longer-durée global studies’.2 The impact of this longue durée approach is twofold. First, it redresses the tendency within historical studies to confine the global to modernity, attempting to reclaim the global for texts and practices in deeper time.3 In a Supplement of Past & Present, the co-editors Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen attribute the marginalization of the Middle Ages to ‘the still ubiquitous idea that truly global history only began with European long-distance maritime expeditions in the early modern centuries’.4 A globalist approach, Amer and Doyle argue, not only shifts medievalists’ disciplinary focus toward the ‘connections of local formations to longer geopolitical histories’, but compels a reconsideration of the exclusive focus on modern cultures within postcolonial, transnational, and global studies.5 Secondly, identifying longue durée globality decentres Europe’s role in world history. Julia McClure has summarized the practice of globalizing medieval history as having the objective of deconstructing ‘Europe’ as an autonomous entity: it aims ‘to represent extra-European histories’ and ‘to show the ways Europe itself is the product of global interactions’.6 As can be seen in D’Arcens’s article in this cluster, there continues to be considerable debate about whether, or how, the term ‘medieval’ should be [End Page 57] applied to cultures for whom European geotemporal coordinates do not pertain. Moving beyond Europe and its settler colonies offers taxonomic challenges to those working within a discipline whose very name (medium aevum alluding to the time between ancient Rome and the Renaissance) takes those geotemporal coordinates as its starting point. The main concern has been that describing this period as ‘the global Middle Ages’ risks enacting a colonizing gesture whereby the globe is gathered indiscriminately into a European schema of periodization. Scholars have responded to this either by using the Western periodization for the purposes of intelligibility rather than accuracy, or else by drawing on periodization schemata appropriate to the coeval cultures under discussion (dynasty, Islamic calendar, and so on). Michael Puett has suggested that a way through this is to make use of ‘medieval’ as ‘a resuscitated theoretical term’ divested of its spatial component and signifying a chronological period across coeval cultures without the corresponding Eurocentric value judgements.7 The notion of cultural interconnectedness—of exchanges, migrations, and cross-race and interfaith encounters between coeval cultures—runs conspicuously through recent scholarship on ‘medieval globality’.8 But this apparently new approach is of course, not new. For instance, scholarship on the Crusades, medieval Byzantium, and diasporic cultures in the medieval West has long focused on East–West and interfaith exchange.9 In terms of Asia, the focus of the essays in this cluster, it has been thirty years since Before European Hegemony: The World System ad 1250–1350, Janet Abu-Lughod’s medievalist intervention into World Systems Theory, a domain of political historiography hitherto founded on the conviction that an epochal divide was brought about by trans-Atlantic expansion.10 In drawing attention to predominantly Islamic trade routes that traversed Western and non-Western spaces in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from Persia to China, Africa, India, and the Indo-Malay region, Abu Lughod’s work drew attention to the interactions of coeval cultures in that period, as did K. N. Chaudhuri’s landmark Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985).11 It is only more recently, [End Page 58] however, that the insights of these earlier studies have begun to be recognized as foundational to current attempts to reconfigure the Middle Ages as global. The region...