Review: Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, edited by Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas

Abstract

Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, eds., Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 504 pp. ISBN 9781316146040. $145.00. World history is a difficult task. Balancing breadth and depth puts historians between an intellectual Scylla and Charybdis. Broad and shallow brushstrokes risk impersonalizing history, while narrow and deep analysis excludes non-specialists. Empires and Exchanges seeks to have its cake and eat it too, by zooming into localized granularity and zooming out to macro exchanges. To achieve this feat, the editors enlisted an international array of scholars, most of whom presented papers at a 2013 conference titled “Worlds in Motion: Rome, China, and the Eurasian Steppe in Late Antiquity.” Expectations for this volume have been high, especially considering the caliber of scholars who were thanked in the acknowledgements for attending the conference, but whose papers were not included. The final product certainly lives up to those expectations. The volume divides 26 chapters into three sections: first, historical thresholds; second, movements, contacts, and exchanges; and third, empires, diplomacy, and frontiers. There are contributions on ethnicity, religion, conceptual geography, and commodities, though on the whole the volume skews toward political interactions. Readers of the volume should be aware that “Rome” in all cases refers to Byzantium, not the Empire's western half; they should be aware that this review does not discuss every chapter due to space constraints, but rather attempts to convey a sense of the book's breadth and depth. Michael Maas and Nicola Di Cosmo open with chapters on the steppe's relationship with Byzantium and China, respectively. Maas traces Byzantium's understanding of steppe peoples with its concomitant political, diplomatic, and religious adjustments. Di Cosmo delineates economic and political interactions that show the steppe's growing influence on China. Both chapters outline changes over the centuries and provide useful backdrops for the granularity of subsequent chapters. Matthew P. Canepa's insightful contribution, “Sasanian Iran and the Projection of Power in Late Antique Eurasia, Competing …