Review: The Global Middle Ages: Past and Present, edited by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen

Abstract

Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, eds., The Global Middle Ages: Past and Present . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 441 pp; illustrations; maps. ISBN 9780198837503. $45. The Global Middle Ages , a supplement to the journal Past and Present , is a welcome publication. Pre-1500 global history is a small field, and few works have taken up the middle period millennium (the volume covers roughly 500–1500 C.E.) in a comparative way at all, let alone in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas as well as Eurasia. Indeed, there is no volume, to my mind, that theorizes or conceptualizes the Middle Ages as a global era. This is a field-making volume, and for that reason alone, it belongs in the collection of any historian who is serious about world history or about the millennium in question. It is also a volume that grows out of a collaborative endeavor, a series of intensive workshops. No single individual could have covered its breadth, but neither is it a typical edited collection in which each chapter is a deep dive into one author's expertise. Instead, half the chapters are co-authored, and all of them include information about parts of the world far beyond the authors’ own specialties. It is commendable to see authors offering insights that they could not have reached outside the opportunities that the editors fostered. The volume is exemplary in that way. The Global Middle Ages defines itself against “the still ubiquitous idea” that “truly global history” only began with European long-distance maritime expeditions (1) and against a dominant teleology of global history, that of “relentless development of a global order defined by ever increasing circulation” (2). It is audacious for a global history book to reject a “globalization narrative” (18) in favor of an aspiration to study the millennium in question “in its own terms and in its own time” (15). The editors concede that “the topic is a moving target” (43). For a reader looking for …