Wolfgang Reinhard – författare

Between 1350 and 1750—a time of empires, exploration, and exposure to radically different lands and cultures—the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas during this pivotal period: Eurasia between Russia and Japan; the Muslim world of the Ottoman and Persian empires; Mughal India and the Indian Ocean trading world; maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania; and a newly configured transatlantic rim. While people in many places remained unaware of anything beyond their own village, an intense period of empire building led to expanding political, economic, and cultural interaction on every continent—early signals of a shrinking globe.By the early fourteenth century Eurasia’s Mongol empires were disintegrating. Concurrently, followers of both Islam and Christianity increased exponentially, with Islam exerting a powerful cultural influence in the spreading Ottoman and Safavid empires. India came under Mughal rule, experiencing a significant growth in trade along the Indian Ocean and East African coastlines. In Southeast Asia, Muslims engaged in expansion on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and the Philippines. And both sides of the Atlantic responded to the pressure of European commerce, which sowed the seeds of a world economy based on the resources of the Americas but made possible by the subjugation of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.

The modern European state, defined by a continuous territory with a distinct borderline and complete external sovereignty, by the monopoly of every kind of legitimate use of force, and by a homogeneous mass of subjects each of whom has the same rights and duties, is the outcome of a thousand years of shifting political power and developing notions of the state. This major study, in the Origins of the Modern State in Europe series, sets out to examine the processes of state formation and the creation of power élites. A team of leading European historians explores the dominant institutions and ideologies of the past, and their role in the creation of the contemporary nation-state.

This well-written and comprehensive book by an outstanding expert provides students of history and the general reader with reliable up-to-date information on an essential part of the history of mankind: the global impact of European colonial expansion from the late Middle Ages to the present. It deals with the discoveries, with Portuguese, Dutch and English trade systems in Asia, with the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Colonies in America, the American plantation economy and the trade in African slaves, with settler colonies in the southern hemisphere, with US-, Russian and Chinese continental imperialism, with western colonial rule in Asia and Africa and the several waves of decolonisation between 1775 and 1989. Twenty-four maps illustrate the narrative. A useful teaching text, it combines traditional and more recent perspectives to produce a final balance sheet of Western colonialism and its global heritage. A carefully selected bibliography encourages further reading.

Zwischen den "Tagen der Revolution" und den "Festen der Nation" steht im Titel des Bandes ein Gedankenstrich. Als Zeichen für den Zusammenhang der vierzehn versammelten Beiträge verbindet er revolutionsgeschichtliche und revolutionstheoretische Fragestellungen mit Fragen und Fragwürdigkeiten nationaler Fest- und/oder Feiertage. Der Horizont der betreffenden Gedankenverbindung spannt sich von der griechisch-römischen Antike über das Mittelalter, die Reformation und die Revolutionen in Amerika, Frankreich und Deutschland bis hin zum "Fest der Freiheit", das die Staats- und Regierungschefs der Welt zum zwanzigsten Jahrestag der Maueröffnung 2009 in Berlin zelebrierten. Die Weite dieses Horizonts erhellt nicht nur den interdisziplinären Anspruch des Bandes, sondern auch den politischen Appell an dessen Ende: den 9. November durch einen "Tag des Erinnerns" im kollektiven Gedächtnis der Deutschen besser als bisher zu würdigen: als Gedenktag des Judenpogroms 1938 und Feiertag der Freiheitsrevolution 1989.

Erstmals wird in diesem aus den Akten zahlreicher Archive erarbeiteten Buch die Untersuchung des politischen Einsatzes von Patronage-Klientel-Beziehungen und sozialen Netzwerken, das ist Mikropolitik, von den inneren Herrschaftsverhältnissen frühneuzeitlicher Gemeinwesen auf deren zwischenstaatliche Beziehungen übertragen. Konkret geht es um die vielgestaltige Interaktion zwischen der Römischen Kurie Papst Pauls V. (1605-1621) mit seiner Familie, den Borghese, und Spanien mit seinen Nebenländern Neapel und Mailand sowie dem Spanien nahestehenden Finanzzentrum Genua.