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This book places Biruni in his historical and cultural context within the long-term history of medieval Eurasia. It outlines the course of Biruni’s life, clarifying key questions about his associations, travels, and patrons. Following an overview of Biruni’s chief interests, it details his major works to illustrate the breadth of Biruni’s output and his intellectual approach, especially his attention to language, esteem for knowledge, and commitment to objective truth. An account of his institutional context and relationships elucidates his friendships and rivalries, notably with Avicenna. The book also shows how varied paths of transmission affected the legacy of Biruni and its reception in global scientific and literary traditions. Finally, a timeline, list of key works, and detailed bibliographic essay will guide readers into further study of Biruni and his thought. This comprehensive overview of Biruni is based on the Arabic and Persian primary sources in the original languages using the best editions. The author has consulted scholarship in French, German, and Russian to draw conclusions and present up-to-date bibliographic references in a manner accessible to specialists and the general reader alike.

This work traces several generations of Chinese “brokers,” ethnic leaders who acted as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of Canada. At the time, most Chinese could not vote and many were illegal immigrants, so brokers played informal but necessary roles as representatives to the larger society. Brokers’ work reveals the changing boundaries between Chinese and Anglo worlds and how tensions among Chinese shaped them. By reinserting Chinese back into mainstream politics, this book alters common understandings of how legally “alien” groups helped create modern immigrant nations. Over several generations, brokers deeply embedded Chinese immigrants in the larger Canadian, U.S., and Chinese politics of their time. On the nineteenth-century Western frontier, Chinese businessmen competed with each other to represent their community. By the early 1920s, a new generation of brokers based in social movements challenged traditional brokers, shifting the power dynamic within the Chinese community. During the Second World War, social movements helped reconfigure both brokerage and race relations. Based on new Chinese language evidence, this book recounts history from the “middle,” a view that is neither bottom up nor top down. Through brokerage, Chinese wielded considerable influence, navigating a period of anti-Asian sentiment and exclusion throughout society. Consequently, Chinese immigrants became significant players in race relations, influencing policies that affected all Canadians and Americans.

In this historical study of High-Medieval Iceland, the author investigates the influence of the Christian Church on the formation of the earliest state structures in Iceland, from the conversion in 1000 to the union with Norway in 1262. In the history of mankind, states and state structures have usually been established before the advent of written records. As a result historians are rarely able to trace with certainty the early development of complex structures of government. In Iceland, literacy and the practice of native history writing had been established by the beginning of the twelfth century; whereas the formation of a centralized government did not occur until more than a hundred years later. The early development of state-like structures has therefore been unusually well chronicled, in the Icelandic Sagas, and in the historical records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Based on this material, this book contributes to the discussion on the formation of states.

Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1,000 years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in and contributing to elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society, and religion has, by now, deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Palaces like the Aljafería and the Alhambra rank among the highest achievements of the Islamic world. In recent years archaeological work at Córdoba, Kairouan and many other sites has vastly increased our knowledge about the origin and development of Islamic palatial architecture, particularly in the Western Mediterranean region. This book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Islamic palace architecture in Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and southern Italy. The author, who has himself conducted archaeological field work at several prominent sites, presents all Islamic palaces known in the region in ground plans, sections and individual descriptions. The book traces the evolution of Islamic palace architecture in the region from the 8th to the 19th century and places them within the context of the history of Islamic culture. Palace architecture is a unique source of cultural history, offering insights into the way space was conceived and the way rulers used architecture to legitimize their power. The book discusses such topics as the influence of the architecture of the Middle East on the Islamic palaces of the western Mediterranean region, the role of Greek logic and scientific progress on the design of palaces, the impact of Islamic palaces on Norman and Gothic architecture and the role of Sufism on the palatial architecture of the late medieval period.

This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. Beginning around 1000, Mary was drawn into warfare between Muslims and Christians in Iberia, emerging as an icon of the so-called Christian reconquest, which ended in 1492. In the process, rulers of Castile and Aragon developed a Marian sense of monarchy and Mary helped define the manliness of Christian men of war. In the religiously–mixed polities of high medieval Castile and Aragon, Mary became a key figure through which Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated their relationships with each other, and articulated identities. Mary also became central to the Christian view of the conversion of Muslims and Jews. The Spaniards who established colonies in the Caribbean and Mexico brought with them these medieval understandings of Mary. In the New World, the conquistadors both used her in the conquest of indigenous peoples and held her out to these people in evangelical efforts, influencing how some indigenous eventually appropriated her as their own military icon. Legends about her role in the conquest of Mexico became repositories of colonial identities, Spanish and indigenous. These legends inspired men involved in the founding of seventeenth-century New Mexico. There, Mary figured prominently in how colonists, friars, and Pueblos viewed the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the re-establishment of the Spanish colony in the 1690s. Her role in colonial New Mexico reverberates in the state’s contemporary ethnic politics.

This interdisciplinary study of violence in medieval Iceland pursues three intertwined goals. First, it proposes a new cultural history model for understanding violence. The model has three axes: power, signification, and risk. Analysis in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysis in symbolic terms, as an attempt to manipulate meanings, focuses on signification. Analysis in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency over imperfectly controlled circumstances, focuses on risk. The axis of risk is the model’s major innovation and is laid out in detail, using insights from prospect theory, edgework, and the calculus of jeopardy. It is shown that violence, which itself generates risks, at the same time also serves to control uncertainties. Second, the book tests this model on a series of case studies from the history of medieval Iceland. It examines how violence shapes present circumstances, future status, and past memories, and how it transforms uncertain reality into socially useful narrative, showing how Icelanders’ feud paradigm blocked the prospects of warfare and state formation, while their idiom of human violence domesticated the natural environment. Third, the book develops the concept of uchronia, the hegemonic ideology of the past, to explain how texts modulate history. Uchronia is a motivated cultural memory which vouches for historical authenticity (regardless of factual reliability), maintains textual autonomy from authorial intent, and secures a fit between present society and its own past. In medieval Iceland, as often elsewhere, violence played a key role in the making of uchronia