Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalization as a Long-Term Historical Process

by LaBianca,Oystein S.

• ISBN13: 9781904768135
• ISBN10: 190476813X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-08-18
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Today's political minds assure us that the more 'connected' societies are, the less danger they pose to global stablity--but is this a 'new' idea or one that is as old as history itself? Trade networks that began as far back as human prehistory were responsible for exchanges of ideas as well as goods and the 'ripple effects' of these networks were the expansionist compulsions of hstorical states and empires. These papers tell us that the civillizations of the ancient past may have had more in common with modern global enterprises than was ever before imagined. Two concepts that have great mmediacy and have now become the current watchwords for the media as well as for academia, globalization and long-term historical processes, are brought together in this interdisciplinary volume of papers based upon Manuel Castells' massive work "The Network Society.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	vii
Introduction---Ancient Network Societies	1	(6)
Section One: The `Space of Flows' in Antiquity	7	(52)
Introduction to Section One	8	(2)
Grand Narratives, Technological Revolutions and the Past: Deep-Time Studies of Metallurgy and Social Evolution in the Eastern Mediterranean	10	(16)
Thomas E. Levy
Emerging State Connectivity: Dynamic Urban and Economic Growth in Fourth and Third Millennium BCE West Syrian Societies	26	(6)
William Collins
Trade Pulsations, Collapse and Reorientation in the Ancient World	32	(27)
William R. Thompson
Section Two: Cognitive Globalization in History	59	(54)
Introduction to Section Two	60	(2)
The Globalizing Effects of `Hajj' in the Medieval and Modern Eras	62	(13)
Bethany J. Walker
Connectivity: Transjordan during the Persian Period	75	(18)
Paul J. Ray, Jr.
Organic Globalization and Socialization	93	(20)
Sheldon Lee Gosline
Section Three: Antiquity and the Power of Identity	113	(55)
Introduction to Section Three	114	(3)
Connectivity in the Longue Duree: Hadrami Muslims in an Indian Ocean World	117	(15)
Leif Manger
Perceptions of Antiquity and the Formation of Modern Resistance Identities	132	(7)
Sandra Arnold Scham
Foreign Self and Familiar Other: The Impact of `Global' Connectivity on New Kingdom Egypt	139	(19)
Jenny Cashman
Nothing New Under the Sun?	158	(10)
Manuel Castells
Index	168