“Unable to Dismiss Them”: Re-assessing the Jewish “Court Bankers” of Abbasid Baghdad, 908–932

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
Jennifer Grayson
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Global History ◽  
Central State ◽  
Tax Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Finance

Abstract Economic historians describe the emergence of Jewish court bankers presiding over a central state bank in Abbasid Baghdad as significant for the global history of finance. This paper, however, re-evaluates these figures in light of new insights about court cultures and institutions in the medieval Islamicate world. It argues that they should be understood primarily as middlemen in tax collection. They performed favors for individual viziers, but likely never held official titles or appointments at al-Muqtadir’s court. Rather, it was precisely their outsider status relative to elite Abbasid social networks that accounts for the longevity of their careers.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Fellow Worker

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Barry Pateman
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fellow Worker

Review of Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, Wobblies of the World. A new edited collection on the global history of the Industrial Workers of the World.  

Towards a Global History of Culture1

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Yūji Nawata
Keyword(s):  
Global History ◽  
Short History ◽  
Physical Time ◽  
Shared Space ◽  
Cosmic Space ◽  
Parallel Universes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shared Context

Abstract Contemporary physics often speaks of “multiverses” or “parallel universes,” seriously debating whether our cosmic space is only one of many2. However many such spaces there may be, for now let us limit ourselves to the space in which we find ourselves; let us focus furthermore on the planet we are on, and further still on humanity upon this planet. Let us attempt to write a short history of the culture produced by humanity on this globe. We humans possessed and indeed possess a shared space, the globe, where a physical time common to us all passes. Let us survey the history of the world’s culture within this shared context.

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