Who Owns the Fish in the Sea?

From the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the ducal house of Medina Sidonia held exclusive rights to fish for Bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in south-western Spain. Framed by recent theories about the privatization of access to natural resources, this essay explores the history of successive royal grants to the house of Medina Sidonia. It then examines statistical evidence for the tuna catch over the long term, especially in the late sixteenth century, when the annual catch reached a peak and then suddenly declined. The ducal house may have contributed to that decline by overfishing. During the long term, however, ducal control may unintentionally have aided in the conservation of tuna stocks in times of population pressure, both by not fully exploiting their exclusive rights to fish, and by preventing all others from doing so.

Teaching World History in a Swirl of Standards

Standards-based education reform efforts that began in the 1990s resulted in social studies standards by grade level in every single state, stretching from kindergarten to grade 12. All of these standards single out history as a separate subject or strand, and many include world history as a subset within history as a whole. These standards are highly variable, idiosyncratic, and sometimes error-ridden, and they have been the source of enormous controversy. Some world history standards are completely skills-based, with only one sentence about content, and many are very Eurocentric, especially in the lists of individuals and events students should know. Recent efforts to develop better standards, such as the C3 Framework, have become embroiled in the controversy over Common Core, but because high-stakes testing is often based on state standards, world historians should get involved in improving them, and advocate for better world history teaching.

The Promise of—and the Threats to—Historical Linguistics as a Complement of Bentleyan World History

Historical linguistics offers powerful tools for the broad-based approach to world history pioneered by Jerry Bentley. Linguistic analysis, for example, has allowed scholars to solve the mystery of the Roma migration to Europe in the medieval period. Unfortunately, historical linguistics is currently threatened by a movement that seeks to reinvent it as a computational science, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology and epidemiology. Applying such methods to the vexed issue of the origin of the Indo-European languages, a team of scholars has concluded that this language family originated not among Bronze-Age pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe, as the archeological consensus maintains, but rather among Neolithic farmers living in Anatolia. Careful historical analysis, however, shows that the findings of these scholars are incorrect at nearly every turn. Traditional methods of historical linguistics must therefore be preserved if scholarship on language is to contribute to the further development of Bentleyan world history.

Eating the World

This essay follows the iguana, an indigenous genus of herbivorous lizards, to the Caribbean dinner table, from the fifteenth century to the present. Inspired by historian Jerry Bentley’s scholarly contributions to questions of cultural encounters, the essay argues for the importance of indigenous foods in complex, often ambiguous, and consistently nuanced processes of cultural interactions between indigenous peoples and transplanted Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The story of how and why the iguana consistently appeared in the region’s foodways provides a critical perspective on the history of globalization in the Atlantic world. Mapping the variety of these culinary experiences can also reveal insights into the Caribbean’s changing ecology and the role of indigenous beliefs and African interpretations in the eco-cultural encounters that reshaped the flavors and choices of the region.

The Sixteenth-Century World War and the Roots of the Modern World

This essay examines several world historical events from an unfamiliar perspective, that of sixteenth-century Morocco. It seeks to provide a new way of conceptualizing empires, one that builds upon recent work, while imagining them differently. As a key player in the struggle over the western Mediterranean, Morocco’s neglected history has much to tell us about both the power and the limits of the military revolution of early modern times. Moreover, Morocco’s success in withstanding Iberian efforts to extend the reconquista to Northwest Africa served to deflect the expansionary energies across the Atlantic and around Africa. More generally, Morocco provides a useful vantage point for thinking about the emergence of the international structures of power that define the early modern world.

Encounters within Europe

This chapter examines the accounts of several Central European travelers who visited the Iberian Peninsula in the second half of the fifteenth century and pays particular attention to their comments on slaves and slavery. First was the Swabian Georg von Ehingen who sought adventure in latter-day crusades and fought with the Portuguese in Morocco. The Bohemian Leon von Rozmital visited Iberia in 1465–1467. Two of his companions left accounts, his secretary Shashek and the patrician Tetzel wrote accounts of the tour. Nicholas von Popplau made a short visit to Santiago de Compostela in 1484. The German Hieronymus Münzer (or Monetarius) made an extensive tour of Portugal and Spain in 1494–1495. The German knight Arnold Von Harff visited Iberia at the very end of the fifteenth century. Each account provides significant observations and detailed descriptions of the traffic and sale of slaves. Taken as a whole, they provide a window on the relations between Central Europe and the western Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages.

Shadows of Sovereignty

While highlighting the importance of protection to European ventures in the Indian Ocean, historians have tended to overlook its central role in structuring cross-polity relations in the Atlantic world. References to protection pervaded mutual security arrangements and anchored alliances across Atlantic regions. Rulers’ offer of protection to old and new subjects reinforced the legitimacy of imperial claims in the Americas. These multiple meanings of protection made the term politically useful and rhetorically irresistible. This chapter analyzes the way protection talk both structured alliances and created a flexible framework for cross-polity relations in the Atlantic world. It then suggests that meanings of protection began to shift in the early nineteenth century, when the term increasingly signaled more robust claims to sovereignty. The chapter honors Jerry Bentley’s insight that cultural encounters represented rich sites of political innovation in the early modern world.

World Historians and the Future of Academic History

This essay explores the relationship between academic training in history and teaching world history. Historians are almost always trained to do original archival research, which generally leads to detailed, but narrow, studies. When they are hired into academic positions, they are required to teach outside of their comfort zones, with a survey course in world history being at the extreme end of such requests. But the general public, including many students, is interested in larger questions about the relationship between history and the contemporary world. There is therefore a disconnect between historical training and public discourse, which Jerry Bentley and others tried to bridge, which has unfortunately led to the marginalization of historians in public debate. Historians can again be relevant to public life by broadening their research and/or contextualizing it differently, so that it is located in a wider geographic and intellectual space. World history is a fine start to this process.

Writing World Histories for Our Times

This essay considers the place of world history within the larger disciplinary practices of historical inquiry. Disciplinary traditions of deep specialization are in tension with world historians’ interest in broad patterns and long time scales, which leads some scholars—especially those with access to institutional power—to keep world historical scholarship at arm’s length. The essay demonstrates the institutional and intellectual benefits of supporting both global and local scholarship. It argues that historians’ attention to time scale significantly differentiates history from other analyses of globalization.

Close Encounters of the Methodological Kind

Professional and public perceptions of history remain deeply influenced by the discipline’s Enlightenment roots. Without a set of common assumptions, the field would be paralyzed, but unless scholars acknowledge the Eurocentric legacies that shape our thinking, historical understanding among scholars and the public will continue to erroneously universalize locally-rooted processes, such as the creation of the Westphalian state system, as an inherently human characteristic. This essay turns the methodology of cross-cultural encounter pioneered by Jerry Bentley on scholarly practice, examining a counter-factual map of “un-colonized” Africa and the public reaction to it in order to illuminate unexamined, Enlightenment-based assumptions that shape world historical inquiry.