Expanding Empires: Cultural Interaction and Exchange in World Societies from Ancient to Early Modern Times

This is a shrewdly designed volume of essays, translated texts, and visual images that will really help students think ”world historically.” Europe is kept where it belongs, far out on one end of rich and complicated developments in Asia and Africa, eventually the heir to other interactions in the Americas. Rather than focus on cultures and societies as separate entities, the editors lead students to think about interactions of cultures and power. — John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California

Wendy Kasinec and Michael Polushin have assembled an extraordinarily thoughtful and well-crafted collection of essays. This volume will prove invaluable to all those interested in the analysis of imperial expansion and its multifaceted and multitiered consequences. To demonstrate their assertion that ”empires and societies do not exist in isolation,” the editors have put together sixteen selections that not only prove their claim but also provide a sophisticated road map of the complexity of intercultural relationships between and among world civilizations. In addition to its other scholarly qualities, this highly readable book should attract equally the specialist and the initiate. — Daniel Castro, Southwestern University

In this rich and suggestive volume, the editors have brought together a wide-ranging set of scholarly studies of situations of cultural contact that resulted from the establishment of empires in diverse places and times. Accessible enough to be used as a supplemental reader in introductory world history surveys, Expanding Empires: Cultural Interaction and Exchange in World Societies from Ancient to Early Modern Times is sufficiently sophisticated also to be appropriate for upper-level courses dealing with issues in world history. — Ida Altman, University of New Orleans