Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and – against their will – to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Chinese travel writing is a literary genre. All such works contain a coherent narrative of the physical experience of a journey through space towards an identifiable place, written in prose. In later Chinese literary history, however, most travel writing concerns real journeys. Unlike early European travel writing, with its focus on distant, alien, and exotic lands, Chinese travel writing most often describes places inside China. Almost always written in short essay or diary format, the journeys described therein often – but not always – describe trips undertaken for sightseeing purposes. As for content, it can vary considerably, depending on the geographical focus of the narrative and the author’s personal interests. For instance, we might find descriptions of famous landmarks, prominent mountains, local customs and products, and flora and fauna. The ‘literary’ component of these works refers to descriptive and/or commentarial language that is at once personal. ‘Personal’ means active engagement between the author and the place visited and described, which often inspires the traveller to employ an elevated style of language rich in lyrical content.

This chapter explores the growing economic influence of China and its implications for state development. It develops a measure of China’s economic hierarchy and finds that Chinese support increases state capacity through different mechanisms than American hierarchy, primarily by enabling leaders to remain in power longer. The chapter also examines the interaction between American and Chinese economic hierarchies, revealing that their coexistence can undermine state capacity. It discusses the future trajectory of Chinese influence and its potential impact on partner states.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.

This chapter surveys heterogenous lived experiences of disability throughout medieval Afro-Eurasian travel networks, examining examples from approximately the seventh through fifteenth centuries CE. It uses a broadly comparative approach to ‘religiomedical’ modes of understanding disability, illness, and other conditions, which situate the analysis of lived experience within local sociocultural understandings of the body (namely religious frameworks or historical forms of medical knowledge). Surveying disparate medieval first-person accounts of temporary or lifelong disability across Asia, Africa, and Europe, this chapter attends to disability as an adaptive practice and a venue for world transformation: an opening up of possibility, and an intellectual and artistic resource for people in motion.

In 1237, having conquered much of the Central Asian steppes, a massive force of Mongols led by the third generation of Chinggis Khan’s descendants launched a campaign into eastern Europe, taking Kiev (1240) and sweeping westward into Poland and Hungary. News of this invasion quickly reached as far west as England. After more than 130 years of crusading, Latin Christians were passably familiar with the political and cultural complexities of the eastern Mediterranean; knowledge of the lands farther east, however, remained a hazy blend of ancient authors, Biblical lore, the Alexander Romance, and the legend of Prester John. Within short order, however, western European leaders took the initiative in their own hands, dispatching exploratory missions to the Mongols, like those of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini in the mid-1240s and William of Rubruck in the early 1250s. Thanks to the detailed accounts of their travels they wrote on their return, the Mongols emerged from the fog of apocalyptic terror that had first surrounded them and, like a gradually-developing Polaroid, took on the contours of people with their own history, customs, and institutions

During the 1970s–1980s, “self-reliance” (al-i‘timad al-thati/al-i‘timad ‘ala al-nafis) or “auto-centric” was a central Arab (and indeed Third World) theory of development. Thinkers and institutions broke with models of import-substitution and export-oriented industrialization that dominated developmental planning in republics and right-wing regimes, stemming from notions of development based on integration with the capitalist world system. They created a model implicitly or explicitly based on the Chinese experience of agrarian reform, self-reliance, and sovereign industrialization as the necessary steps to rupture with colonial underdevelopment. These economists, sociologists, and agronomists developed anticolonial and anti-imperialist theories of development based on self-reliance vis-à-vis macroeconomic architecture, technology, agriculture, and industrialization. This essay offers a preliminary genealogy of those ideas, tracing the emergence of these theories across space and time, through the work of major Arab thinkers such as Samir Amin, Mohamed Dowidar, Azzam Mahjoub, and Ismail-Sabri Abdallah.

The upbringing and professional career of Wu Jian (1462–1506) and his uncle, Wu Cong, shed light on two key issues. First is the gradual transformation of merit nobles within the Ming polity, particularly their role in dynastic defenses. Second is the dynasty’s continued efforts to secure military ability through instituting new practices, including the education and training of young merit nobles and entrusting capable civil officials with substantial military responsibilities. Before turning to Wu Jian’s career, however, we first consider the experiences of his mother and other women, whose abilities both in managing large, complex households and negotiating with the dynastic state, were essential to the fortunes of all merit noble families.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Using Wu Jin’s tenure as Marquis of Gongshun from 1449 to 1461, this chapter explores issues of ability and difference in a time of upheaval at the Ming court. It traces the Wu family as it shifted from immigrant family at the empire’s western edge to members of the capital elite. The chapter also explores the divergent experiences of other Mongolians and merit noble families within the Ming polity.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the next address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Using Wu Jijue’s career as a focal point, this chapter explores the power of appointment, the process of assessment, and the culture of patronage, before offering a few overarching observations about Wu Jijue’s experiences and what they say about China in the second half of the sixteenth century. The chapter also throws into clear relief how dramatically contemporary perceptions of the Wu family had changed from the early fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century. Once newly arrived immigrants at the edge of the realm whose Mongolian names and origins were obvious to all, the Wu family were now unquestionably “one-percenters,” a capital family ranking among the elites of the elites and whose foreign origins were completely overshadowed by its century-old ties to the imperial throne and service in the highest echelons of the dynastic administration.

The Wu family’s experiences illustrate in clear and human terms how institutions change over time. Far from lapsing into an ornamental or parasitic existence after the horrific purges of the Hongwu and Yongle reigns, merit nobles remained integral to the Ming dynasty. Reviewing the careers of the Wu men across the generations, we see their role change from field commanders, to a mix of field command and senior administration, and finally to exclusively capital administration. Rather than a caricatured image of corrupt irrelevance, merit nobles, properly considered, serve as a salutary reminder that military institutions, like other institutions, adapted to new circumstances. Examination of the Wu family yields a sharper understanding of who actually administered the dynasty’s core military institutions, what functions they served, and how they interacted with civil officials, palace eunuchs, officers, and the throne. Civil officials came and went, eunuchs held posts for longer, and military officers led campaigns, but merit nobles provided much of the continuity in personnel so essential for the operation of the Capital Training Divisions and Chief Military Commissions, pillars of the dynastic military.

Chapter 1 traces the experiences of Batu-Temür, his wife, their sons, and some 5,000 followers, who in 1405 migrated from the Mongolian steppe to the northwestern corner of the still-new Ming dynasty. In recognition of the military contributions of Batu-Temür and his sons, and their steadfast loyalty on refusing to join a local Mongolian insurrection, the Ming emperor granted the family a series of high-level military posts, gifts, honorary titles, a Chinese surname (Wu), and eventually investiture of Batu-Temür as Earl of Gongshun, a title that his descendants would hold until the mid seventeenth century. The Wu family’s experiences show both the Ming dynasty and recently arrived immigrants actively attempting to advance their interests in a time of rapid geopolitical change.