This volume analyzes historical processes of mobility by focusing on material objects. Mobility—as a shorthand for various related processes such as migration, transfer, entanglement, and translation—involves human actors, immaterial elements such as ideas and knowledge, but also objects in various forms and functions. For example, as material infrastructures they are the basis for transport and travel; as goods they are the object and purpose of trade or gift exchange. By focusing on the way objects determined certain processes of mobility and how their social meaning and materiality was transformed in these processes, the contributors hope to gain deeper insight into the historical relations between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Persia.

In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland–Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance. These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation. The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.

For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people’s biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.

The volume investigates flows of knowledge that transcended social, cultural, linguistic and political boundaries. Dealing with different sources such as dictionaries, early printed books, political advice literature, and modern periodicals, the case studies in this anthology cover a time frame from the 15th to the early 20th century. Being concerned with a wide variety of geographical areas, including the Ottoman capital Istanbul, provincial settings like Ottoman Palestine, and also Egypt, Bosnia, Crimea, the Persian realm and Poland-Lithuania, this volume gives transepochal and transregional insights in the production, transmission, and translation of knowledge. In so doing it contributes to current debates in transcultural studies, global history, and the history of knowledge.

Studying the entangled histories of the areas conceptualized as Middle Eastern and North Atlantic World in the interwar years is crucial to understanding the two areas' respective and common histories until today. However, many of the manifold connections, exchanges, and entanglements between the areas have not received thorough scholarly attention yet. The contributors to this volume address this by bringing together various innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. They thereby further the understanding of the two areas' entangled histories and diversify prevailing concepts and narratives. Through this, the volume also offers enriching insights into the global history of the early 20th century.

The study of historic foodways is as multifaceted and varied as food itself. The changes we see in food habits and choices over history reveal evolving social and political climates and help us envision our ancestors' everyday lives and imagined afterlives. Food certainly played a role in funerary rites; it was offered to the dead, of course, but also shared at the grave among the living family members, symbolically bridging between this world and the next. Choosing the food was embedded in a series of traditions and norms; how it relates to what was actually eaten in associated settlements enables an understanding of its meaning. Feasts, whether for the dead or the living, were laden with political and social meaning. Fasting, although requiring abstention from certain foods, also involves the management-from sourcing and storing to cooking and eating-of the permitted foods, a key concern in contexts such as monasteries where fasting occurred. This collective work demonstrates the diversity of possible approaches to food. It presents the current state of research on the foodways of Egypt and Sudan and highlights the importance of further interdisciplinary collaboration for a "big picture" approach. It brings together 16 articles covering archaeology (in the broadest sense), theory, anthropology, language, ethnography, and architecture to illustrate food traditions and history in Egypt and Sudan from as early as the 4th millennium BC to the 20th century.

The book explores the complex, multi-directional connections of the "mobility/security nexus" in the re-ordering of states, empires, and markets in historical perspective. Contributing to a vivid academic debate, the book offers in-depth studies on how mobility and security interplay in the emergence of order beyond the modern state. While mobilities studies, migration studies and critical security studies have focused on particular aspects of this relationship, such as the construction of mobility as a political threat or the role of infrastructure and security, we still lack comprehensive conceptual frameworks to grasp the mobility/security nexus and its role in social, political, and economic orders. With authors drawn from sociology, International Relations, and various historical disciplines, this transdisciplinary volume historicizes the mobility-security nexus for the first time. In answering calls for more studies that are both empirical and have historical depth, the book presents substantial case studies on the nexus, ranging from the late Middle Ages right up to the present-day, with examples from the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, Papua New Guinea, Rome in the 1980s or the European Union today. By doing so, the volume conceptualizes the mobility/security nexus from a new, innovative perspective and, further, highlights it as a prominent driving force for society and state development in history. This book will be of much interest to researchers and students of critical security studies, mobility studies, sociology, history and political science.

This collection of articles explores a possible alternative beginning of Global Art History and World Art Studies, two methodologies that set a worldwide focus in the study of art around the 2000s. Teaching back to earlier efforts to conceive of the international community in a less Eurocentric way, the volume proposes a tentative link between socialist internationalism as a political and cultural diplomatic principle in the Soviet Block and some new approaches to art and cultural historiography introduced there. In the "Second World", universal art history or Weltkunstgeschichte were endorsed as frameworks for the teaching and writing of art history. Authors in this book interrogate whether "world art history" as practiced by socialist scholars had aspirations and achievements comparable to today's Global Art History and World Art Studies. Or was this knowledge production in an internationalist paradigm a mere foil for communist rhetoric, behind which severed cultural relations to the Western world could also be recommenced?

Central Europe and the Non-European World in the Long 19th Century explores various ways in which inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy perceived and depicted the outside world during the era of European imperialism. Focusing particularly on the Czech Lands, Hungary, and Slovakia, with other nations as comparative examples, this collection shows how Central Europeans viewed other regions and their populations, from the Balkans and the Middle East to Africa, China, and America. Although the societies under Habsburg rule found themselves (with rare exceptions) outside the realm of colonialism, their inhabitants also engaged in colonial projects and benefited from these interactions. Rather than taking one “Central European” approach, the volume draws upon accounts not only by writers and travelers, but by painters, missionaries, and other observers, reflecting the diversity that characterized both the region itself and its views of non-Western cultures.