ABSTRACT
Makdisi (1990), recent studies have tracked the ‘interactive emergence’ of sophisticated states,
traditions, and technologies in Afro-Eurasia.1 Much of this scholarship reassesses the so-called
‘great divergence’ of ‘European modernity’, casting European projects not as a radical origin of
new systems, but rather as an outgrowth of existing systems and earlier convergences and diver-
gences. The data reveal that many systems we call ‘modern’ were consolidated in a period that
westerners call ‘medieval’, not in the West, but in the global South and East, among Asian,
Islamic, and African empires, and to some extent as well in the pre-Columbian empires of the
Americas.2 Scholars have tracked these modernizing formations as they spread across the hemi-
spheres of Afro-Eurasia and arrived at the doorstep of western Europeans in the later medieval
period, who entered and extended this south-eastern world system (Beaujard, 2005, 2012;
Bentley, 1998; Chaudhuri, 1990; Curtain 1984, 2002, Doyle, 2013; Manning 2006, 2012).
