This collection fills the need for a resource that adequately conceptualizes the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. These essays were selected with special emphasis on their comparative outlook. The chapters range from the British Empire (India, Egypt, Palestine) to Indonesia, French colonialism (Brittany and Algeria), South Africa, Fiji, and Japanese imperialism. Within the chapters, key concepts such as gender, land and law, and regimes of knowledge are considered.

This collection fills the need for a resource that adequately conceptualizes the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. These essays were selected with special emphasis on their comparative outlook. The chapters range from the British Empire (India, Egypt, Palestine) to Indonesia, French colonialism (Brittany and Algeria), South Africa, Fiji, and Japanese imperialism. Within the chapters, key concepts such as gender, land and law, and regimes of knowledge are considered.

World Environmental History, a Berkshire Essential, explores how the biosphere is affected by human interventions such as climate change, deforestation, waste management, water and wind energy, population growth, oil spills, ecological imperialism, and urbanization. An interdisciplinary approach to the field considers biological and physical processes as integral parts of history, with mammals, birds, plants, bacteria, and viruses as "biotic actors" that play important roles. So do geological formations and disruptions, such as deserts, mountains, islands, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The volume's rich content includes articles on the anthroposphere, carrying capacity, ethnobotany, Gaia theory, and the Green Revolution, for instance-all of which define key concepts that shape the environmental studies so crucial to a sustainable future.

Africa in World History stresses Africa's interrelatedness to other regions and cultures, from early trade routes, the arrival of Christianity and Islam, and the ramifications of colonialism to contemporary issues such as HIV/AIDS and apartheid that have thwarted Africa's efforts to establish unity. Africa stretches across more than 11 million square miles, from the Sahara and Sahel in the north to the mineral-resource-rich south, the endangered rain forests of the west, and the Serengeti savannas of the east. Fossils from Ethiopia tell us that the human species originated in Africa, and scholars have different theories about the journey out of Africa made by Homo sapiens some 60,000 years ago. Today, Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking more than a thousand different languages.

Art in World History, a Berkshire Essential, put readers in touch with art from the Paleolithic period and the millennium-long heyday of porcelain, to performance art of the postmodernist world. They explore fundamental questions about the origins of art making and the case for including visual studies in world history. The volume balances and interweaves regional coverage with cross-cultural perspectives - when trade brought Chinese silk to the Romans in the first century CE, or how celebrated 19th-century Japanese printmakers used one-point perspective, a Western technique. Overviews on vernacular architecture and textiles examine how the study of these art forms can provide insight on a people's aesthetic sense and development, as well as on the cultural, political, and socioeconomic aspects of their lives.