For undergraduate or graduate courses in World History This impressive collection of readings illustrates that the history of the world is as much about the relationships among societies as it is about transformations and continuities within societies. Exchanges: A Global History Reader is designed as an introduction to the discipline of world history. Unlike other source collections, Exchanges helps students look beyond strictly delineated regionalism and chronological structures to understand history as a product of ongoing debate. Structured around a series of interconnected themes and debates, and pairing both primary and secondary sources, Exchanges challenges both students and teachers to rethink history. Praise for Exchanges: A Global History Reader The authors have successfully produced a text that will allow students to explore the ways in which historical writing has generated important debates about world history.... It offers a rich and diverse compilation of reading materials that provide students with ideas about world history, but also with models of historical writing.... Moreover, it offers examples from a wide range of geographical areas, something that will help broaden the horizons of the average student. --Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, Montclair State University The method of placing competing narratives side by side is one of the best strategies for demonstrating the nature of history as an interpretation.... I am very excited about the possibilities that this text could provide for transforming my World Civilizations course. An attentive student will find his or her basic assumptions challenged on every page, and it is this kind of intellectual transformation that I seek to facilitate as a teacher. --Carolyn R. Dupont, Eastern Kentucky University I think this textbook goes a long way toward helping students to think more deeply and more historically about the state of the world today.... The fact that the book is focused upon the five big questions of world history is a great plus. Too many world history readers have a diffuse focus and don't really add up to a book that promotes sustained, focused inquiry. --Mark Jones, Central Connecticut State University I would describe the book as an introduction to being a world historian. Through a selection of thematic case studies, students are able to compare theories, test historians' interpretations against the primary evidence, and access the range of material that allows them to develop their own interpretations of the worlds they inhabit and inherit. --Lesley Mary Smith, George Mason University Exchanges focuses more than any other reader on the interconnectedness of regions and the debates pertaining to the new world history.... The authors successfully demonstrate that history is contested to this day. Not only is this a more accurate portrayal of historical scholarship than most readers provide, it is also more interesting for the students, who are more likely to appreciate history if they see it as contested, often for reasons closely connected with the state of the world today. --A. Martin Wainwright, University of Akron

Cosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, offers an alternative interpretation of the 175 years leading up to the formal colonization of Africa by Europeans. In this brief and affordable text, author and series editor Trevor R. Getz demonstrates how Africans pursued lives, constructed social settings, forged trading links, and imagined worlds that were sophisticated, flexible, and well adapted to the increasingly global and fast-paced interactions of this period. Getz's interpretation of a "cosmopolitan Africa" is based on careful reading of Africans' oral histories and traditions, written documents, and images of or from the eighteenth century. Examining this time period from both social and cultural perspectives, Cosmopolitan Africa, 1700-1875, helps students to re-envision African societies in the time before colonization.

Winner of the James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association, and widely acclaimed by educators and students, Abina and the Important Men, 2e is a compelling and powerfully illustrated "graphic history" based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The book is a microhistory that does much more than simply depict an event in the past; it uses the power of illustration to convey important themes in world history and to reveal the processes by which history is made. The story of Abina Mansah-a woman "without history" who was wrongfully enslaved, escaped to British-controlled territory, and then took her former master to court-takes place in the complex world of the Gold Coast at the onset of late nineteenth-century colonialism. Slavery becomes a contested ground, as cultural practices collide with an emerging wage economy and British officials turn a blind eye to the presence of underpaid domestic workers in the households of African merchants. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of "important men"-a British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country "gentleman," and a jury of local leaders-that her rights matter. "Am I free?" Abina inquires. Throughout both the court case and the flashbacks that dramatically depict her life in servitude, these men strive to "silence" Abina and to impose their own understandings and meanings upon her. The story seems to conclude with the short-term success of the "important men," as Abina loses her case. But it doesn't end there: Abina is eventually redeemed. Her testimony is uncovered in the dusty archives by Trevor Getz and, through Liz Clarke's illustrations, becomes a graphic history read by people around the world. In this way, the reader takes an active part in the story along with the illustrator, the author, and Abina herself. Following the graphic history in Part I, Parts II-V provide detailed historical context for the story, a reading guide that reconstructs and deconstructs the methods used to interpret the story, and strategies for using Abina in various classroom settings. This edition adds crucial value to Abina's story and the reader's experience. These include: - new, additional testimony uncovered in the National Archives of Ghana - a gender-rich section in Part V that explores the Abina's life and narrative as a woman, focusing on such important themes as the relationship between slavery and gender in pre-colonial Akan society, the role of marriage in Abina's experience and motives, colonial paternalism, and the meaning of cloth and beads in her story. - a forum on the question of whether Abina was a slave with contributions by three senior scholars working from different perspectives: Sandra Greene, Antoinette Burton, and Kwasi Konadu .