Includes bibliographical references (pages 374-427) and index

Studying a system in formation -- The cities of the Champagne fairs -- Bruges and Ghent: commercial and industrial cities of Flanders -- The merchant mariners of Genoa and Venice -- The Mongols and the Northeast Passage -- Sindbad's way: Baghdad and the Persian Gulf -- Cairo's monopoly under the slave sultanate -- The Indian subcontinent: on the way to everywhere -- The strait and narrow -- All the silks of China -- Restructuring the thirteenth-century world system

In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony. -- From product description