Product Description: Adler and Pouwels's WORLD CIVILIZATIONS offers broad-based coverage of the world's major civilizations, in a brief-chapter format that presents information in manageable segments. The focused treatment of topics throughout history covers every major epoch and follows general patterns and processes, while illuminating history through specific examples and a particular emphasis on social and cultural topics...read more

Short chapters, great stories, and tons of study tools! Adler and Pouwels's WORLD CIVILIZATIONS is a vibrant introduction to world history structured to meet the demands of your study schedule. It's clearly written, packed with charts and illustrations, and loaded with review features so you'll be up to date in class and ready for the test. And, because WORLD CIVILIZATIONS offers extensive coverage of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, you'll have timely historical insights into the issues that make today's news. Get WORLD CIVILIZATIONS and discover how having all the information you need to know for the test really does equal a better grade.

Provides coverage of the political, cultural, and social history of the Middle East and Africa from 600 to 1500.

'This book provides coverage of the political, cultural, and social history of the world from 1350 to 1600. Contact among regions of the world expanded through trade networks, enabling a transferal of knowledge and culture between western and eastern societies. With a strong focus on the Renaissance, Reformation, and Ming China, the text comes from ordinary people, travelers, bureaucrats, children, housewives, poets, and religious thinkers.'--Supplied by publisher.Provides coverage of the political, cultural, and social history of the world from 1350 to 1600.

In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole. Coastal Africans, he argues, simply adopted Islam as the spiritual vehicle best suited to their expanding intellectual needs and to meeting the opportunities presented by their physical and cultural environment. The culture and religion that developed were strong, rich, supple, self-assured. yet capable of accommodating change where it was unavoidable or preferable. All these characteristics were put to the test in the nineteenth century, when coastal peoples were subjected to intense Arabizing and Westernizing influences. Pouwels demonstrates how local people went on asserting their own traditions while assimilating what they chose from both worlds. East African Muslims, therefore faced the twentieth century divided on issues of local cultural autonomy and the need to conform to external cultural pressures. (view table of contents)

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