As this issue goes to press, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be a great disruptor of life in and out of academia: though trivial in terms of its global effects, it has contributed to the lateness of this number of the journal. However, it has not prevented this journal and others like it from ultimately gathering scholars and practitioners around a troubled world to address the continuing challenge of providing innovative research and the teaching of world history, such as the World History Bulletin’s “Teach in the Time of Corona,” (Spring/Summer 2020, Volume XXXVI, No. 1).
Pandemics have been addressed on many occasions by World History Connected and will be the subject of a future issue. Other future Forums (several articles addressing a single topic) currently under development are Latin America and the Caribbean, Empires, Sustainability, Maritime History, and South Asia. Individual articles on any subject germane to world history and ideas for future Forums are welcome at any time.
This issue’s topical Forum is devoted to exploring world history in a region, Southeast Asia, once neglected by, but now of increasing interest to, world historians for a variety of reasons, such as the global importance of its diverse Muslim population and the region’s growing recognition as a place where scholars and teachers have been able to identify world history processes and test new paradigms. The Forum is comprised of eight articles that offer fresh perspectives that are as important to the world history classroom as they are for researchers.
Forum
Introduction to the Forum by Marc Jason Gilbert
Giving Up the Ghost: Rethinking Southeast Asia’s Maritime Past and its Place in World History by Jennifer L. Gaynor
Negotiating Ambiguities: Female Rule in Muslim Asia during the Early Modern Period by Barbara Watson Andaya
Islam and Modernity: A Reconciliation through Southeast Asian History by Ethan Hawkley
Chinese Principalities in the Water Frontiers of Southeast Asia: Historical Significance and Memory of Hà Tiên, Lanfang, and Kokang by Robert Y. Eng
The Friction of Distance in Borneo: Migration, Economic Change and Geographic space in Sabah by David R. Saunders
The Bay and the Straits: The Melaka Era (1402-1641) in the Northern Bay of Bengal by Rila Mukherjee
History Lessons from Vietnamese Francophone Literature by Jack A. Yeager
Girl with Lotus and M-16: the equivocal legacy of the École des Beaux-arts de l’Indochine 1924–1945 by John Michael Swinbank
Digital Resources for Research and Teaching Southeast Asia in World History by John Maunu
Articles
Imperial Intrigue: Entrepreneurs and Early Twentieth Century Attempts at United States Economic Expansion in Ottoman Iraq by Jameel Haque
An Interview with a World Historian: Stanley Burstein Conducted by Marc Jason Gilbert
Book reviews
Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.by Andrae Marak
Spengler III, Robert N. Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat.by Robert Klemm
Delgado, James P. War at Sea: A Shipwrecked History from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century.by Cynthia Ross
Dejung, Christof, David Motadel, and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire.by Jeffrey Auerbach
Headrick, David R. Humans Versus Nature: A Global Environmental History.by Thomas Anderson