Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia ed. by Pamela H. Smith (review)

Abstract

With the global turn in recent decades, how to maintain scholarly precision and analytical effectiveness when working on a macroscopic scale has become increasingly challenging. That big fancy terms sprout up occasionally does not help either. In this regard, this well-organized symposium volume is a timely contribution to the field of world history. Instead of proposing yet another all-encompassing mega-framework that aims at organizing every era obsessively, the book presents several approaches and examples to study the “itineraries” of materials, practices, and knowledge while engaging other existing analytical categories. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) offers a methodological summary and a historical overview of Eurasian routes, while the rest three parts (chapters 3–12) include case studies, mainly of the early modern period, showing how “itineraries” can help connect a wide variety of topics from science and economy to arts and philosophy. The flexibility of the term “itineraries,” though, might be the same reason that this advantage seems less evident in the well-written but dense overview (part I). As editor Pamela H. Smith puts it, this volume “illuminate[s] how knowledge systems, epistemologies, objects, texts, materials, and practices that might appear to be stable or ‘natural’ are, in fact, agglomerations accreted and transformed over time and space”