Far from being a recent world, the concept of "a [one] world" did slowly emerged in a post-prehistoric Antiquity. The actual knowledge of the world increased through millennia leaving aside large continents (Americas, part of Africa, Australia, etc.-most areas without written history), and writing history in Antiquity cannot be a synchronal presentation of the most ancient times of these areas. Through a few case studies dealing with texts, archaeology and history itself mostly in BCE times, the paper will try to perceive the slow building-up of a physical awareness and 'moral' consciousness of the known world by people of the Middle East (e.g. the Bible, Gilgamesh) and the Mediterranean (mainly Greeks).

The paper examines, in the light of current historiography, the recent trends in the application and applicability of the World Historical studies on the Indian Ocean scenario. Calling for the combination of the breadth of the World Historical studies with the analysis of a historical scenario in its specific spatio-temporal context-instead of a synchronic approach-the present study takes a close look at commerce and politics in the western Indian Ocean in the light of an early 14th century Latin Crusade tract, How to Defeat the Saracens by William of Adam (Guillelmus Ade, Tractatus quomodo Sarraceni sunt expugnandi), a Dominican friar. The text offers remarkable insights into the interlocking of the Indian Ocean and the South Asian subcontinent with the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ilkhanid realm and the Crusades. The paper argues for what is now termed as braided and connected histories.

The paper is oriented towards a reflection on the epistemological extension of world history. This discipline is currently opening up for new subjects and new foci of interest, with environmental history being one of them. The paper debates the interaction between the global and the local as one of the main issues of world history. It analyses the impacts of the interconnectivity of diverse regions as well as different geographical and cultural complexes, during the period between 1500 and 1800. Assuming that the sea in its economic, cultural and environmental dimensions contributed actively to world history, and is, in itself, a major factor of globalization, the paper intends to highlight interdependencies which fostered connections between the local and the global. It further submits to discussion which was the impact of an on-going globalization process, based on maritime dynamics, on the environment. Through an analysis centered on the impact of European overseas expansion, some environmental impacts will be analyzed. The paper aims at questioning environmental history as an emergent theme of world history, based on the historical experience of connecting worlds developed in the First Global Age (1500-1800).

This essay interrogates the category of the 'global' in the emerging domain of 'global intellectual history'. Through a case study of the Indian social-religious reformer Rammohun Roy (1772/4-1833), I argue that notions of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (which have been preoccupying concerns of recent debates in intellectual history) have multiple conceptual and practical points of origin. Thus in early colonial India a person like Rammohun Roy could invoke centuries-old Indic terms of globality (vishva, jagat, sarva, sarvabhuta, etc.), selfhood (atman/brahman), and notions of right (adhikara) to liberation/salvation (mukti/moksha) as well as late precolonial discourses on 'worldly' rights consciousness (to life, property, religious toleration) and models of participatory governance present in an Indo-Islamic society, and hybridize these with Western-origin notions of rights and liberties. Thereby Rammohun could challenge the racial and confessional assumptions of colonial authority and produce a more deterritorialized and non-sectarian idea of selfhood and governance. However, Rammohun's comparativist world-historical notions excluded other models of selfhood and globality, such as those produced by devotional Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta-Tantric discourses under the influence of non-Brahmanical communities and women. Rammohun's puritan condemnation of non-Brahmanical sexual and gender relations created a homogenized and hierarchical model of globality, obscuring alternate subaltern-inflected notions of selfhood. Class, caste, and gender biases rendered Rammohun supportive of British colonial rule and distanced him from popular anti-colonial revolts and social mobility movements in India. This article argues that today's intellectual historians run the risk of repeating Rammohun's biases (or those of Hegel's Weltgeschichte) if they privilege the historicity and value of certain models of global selfhood and rights-consciousness (such as those derived from a constructed notion of the 'West' or from constructed notions of various 'elite' classicized 'cultures'), to the exclusion of models produced by disenfranchised actors across the world. Instead of operating through hierarchical assumptions about local/global polarity, intellectual historians should remain sensitive to and learn from the universalizable models of selfhood, rights, and justice produced by actors in different spatio-temporal locations and intersections.

The word 'urbanity' literally means 'quality or state of being urban' where the criterion of urban economic and civic culture is assumed despite the general celebration of cultural uniqueness of urban centers. The narratives celebrating the uniqueness of urban centers since the ancient past till recent times could not get rid of the broad categorization of the urban models depending on their contextual networks of trade, mobility and culture. This paper attempts to explore whether the urban cultures in South Asia even preceding a global phenomenon like colonialism were actually reflecting an idea of urbanity where the urban culture, including planning and architecture reflected a trans-national model. This paper particularly concentrates on the medieval period when a pattern of urbanity took shape in this subcontinent under the influence of Islam, which could be explained by its particular idea of urban model, cultural exchange and vibrant trade networks.