Patterns of urbanization, 1400 to 1800

PETER BURKE

This chapter is concerned not so much with cities as with the process of urbanization.¹ In other words, it deals not only with the growth of cities, but also with the rise in the proportion of the population that lived in cities (the Netherlands, for instance, was 37 per cent urban in 1815); with the reorganiza­tion of cities that followed their growth; and with the spread of urban attitudes and values.

As so often happens in the case of global history, the dates chosen in this volume, the beginning and end of the so-called ‘early modern' world, are more appropriate to some parts of that world than others. There are no ‘natural' dates for this chapter. Paul Bairoch, for instance, treated the period 400 to 1700 as a unit, presenting it as a long trough between the end of one urban civilization and the rise of another.^{[77] [78]} Historians of China generally treat the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644) and the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912) as units, while the Japanese think in terms of the Ashikaga and Tokugawa periods (1336 to 1573 and 1603 to 1868).

However, the period 1400 to 1800 has some kind of unity. The years around 1400 mark a moment of recovery from the great plague of 1348-9, which affected Western Asia as well as Europe, as well as a recovery from the destruction of cities by the Mongols, from China to Eastern Europe. As for the years around 1800, they mark not only the rise of new major cities, from New York to Shanghai or Kolkata (Calcutta), but also the beginning of new patterns of urbanization in an age of industrialization in a world economy that was dominated for the first time by the West.^[79]

By the standards of the period 1800 to 2000, let alone the megacities of the twenty-first century, urbanization in the four centuries between 1400 and 1800 was a rather modest process.

The population of another nine cities reached figures somewhere between half a million and a million: Nanjing, Guangzhou (formerly known in the West as Canton), Cairo, Isfahan, Istanbul, Agra, Delhi, Lahore and Paris. Urban growth was sometimes rapid. Amsterdam had about 30,000 inhabit­ants in 1550, 90,000 in 1620 and 200,000 in 1680; London, 200,000 in 1600 rising to 400,000 in 1650; and St Petersburg, 100,000 in 1750 but 220,000 in 1790.^[81]

However, a study of the process of urbanization should not confine itself to individual cities, no matter how spectacular their growth. It is more illuminating to consider urban systems, networks of cities, large, medium and small, that rise or decline together. These urban networks, especially dense in some regions, cannot be considered in isolation either, since they depended on rural areas not only for food, but also for the immigrants that allowed them to grow. This hinterland was usually near, but might be further away if there was a good system of communication in place. Beijing, for instance, depended on grain that came from the Yangzi valley via the Grand Canal. Istanbul depended on food supplies from Thrace. London was fuelled by what are now known as the ‘home counties', including Essex, Hertfordshire and Kent.

Urbanization was described above as ‘a process', but this begs an important question.

different parts of the world, grow for the same reasons? It is obviously necessary to distinguish between different kinds of city, such as the port (Guangzhou, Osaka, Amsterdam), the capital (Beijing, Edo, Isfahan), the sacred city (Rome, Mecca), the craft centre (Florence, Suzhou) and so on. It may also be necessary to distinguish patterns of growth in different regions.

What follows will concentrate on Japan, China and Western Europe before turning to the colonial city and finally to some general conclusions about the causes and consequences of early modern urbanization.

The Japanese model

It is convenient to begin with Japan because this group of islands was relatively isolated from the rest of the world, especially from the early seventeenth century onwards, the time when urban growth was accelerating. Foreign trade was strictly controlled and confined to one city, Nagasaki (indeed, the personnel of the Dutch East India Company were confined to Deshima, a small island just outside the city). Hence, urbanization in early modern Japan was essentially stimulated from within the country.

The process of urbanization began from a low base. The political climate of the later Ashikaga period, c. 1450 to 1600, known as the period of ‘warring states' (Sengoku), was unfavourable to the growth of cities, although regional warlords established what became known as ‘castle towns' (jokamachi) as centres of administration.^[82] However, under the successive rule of three leaders, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu (the founder of a dynasty of shoguns, or commanders, which remained in power until 1868), Japan was gradually unified and pacified.

Unity and peace were important preconditions for the growth of popula­tion and hence the growth of cities. The population of Japan was about 8 million in 1400 and about the same a century later.

Between 1550 and 1650, the amount of rice paddy doubled. The productivity of agriculture was increased by the use of fertilizers such as grasses, rapeseed and sardine meal.^[83]

Thanks to this revolution, it was possible to feed the inhabitants of Japan's growing cities. Under the Tokugawa regime, the peasants were taxed heav­ily, paying in rice. Much of this rice went to the samurai and their lords the daimyδ, who were paid stipends in kind rather than money. The samurai, who had previously lived in villages, were encouraged to move into castle towns or larger cities, bringing their servants with them. By 1700, more than 5 per cent of Japanese lived in cities of 100,000 people or more, compared to 2 per cent in Europe.^[84]

Three cities were particularly large. The first was Kyoto, which had been the capital of Japan since 794, but had suffered considerable damage during the Sengoku period, especially during the Onin war of 1467 to 1477. It was extensively rebuilt by Hideyoshi. With a population of 150,000 to 180,000 people in 1500, Kyoto grew to about 350,000 in 1600 and then remained more or less stable for the rest of the period. Hideyoshi built a castle in the second major city, Osaka, which developed into a major port and commercial centre from the early seventeenth century onwards, partly at the expense of its neighbour Sakai, which had become virtually self-governing during the wars of the sixteenth century, but declined thereafter. Osaka by contrast was subservient to the central government, the Bakufu, although there was a council of merchants for everyday administration.^[85]

By 1600, Osaka was home to about 400,000 people, many of them migrants from the Kinai region (the names of certain quarters of the city, such as Ise and Awaji, suggest that they originally housed people from those parts of the region).

These three cities were the three major nodes in an urban system or network that included the new castle town of Nagoya and also Kanazawa, the capital of the domain of one of Tokugawa Icyasu's leading allies in his struggle for power. 11 Trade flourished, and with it the merchants, the chδnin. Japan, like parts of Europe in this period, was becoming a commercial society, with commercial values memorably expressed in the Nihon eitaigura or Everlasting Storehouse of Japan (1688) by Ihara Saikaku, a collection of stories of enterprising tradesmen who went from rags to riches.

There was a kind of division of labour, or division of function, between the three major cities. Osaka, originally the headquarters of the shogun in western Japan, became the ‘merchant's capital', the economic centre of what was becoming a national market. Edo was the political centre of the new regime, while Kyoto, still the place of residence of the prestigious if power­less emperor, remained the cultural centre, with large numbers of skilled artisans who made fans, porcelain and paper, and who also wove silk.

Osaka, conveniently located at the junction of the coast and the Yodo and Yamato Rivers, became the centre for the distribution of food, which led to its being nicknamed ‘Japan's kitchen'. There was a rice market with hundreds of brokers, who converted the stipends of the daimyδ and samurai, which were paid in kind, into cash, and also offered them loans. There were also fish and vegetable markets. New canals, financed by merchants, were constructed in the early seventeenth century, in order to improve the distribution system and so encourage trade. A number of industries also developed in Osaka, among them ship-building, copper refining and sake brewing. The growth of

10 Gilbert Rozman, ‘Edo's Importance', Journal of Japanese Studies 1 (1974), 91-112; Ugawa Kaoru, James McClain and John M. Merriman (eds), Edδ and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

11 Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1973).

5.i Early modern Japan

the city encouraged the commercialization of agriculture in the area around Osaka, including the production of cotton for sale in the city. Cotton goods and sake were exported to Edo.

Edo was not only a centre of administration, but also a centre of consump­tion, assisted by the fact that the Tokugawa shoguns insisted that not only their own retainers move to the city but also that the daimyδ who ruled the provinces build houses in Edo and live there for at least part of the time (the obligation to live in the capital and send relatives to live there during one's absence was known as the system of ‘alternate attendance', or sankin kotai). As Edo grew, the food, clothing and building trades all flourished. Artisans, shopkeepers and merchants naturally followed their potential customers to the city. Rivalry between daimyδ led to increasingly conspicuous con­sumption, paid for by the mobilization of local resources and placing more pressure on the peasants (which probably encouraged some of them to migrate to cities).

This conspicuous consumption was imitated by the new rich, such as the lumber merchants who profited from the boom in construction. It is obvi­ously too simple to reduce the process of urbanization to the rise of the chδnin (as in the case of the rise of the middle class in the West), since the shoguns, daimyδ and samurai are all part of the story, but the chδnin certainly played a major role in the story of urbanization in early modernJapan. By the eighteenth century, even Edo had become a city dominated, in numbers at least, by this middle class, while Osaka had always been a chδnin city.¹²

The centralization of wealth, both old and new, in cities had important cultural consequences that may be summed up in a phrase originally coined to refer to eighteenth-century London, but applicable much more widely: the commercialization of leisure. In Japan this meant the rise of tea-houses, sumo wrestling, puppet shows and so on. Among the most visible of these conse­quences was the rise of the pleasure quarters in the three great cities: the Yoshiwara quarter in Edo, the Shimabara in Kyoto and the Shinmachi in Osaka. In these quarters, separated from the rest of the city so that they could be controlled more easily, could be found courtesans of different ranks and also actors in the kabuki theatre, another art form that originated at this time. These pleasure quarters were known as ukiyo, ‘floating world'. Originally a Buddhist term for the transience of all worldly things, the phrase acquired hedonist overtones in the seventeenth century and came to mean ‘living for the moment', particularly if that kind of living took place in the pleasure quarters of the three great cities. The ‘floating trade' was prostitution.¹³

The Genroku period (1688 to 1704) was considered, at least retrospectively, to have been the golden age of the new urban culture, expressing the values of the chδnin, although the coloured woodblock prints that evoke that world (especially the floating world) so vividly were mainly produced later in the eighteenth century. Osaka played a key role in the creation of new forms of culture: the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the storyteller Ihara Saikaku both came from that city. On the other hand, the chδnin of Edo, known as the Eddoko, helped to accommodate these new cultural forms to older, more aristocratic traditions. The women of this class, who imitated aristocratic forms of speech, helped to standardize the language.¹⁴ One might therefore speak of the urbanization of language in early modern Japan, as in Europe at this time.

The urban culture of both work and leisure was described and sometimes celebrated not only in the fiction of Saikaku and his colleagues, but also in a new genre: the urban guidebook. Some of them were written for visitors and concentrated on the sights of the city, while others listed the shops to be found in every street together with the goods that they sold.1⁵ As the rise of this genre suggests, in some respects early modern Japan was becoming a commercial society, offering high rewards to entrepreneurs. This was in spite of the country being ruled by an authoritarian regime that is sometimes described as ‘feudal', thanks to the dominance of the military class, the samurai and the decentralization of government that left the daimyδ as masters of their own houses in the provinces. At times, there were conflicts between the commercial and feudal parts of the system. In 1705, for instance, the Bakufu confiscated the wealth of a leading merchant family in Osaka, the Yodoya, in order to remind merchants to know their place (which was officially below that of peasants in the status hierarchy) and also to cancel the debts of some daimyδ to that family. On the other hand, many merchants flourished, together with an urban culture that attracted samurai as well as merchants and artisans.

The Chinese model

The story of urbanization in early modern China is not as simple as in the case of Japan. First, China was less isolated, despite attempts to close the country to foreign trade in the early sixteenth century.¹⁶ Second, it has been argued that China had not one urban system, but several, each based on a different region, the most densely urbanized region being the Lower Yangzi. Third, the narrative focuses on recovery rather than irresistible rise, and a limited recovery at that. One leading scholar in the field places this period between ‘two great macrocycles' of urban growth, the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries.¹⁷

It is the period of the Song dynasty (960 to 1276) that witnessed an urban revolution. In the twelfth century, Kaifeng, the capital, was home to about 1 million people, while Hangzhou may have reached 1.2 million, making it the largest city in the world at that time. No wonder Marco Polo was impressed by the size of Chinese cities. This urban revolution was made possible by a rising population, which in turn depended on an agricultural revolution, spread over the centuries 900 to 1200, of which the central feature was the expansion of rice production thanks to irrigation and new strains of rice that ripened more quickly, allowing several crops a year.¹⁸ The agricul­ture of the Yangzi delta was probably the most productive in the world, and an efficient system of water transport via the Yangzi and Yellow Rivers and the Grand Canal brought food to the growing cities. As a result, the popula­tion of China rose to about 120 million. The invasion of the Mongols brought these developments to a halt. Indeed, the population probably fell to half what it had been at its height, recovering slowly to reach around 80 million by the year 1400.

By 1400, a new dynasty, the Ming, was in power and a limited urban revival was in progress, assisted by the rise in the country's population. From around 80 million in 1400, it had doubled to around 160 million by 1600 and then more than doubled again, to around 350 million in 1800.¹⁹ This increase suggests that the productivity of Chinese agriculture continued to increase, thanks in part to the European discovery of the New World: maize was introduced to China by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, while the sweet potato made its way there via the Spanish colony of the Philippines.

The government encouraged the growth of some cities. At the beginning of Ming rule in 1368, Nanjing became the capital and so the administrative

1 ⁷ G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 1977), introduction, and Rozman, Urban Networks.

1 ⁸ Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973); and Mark Elvin, ‘Chinese Cities since the Sung Dynasty' in Philip Abrams and E. Anthony Wrigley (eds), Towns in Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 79-89.

1 ⁹ Patricia Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 197.

centre of China. There followed an influx of soldiers (200,000 of them, according to a contemporary source), civil servants (about 15,000) and students (8,000 to 9,000 by the end of the fourteenth century), who hoped that good results in the public examinations would launch their careers as officials. By 1400, the population of Nanjing was a little short of half a million by one estimate and around 1 million by another, which would have made it the largest city in the world at that time.^[86] In 1421, however, Nanjing lost its status as the capital and gradually declined in numbers, although it remained an important city. It recovered to some extent in the sixteenth century and became a centre of silk weaving under the Qing dynasty. In 1600, it housed more than 300,000 people, in 1800 about 220,000.

In 1421, the government moved the capital to Beijing, and the soldiers, officials and students followed, together with increasing numbers of mer­chants, shopkeepers and artisans to meet the needs of the upper classes. The imperial household (including the politically influential eunuchs) was already established there. Some industries also flourished in the capital, from iron­work to printing. When the Qing dynasty replaced the Ming in 1644, Beijing remained the capital, and there was a new influx of military men organized under the ‘banner' system, some 300,000 of them in the 1640s, a number that had doubled by the 1720s.^[87] With a population of about 320,000 in 1400, Beijing grew to about 700,000 in 1600 and ι,100,000 in 1800, making it the largest city in the world at that time, even if it was soon to be surpassed by London. The topography of Beijing resembled an onion, with an Outer City, an Inner City and an Imperial City within which the Forbidden City or imperial palace was to be found.

The capital city, whichever it was, was far from being the only important city in China. If the growth of Nanjing and Beijing was driven by politics, the expansion of other cities was driven by trade in an age of commercial­ization - not only trade in necessities, but also in luxuries and luxury substitutes. Hangzhou, for instance, remained important and continued to grow throughout the period, from 250,000 or 325,000 in 1400 to half a million in 1800, on the eve of the second great period of urban expansion. It was famous for the tea trade, but also for the market in rice, salt and cotton and the luxury trade in textiles. Thanks to the water transport system,

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Kaifeng some ways, the pattern of European urbanization resembles that of China. For one thing, it is probably more illuminating to think in terms of several urban systems than of one alone - indeed, given the political fragmentation of the continent, polycentrism is still more obvious in the case of Europe. Again, as in China, the largest cities were smaller in 1400 than they had been in 1300. In Europe, the decline was a result of the bubonic plague, known as the ‘Black Death', in which a third of the population had died in 1348 to 1349. Between 1400 and 1500, the population of some major cities declined still further. Paris went from 275,000 to 225,000; Bruges, which was losing trade to Antwerp, from 125,000 to 90,000; Granada, following the expulsion of Muslims and Jews, from 100,000 to 70,000. In 1500, there were only three or four European cities with a population over 100,000: Paris, Venice, Naples and possibly Milan (leaving aside Istanbul and Edirne, which will be dis­cussed in the following section).^[94]

However, the three or four cities of 100,000 people in 1500 had become twelve 100 years later, with the addition (among others) of Lisbon, Seville, London, Rome and Moscow. This number remained more or less constant in the seventeenth century, when the population of Europe was fairly stable, but between 1700 and 1800 it rose from twelve to twenty-two cities, led by London and followed by Paris, Naples, Moscow, Lisbon, Vienna, St Peters­burg and Amsterdam. This growth was made possible by a revolution in farming that made agriculture more productive. Conversely, the urban demand for food stimulated the development of commercial agriculture, especially in regions surrounding cities. Cities of 100,000 or more were becoming more important in the sense of accounting for an increasing percentage of the urban population, from 16 per cent in 1600 to 22.5 per cent in 1800. The bigger fish were eating up the smaller ones.

The rapid rise of a few European cities is reminiscent of the Japanese model, especially the rise of Edo. Madrid, for instance, was a small town in 1561, when King Philip II moved the court there. It doubled in size in the twenty years from 1597 to 1617, and by 1700 it was home to some 110,000 people, slowly increasing to 123,000 by 1750 and 169,000 in 1800.^[95] London (which might be described as an Edo, Osaka and Kyoto rolled into one, far larger than its provincial rivals) doubled in size between 1600 and 1650, rising from 200,000 to 400,000 inhabitants. St Petersburg more than doubled between 1750 and 1800, from 100,000 to 238,000 people.

Like Madrid, Paris, Naples, London, Vienna and St Petersburg all grew because they were the capitals of states, Peter the Great having transferred the capital from Moscow to St Petersburg just as Philip had transferred his capital from Valladolid to Madrid. The social structure of the population of these capital cities is what might have been expected from their political functions. In 1789, a quarter of the population of St Petersburg was military. As for civil servants, there were some 3,000 of them, excluding clerks, in Vienna in 1782, while in St Petersburg numbers had climbed by 1833 to 10,000 officials and 23,000 clerks.^[96]

As in the case of Edo and Beijing, European capitals were centres of conspicuous consumption by an elite that was increasingly drawn to the court. The population of these cities therefore included unusually high proportions of servants and tailors. In Rome in 1526, ‘tailor' was the most common single occupation and accounted for 8 per cent of the work force, a proportion matched by Valladolid before the court moved to Madrid. Lawyers too made up a surprising large proportion of the population of capitals. The contemporary estimate that 30,000 people made their living from the law in seventeenth-century Naples must be an exaggeration, but there is hard evidence that lawyers accounted for over 7 per cent of the active population of Valladolid in 1570.^[97]

Other European cities grew for economic reasons. Seville, for instance, was a boom town in the sixteenth century because it was the port through

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5.3 Europe in 1700

which the silver mined in Mexico and Peru reached Spain. By 1600, its population was about 144,000, declining together with the Spanish economy in the seventeenth century.^[98] Amsterdam was another success story, growing in part at the expense of Antwerp, which had itself grown at the expense of Bruges. It prospered first on the basis of trade with the Baltic region, and later with the East and West Indies. Amsterdam was fourth in the sequence of early modern cities identified by Fernand Braudel as the centres of world economies, following Venice, Antwerp and Genoa. Its great age of expansion was the seventeenth century: the city had about 90,000 inhabitants in 1620, but 200,000 in 1680. It was no larger in 1800, since the Dutch Republic had gone into economic decline and it was now the turn of London to be a centre of trade.^[99]

Industry, in the sense of the crafts, was less important than trade as an engine of urban growth. Leading craft-industrial or proto-industrial cities such as Florence, Segovia, Leiden and Amiens, all centres of cloth making; Lyon, a centre of silk weaving; and Leipzig, a centre of printing, all remained below the 100,000 level for most of the period before 1800. Printing was a relatively important industry in Venice in the sixteenth century, in Amster­dam in the seventeenth century and in London in the eighteenth century, as it was in seventeenth-century Osaka, but it contributed much less than international trade to the growth of these cities. As far as size was concerned, the producer city lagged behind the consumer city.

Migration to cities is better documented in the case of Europe than that of East Asia, but it appears to have followed the usual pattern of chains. In sixteenth-century Venice, the Greeks tended to live in the parish known as ‘San Giorgio dei Greci' and the Slavs along the Riva degli Schiavoni. In eighteenth-century Paris, certain streets were dominated by migrants from particular regions, the Rue Mouffetard by Auvergnats, for instance. In the case of Paris, contracts of apprenticeship reveal cases of immigrants with relatives already established in the city who guaranteed their good behaviour. In Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, 73 per cent of newly-weds and 33 per cent of the city's population were immigrants. As usual, migrants were more often young than old and more often male than female. Unlike anthropologists or sociologists, historians of early modern Europe cannot ask immigrants what brought them to the city, but there is some evidence to illustrate both rural ‘push' and urban ‘pull'. That hunger was an important push factor becomes clear when we consider the chron­ology and the geography of migration, which was most intense in times of famine and from the relatively infertile areas of heath and mountain.

As for urban pull, it may be summed up in the famous German phrase ‘Town air makes you free' (Stadtluft macht frei). The phrase originally referred to freedom from serfdom, but it may be expanded to include freedom from parental control and, following the Reformation, religious freedom as well, especially in Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam. As in China, certain institutions helped immigrants to adjust to the alien environment of the city and to maintain connections with their region of origin. In Rome, for example, the French immigrants attended the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the Spaniards that of San Giacomo degli Spagnuoli, and the Floren­tines that of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini.

The city was also the promised land of social mobility. That it was perceived as such is shown by the story of Dick Whittington, the poor country boy who became Lord Mayor of London, a story that circulated widely in seventeenth-century England and ended in one version with this verse: ‘And you poor country boys/Though born of low degree/See by Gods Providence/What you in time may be.' Hence cities such as Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and London attracted talented people, provided spaces in which they could meet and thus became centres of innovation. The concen­tration of institutions such as libraries, universities and learned academies in a few cities turned them into centres of knowledge.

As in the case of both Japan and China, the growth of cities led to the commercialization of leisure - the rise of the theatres for instance. Plays had long been performed by travelling actors, but as cities grew, it was possible for actors to remain in the same place and still perform for a different audience every night, whether in the courtyard of inns, as in Madrid, or in purpose-built theatres such as Shakespeare's Globe in London. The new genre of opera moved from the court to the city: the first opera house, catering to anyone who could buy a ticket, opened in Venice in 1637. Something like the Japanese ‘floating world' developed in European cities, even if the pleasure quarters were not formally segregated. Actors and courtesans shared the same spaces in the city, such as Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London. As in China, booksellers had their own quarters, such as St Paul's Churchyard in London or the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. The growth of cities also encouraged the development of an art market (as opposed to the patronage system), first in Bruges and Antwerp and later in Amsterdam, Venice, Rome, Paris and London.

Just as Chinese and Japanese cities had their tea-houses, so European cities such as Venice, Vienna, Paris and London had their coffee-houses from the late seventeenth century onwards, which functioned as so many centres of sociability, conversation and the exchange of information. Urbanization, including regular encounters between individuals from different regions, encouraged the standardization of languages, spoken as well as written. As in ancient Greece and Rome, early modern European cities were often represented as the sites of ‘civilization', ‘urbanity' and ‘politeness', words derived from classical terms for ‘city'. Immigration helped cities to spread their values more widely: it has been calculated that one-sixth of the popula­tion of seventeenth-century England had direct experience of London life.^[100]

The Middle East and India

A number of major cities could be found in other parts of the world at this time, especially in the Middle East and India. In 1400, the largest of these was probably Cairo, with a population that reached at least 150,000 and might have been as high as 450,000.^[101] The population of Vijayanagara, the capital of an empire in south India, might have been as high as 350,000, followed by Tabriz with about 200,000 people and Damascus and Baghdad with about 100,000 each.

Constantinople, still the capital of the Byzantine Empire, was declining in numbers at this time as the Ottoman Turks advanced towards it. In 1453, when the sultan Mehmed I conquered the city, Istanbul, as it would be known henceforth, was probably home to 50,000 people. Then the city rose again, thanks in part to emigration by order of the sultan, from the Caucasus, Syria, Serbia and elsewhere. New quarters of the city were given the names of regions such as Aksaray and Balat, suggesting that, once again, chain migration took place. By 1500, Istanbul had a population of 200,000 and by 1700, 700,000, a number which then gradually declined.^[102]

The rise of cities in the Middle East and India in the early modern period seems to have happened for political rather than economic reasons. This is not to say that commerce and crafts were unimportant: Cairo, for instance, was a centre of the international trade in pepper and coffee, as well as crafts such as weaving (cotton and silk) and leather-working. Istanbul was home to more than a thousand guilds, as well as to groups of foreign merchants, Italians and Greeks in particular. Surat, the population of which may have reached 200,000 by 1700, was a major port.

However, the cities that grew most in these parts of the world were the capitals of states: not only Istanbul, but also Isfahan, capital of the empire of the Safavids (said to have reached the 600,000 mark in 1700) and Agra, periodically the capital of the Mughal Empire (500,000 in 1600). When Shah Jahan transferred his capital in 1648 from Agra to Shahjahanabad (better known as Delhi), the former city declined and the latter rose, to reach around 500,000 people by 1700. In 1757, the English soldier Robert Clive called the capital of Bengal, Murshidabad, ‘as extensive, populous and rich as the City of London'.^[103]

The Frenchman Frangois Bernier, who lived in Delhi in the 1660s, remarked on the absence of merchants (‘the middle state') and considered the place a collection of villages rather than a true city. He could hardly have said the same thing about Istanbul or Isfahan, with their huge bazaars in the centre of the city. In Isfahan, the royal square or Maidan impressed a traveller from Rome, Pietro della Valle, as being grander than the Piazza Navona. Tea-houses, coffee-houses, taverns and brothels were to be found in this area, together with jugglers and acrobats - in other words, a kind of floating world (in Istanbul, this world was located in the district of Galata).^[104]

Cities with a population of 100,000 or more could also be found in other parts of the early modern world, though relatively little is known about them. In 1400, for instance, Samarqand, Angkor and Seoul had around 100,000 people each. In the New World, when Hernan Cortes reached the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1519, it was home to 300,000 or even half a million people. It may have been the greatest city in the world at that time, though it was probably surpassed by Beijing. Cuzco, the Inca capital, was a city of about 100,000 people when Pizarro arrived. In North America, the largest cities in 1800 were New York, with 60,000 inhabitants, and Boston, with 25,000.^[105]

In Africa south of the Sahara, although the tradition of Yoruba urban culture goes back to this period, cities tended to be small. Among the largest were Elmina, a port on the Gold Coast (15,000 to 20,000 in the 1620s), Great Accra (20,000 in 1700) and the slave-trading city of Abomey (24,000 in 1800). An African ‘urban revolution' did not occur until the nineteenth century.^[106]

The colonial city

The economic and political expansion of Europe into other parts of the world in the early modern period led to the rise of another type of city: the colonial city, established either to control the region or to manage the unequal trade between colony and metropolis.^[107] Hence colonial cities have sometimes been viewed as outposts of the metropolis that were alien to the local environments. However, it is surely more realistic to regard them as hybrid cities, facing both ways, outwards towards the distant metropolis and inwards towards their own hinterland. The physical structure of these cities revealed their dual function. Manila, for instance, was divided into a section for the Spaniards and another section for the Chinese. Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) were divided into the so-called ‘white' towns, inhabited by Europeans, and the ‘black' towns inhabited by every­one else.^[108] In Mexico City, the Spaniards and their descendants generally lived in the centre and the Indians on the periphery. Despite these attempts at segregation, however, these cities revealed both cultural and social mixing.

Most colonial cities were ports.^[109] In order of size they were led by Madras, a former fishing village that had grown to a city of 300,000 people by 1800. Then came Bombay (Mumbai), another former fishing village, and also Calcutta, with 200,000 people apiece by the end of the eighteenth century. There followed Havana and Batavia, with almost 100,000 each at this time, and Manila, with 75,000. Earlier in the early modern period, leading Asian ports that might be described as ‘semi-colonial cities' (in which European merchants were present but not yet dominant) included Goa, with 75,000 inhabitants in 1630 and Macao, with the same number in 1700; still more complex was the case of Surat, a multicultural city under Mughal rule until about 1760 with a prosperous merchant community, the banias, who acted as brokers for the Portuguese, Dutch, French and British, as well as pursuing their own interests.^[110]

Two major colonial cities were not ports. One was Mexico City, the capital of the viceroyalty of New Spain, built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. It was home to 110,000 people in 1750, in a region undergoing a slow recovery after the demographic disaster that followed the arrival of the Spaniards and the consequent transmission of the diseases of the Old World to the New. The other was Potosi in the viceroyalty of Peru, which has been described as ‘boom town supreme', based on the extraction of silver from the nearby mountain. The city reached a peak of 160,000 people around the year 1650, making it by far the largest city in early modern South America, followed by Salvador (50,000 or more in 1800), Rio de Janeiro (43,000 in 1800) and Lima (30,000 in 1650).^[111]

Conditions in colonial cities varied with the colonial power (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French or British), the presence or absence of an urban tradition, the proportion of resident Europeans and so on. What these cities had in common, and what made them different from other cities, was the importance of race. Some European cities were also home to different ethnic groups, as we have seen, but the cultural and physical contrasts between the Chinese, Javanese, Gujaratis, Tamils, Amerindians and West Africans who lived together in some colonial cities were much greater. Intermarriage, or more often interbreeding, took place, producing mestizos and mulattos who occupied the middle places in a social hierarchy based on colour, sometimes described as a ‘pigmentocracy'.

The concern with colour on the part of the inhabitants of colonial cities is revealed, in the case of Spanish America, by the so-called casta paintings, representing the offspring of a Spaniard with an Amerindian, Spaniard with an African, Amerindian with African and so on and by the elaborate vocabu­lary that developed to describe differences in colour or descent (pardos, zambos and so on). The same preoccupation is revealed by insults traded in the street and recorded in judicial archives, such as this from Mexico: ‘Look out you dog, you are a mulatto and I am very much Spanish [Mira perro que eres un mulato y yo soy muy espanol].'4⁶

Comparisons and conclusions

Let us begin with common features. In all regions, cities were both ‘agents' and ‘patients'; in other words, they were affected by change, but they contributed to further change in their turn. Cities have often been described as engines of change, but the engine needed fuel. The city needed immi­grants, but they could only come if the productivity of rural labour increased, thus freeing some people to migrate. In any case, the increasing numbers of city dwellers needed to be fed. Hence an agricultural revolution, most visible in China and Europe, was a precondition for an urban revolution. Con­versely, the rise of cities encouraged the commercialization of agriculture in their hinterlands, and also rural ‘proto-industrialization' - in other words, the rise of rural crafts such as spinning and weaving for an urban market.^{[112] [113]}

In all regions, some cities were ‘market-oriented', growing for essentially economic reasons, while others, the capitals in particular, were ‘coercion- oriented' or ‘state-oriented' and grew for essentially political reasons, such as the unification of the country (Japan, India, Spain) or the centralization of power (France). The rise of cities was associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie (including the chδnin and the banias). The concept of the rise of the middle class has often been criticized. All the same, it remains virtually indispensable, and is particularly useful when distinctions are drawn between kinds of bourgeoisie (officials and lawyers as well as merchants) and also between kinds of rise (in numbers, for instance, or in wealth and power).

These rises were part of the commercialization of society and especially of leisure, increasingly visible in various parts of the early modern world in the period. As cities grew, they became more effective as centres of information, communication, calculation and innovation. Commercialization went hand in hand with occupational specialization, which was at once possible, because of the concentration of people, and necessary, to survive in a competitive world. In Amsterdam, for instance, painters distinguished themselves from their rivals by specializing in a single genre such as townscapes, group portraits or flower pieces.

Moving to differences, distinctions between economic centres or producer cities and political capitals or consumer cities are obviously necessary.^[114] So are distinctions between macro-regions, more or less unified (Japan more, Europe less). There were also some differences in the way in which growth occurred. In China, the Ottoman Empire and also in colonial cities that depended on slavery, there was compulsory immigration. In Europe, by contrast, governments (in Britain, France, Spain and Piedmont) intervened to forbid immigration to some cities, though without success. The major exception to the rule was Louis XIV's Versailles, where the leading nobles were expected to make their appearance - an informal version of the sankin kotai system in force at Edo, with similar consequences for conspicuous consumption.

A final comparison and contrast concerns periodization. Compared with the years before 1400, there was a dramatic increase in the flows of people, goods and information in the early modern period, with major cities as nodes in communication networks: European cities such as Venice and Amsterdam, and colonial cities such as Mexico and Goa.^[115]

As for comparisons and contrasts between the early modern and late modern periods, they are sometimes expressed as one of two extremes. One extreme view sees cities that developed after 1800 - the industrial city, the late colonial city, the ‘global city' and the ‘informational city' - as completely different from their predecessors. The opposite extreme argues that the changes that took place after 1800 were not really important, and that cities that developed after 1800 were largely the same as those that grew up earlier.

A better view would avoid these extremes. Modern cities have indeed come to depend on a series of new forms of communication: the railways, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the radio, the Internet... All the same, as we have seen, certain cities already performed important functions, both economic and political, in the early modern ‘world system'.

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Gender and sexuality

MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS

Gender is a very old conceptual category, but a relatively new framework for historical analysis. All human societies had (and have) gender systems, in which there were two primary genders defined in relation to one another into which most people were categorized at birth, along with additional gender categories in many societies. These additional categories were some­times based on ambiguous genitalia, castration or other physical circum­stances, but more commonly they were based on social or cultural roles that individuals adopted as they matured, and could change across the lifespan. Thus, gender is a culturally constructed system of differences based to some degree on physical, morphological and anatomical features—what are often called “biological differences”—but the relationship between biology and culture is not unidirectional. Children born with ambiguous external sexual and reproductive anatomy—now generally termed “intersexed”—have gen­erally not been assigned to a third gender, but categorized “male” or “female” at birth, and assigned to the sex they most closely resembled, an assignment sometimes reinforced by surgical procedures. Dichotomous cul­tural norms about gender (that everyone should be a man or a woman) could thus determine “biological” sex, as well as the other way around.

Despite the presence of additional gender categories, and other factors that suggest gender is fluid and malleable, the dualistic male/female gender system has been extremely powerful. It has been associated with other dichotomies, such as body/spirit, public/private, nature/culture, light/dark, up/down, outside/inside and sun/moon. Some of these dichotomies are naturally occurring and in many places viewed as divinely created, which has enabled people to view the male/female dichotomy also as natural or divinely ordained. Most of these dichotomies, including gender, have been viewed as a hierarchy, with the male linked with the stronger and more positive element in other pairs (public, culture, light, sun, etc.) and the female with the weaker and more negative one (private, nature, dark, moon, etc.). This gender hierarchy is highly variable in its intensity and manifest­ations, but it is found in every human group that left written records, and most that did not. Hierarchies in other realms of life were often expressed in terms of gender, with dominant individuals or groups described in masculine terms and dependent ones in feminine. These ideas in turn affected the way people acted, though explicit and symbolic ideas of gender could also conflict with the way people chose or were forced to operate in the world.

Because of this hierarchy, the vast majority of people who obtained a formal education or held positions as official recorders and transmitters of history and tradition until the middle of the twentieth century were men. Those men often commented about women, and engaged in what we would now term “gender analysis,” which generally meant explaining why women were inferior. But the histories that they wrote, that is, narratives about what happened and why, focused on men's actions and viewed the male experi­ence as universal; when women appeared in their histories, they were exceptions that usually brought disaster. That emphasis on men's actions was further enhanced in the nineteenth century, when the male scholars at universities first in Germany and then elsewhere who were creating the professional discipline of history decided that the proper focus of all real history was political and military, that the proper unit of study was the nation-state, and that only men had the rational capacity to do professional history.

The women's rights movements, along with other factors, changed this situation. The first wave of feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created improved opportunities for women to obtain higher edu­cation and to write histories, some of which focused on women. The second- wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in an explosive growth in women's history, as advocates of women's rights in the present turned their attention to the past, discovered rich sources that had been lost or neglected, and mined familiar sources in new ways, finding women everywhere. Historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and by the early 1980s to use the word “gender” to describe these culturally constructed, historically changing and often unstable systems of difference. They asserted that gender is an appropriate category of analysis when looking at all historical developments, not simply those involving women or the family. Gender is a lens through which all of history can be examined, they argued, as well as a topic of inquiry. It should be analyzed in conjunction with other categories of identity, including economic status, nationality, religion and so on, a method for which the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectional.”¹

Sexuality is also a relatively new category of historical study, inspired in part by the gay liberation movement that began in the 1970s. Historians and scholars in other disciplines debated the extent to which sexual desire and sexual relations were “biological” or were socially constructed, and how that construction had changed over time. They asked, for example, whether sexual relations in most societies were simply acts that people engaged in, or whether people might have had some sort of “sexual identity” even before that concept was articulated in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1990s, queer theory challenged the assumption that certain sexual attitudes and practices are “natural” and unchanging, and viewed the entire idea of an identity—sexual, gender, racial or other—as oppressive. One should go beyond intersectionality, argued queer theorists, and celebrate hybridity, performance and boundary crossing, for which they found examples in the past from both new and familiar sources, just as women's historians had found women's actions and ideas.

Scholars of the period from 1400 to 1800 have been at the forefront of all of these developments: women's history, gender history, the history of sexual­ity and queer theory. Women's history of this period, as of most periods, began by asking what women contributed to the developments traditionally viewed as central, in a search for what Natalie Zemon Davis termed “women worthies.”^{[116] [117]} The earliest history of sexuality was also somewhat hagiographic, what later historians sarcastically labeled the search for “great gays of the past.” Most research focused initially on Western Europe: How were women involved in the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment? Who were the great women artists/musicians/scientists/rulers? Which great male artists/musicians/sci- entists/rulers were gay? What was women's role in political movements and economic transformations, and how did these affect women? How did intellectual and cultural changes shape attitudes towards homosexuality and the treatment of those who engaged in same-sex relationships? Studies that addressed these questions were generally narrative, and may now seem to be under-theorized and either overly celebratory or overly pessimistic because they often highlighted agency or oppression. It is important to remember, however, that in the 1970s and 1980s, the simple statements that women did preach, paint, work, compose, protest and engage in other forms of public activity, or that some of the men who engaged in these actions were sexually attracted to other men, were quite novel and sometimes threatening to those who had a more traditional view of what history was.

The Renaissance historian Joan Kelly's straightforward yet provocative question “Did women have a Renaissance?” led to broader questioning of historical periodization, as well as decades of intensive historical and literary research on the Renaissance itself, as people attempted to confirm, refute, modify or nuance her answer that no, women did not, or at least not during the Renaissance.^[118] Various golden ages, dark ages, high points and declines in many places and eras were reassessed, as historians challenged periodization for women's history drawn rather unreflectively from men's, just as world historians challenged periodization drawn solely from Euro­pean history. Such questioning has extended to the term “early modern,” which was first widely adopted by economic and social historians of Europe in the 1970s.^[119] As Sanjay Subrahmanyam notes in the “Introduction” to this volume, and as many other historians of places outside of Europe have also commented, both “modern” and “early modern” are problematic. Reflect­ing sentiments that are widely shared, the historians of Southeast Asia Leonard and Barbara Andaya comment, “especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal... the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a ‘modern Europe' against a ‘yet-to- be modernized' non-Europe.”^[120] From the perspective of women's history, the historian of medieval Europe Judith Bennett has also questioned the validity of a medieval/modern divide, challenging, in Bennett's words, “the assumption of a dramatic change in women's lives between 1300 and 1700.”^[121]

She has recently broadened her focus and called for an emphasis on continuities in all of women's history, and on what she terms the “patri­archal equilibrium” across all periods, not simply across “the great divide” of 1500.^[122]

Bennett's advice not to forget continuities is well taken, as the hierarch­ical gender system has survived every change, from the Neolithic to now: every revolution, whether French, Haitian, Russian, Scientific or Industrial, every war, religious transformation, technological development and cul­tural encounter. Notions about the proper roles for men and women created in Confucian thought, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and other religious traditions and discussed in previous volumes of this Cambridge World History continued throughout the period covered in this volume. Institutions of higher learning continued to be for boys and men only. Gender divisions of labor that began with the development of agriculture continued, with tasks normally assigned to women generally not valued as highly as tasks normally assigned to men, and if they were paid, not paid as much. Women continued to have less access to land, cash, trade goods or other types of wealth than did the men of their family or social group. Most states of the world continued to be under the authority of hereditary rulers; women inherited the crown in some states when male heirs were lacking, and in others held great power because of their position as mother or wife to a male ruler, but the preference was always for a male ruler. But gender was also a dynamic category in this period. Every development discussed in the other chapters in this volume, including warfare, trade, migration, the slave trade and industrialization, brought change to people's lives as women and as men, and was itself shaped by gender.^[123] Among the gender structures that changed were many that related to sexuality, such as marriage, divorce and illegitimacy. This chapter will focus on three topics that each involved both gender and sexuality: migration, intermarriage and the cross-cultural blending that resulted from these; third- and transgen­ders; and religious transformations.

Migration, intermarriage and cross-cultural blending

The contacts between cultures before 1400 that changed gender structures had often been carried out through the transmission of ideas and construc­tion of institutions by individuals or small groups of people; the spread of Buddhism and Islam are both examples of this. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, however, contacts often involved the movement of large numbers of people over vast distances. These brought groups that were different from one another in language, religion, ethnicity, culture and traditions together, which despite widely held norms prescribing group endogamy, resulted in sexual relationships, particularly because the gender balance between men and women among migrants was never equal. In settings of conquest and colonization, sexual relations between members of different groups frequently involved violence or coercion, but relationships sanctioned by authorities or by community norms were also common, as they were in port-cities and others centers of trade. These included mar­riage, concubinage, long-term unions in which a couple and their children formed a household but did not officially marry, temporary marriages in which it was understood that the man would at some point return home and various other sorts of unions. All marriages and marriage-like relation­ships involved issues of power and authority, both within the relationship and in relations beyond it, but those that brought these into sharpest relief were those that crossed some sort of boundary between groups, and in many parts of the world these became a matter of political and sometimes religious policy.

The Manchu Qing emperors who conquered China in the seventeenth century initially encouraged marriage between Manchu men and Han Chi­nese women as a way of blending the two cultures, but in 1655 reversed course and forbade these unions. They enforced this by requiring Manchu soldiers, known as bannermen, to live in separate walled quarters of Chinese cities. There were very few marriages, although Manchu bannermen did buy Han Chinese women as concubines and servants.

In the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns first hoped to avoid such relationships by keeping groups—Europeans, Africans and indigenous peoples—apart. The fact that the vast majority of European and African immigrants were men made this impossible, however, and authorities quickly gave up. A mestizo culture emerged in which not only ethnicity, but religions, family patterns, cultural traditions and languages blended. French authorities, and those of the Dutch and British East India Companies, initially encouraged sexual relations and even marriage between European men and indigenous women as a means of making alliances, cementing their power and spreading Christianity. In the Dutch East Indies, soldiers, mer­chants and minor officials married local women, as did fur-traders in French North America. Women acted as intermediaries between local and foreign cultures, sometimes gaining great advantages for themselves and their chil­dren through their contact with dominant foreigners, though also sometimes suffering greatly as their contact with foreigners began when they were sold or given as gifts by their families, or taken forcibly.^[124] Attitudes towards mixed marriages began to change as more European women moved to the colonies, however, and as it became clear that cultural transformation often went in the direction opposite to that favored by missionaries and officials, with Euro­pean men “going native” instead of local women becoming French or Dutch.

In settler colonies such as those in British North America, immigrants often came in family groups, and there were many more women; this plus a high birth rate meant the main story of native-immigrant relations was one of European appropriation of native lands, not the formation of blended families. In the southern colonies of North America, increasing numbers of immigrants were enslaved Africans. Laws were passed in all the southern colonies and some of the northern ones prohibiting marriage or other sexual relationships between whites and “negroes, mullatoes, or Indians,” and also decreeing that all children born from enslaved women would be slaves. Only in New England were marriages between slaves legally recognized, and family groups were routinely broken up through sales. Laws regarding intermarriage were usually framed in gender-neutral language, but what lawmakers were most worried about was, as the preamble to a Virginia law of 1691 states: “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women” and the resultant “abominable mixture and spurious issue.”^[125] The concern about “issue”—that is, children—was picked up by Thomas Jefferson, who commented: “Were our state a pure democracy... there would still be excluded from our deliberations... women, who to prevent deprivation of morals and ambiguity of issue, should not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men.”¹¹

In the colonial world, attitudes towards sexual relations between certain types of individuals, and the policies and practices that resulted from those attitudes, were shaped by notions of difference that were increasingly described as “race,” a category that came to be regarded as inherited through the blood, so that the children of parents from different cultures were regarded as “mixed-blood.” As many studies (and the quotations above) make clear, race is a gendered category, and so is mixed-blood.1^{[126] [127]} In eighteenth-century Saint Domingue, for example, mixed-race men were thought to be foppish and beardless, while mixed-race women, according to one European visitor, “combine the explosiveness of saltpeter with an exuberance of desire, which, scorning all, drives them to pursue, acquire and devour pleasure.”^{[128] [129]} Critiques of the masculinity of men in other parts of the world were common features in European colonial discourse, but this visitor's view was also shaped by the fact that the mixed-race men of Saint Domingue were generally half French. In the eighteenth century, men in other parts of Europe, especially Britain, worried about the effects of French culture on the masculinity of their own area, particularly among well-to-do gentlemen. In Britain, such concerns led to the creation of a distinctly British version of the gentleman, who dressed in a more subdued way, rarely showed his emotions, and spoke little.1⁴ Such constructions of national masculinities were accompanied by a disparagement of the masculinity of other nations, which was generally seen as praiseworthy only if it was similar to one's own.

The migration of large numbers of men had an influence on gender structures in the areas that they left as well as those to which they went. Two-thirds of the slaves carried across the Atlantic from Africa were male, with female slaves more likely to become part of the trans-Saharan trade or stay in West Africa. This reinforced polygyny, because enslaved women could join households as secondary wives, thus increasing the wealth and power of their owner/husbands through their work and children.¹⁵ They were often favored as wives over free women as they were far from their birth families who could thus not interfere in a husband's decisions. In parts of Europe, male migration also contributed to a gender imbalance among certain social groups. Because Christianity and Judaism did not allow poly­gyny, solutions were more difficult than in Africa. Male migration may have contributed to the entry of more women into convents in Catholic areas, or to dowries reaching the stratospheric heights they did for wealthy families in Italian cities, which itself led to more women being sent to convents. In Protestant areas, male migration reinforced an existing pattern of late mar­riage and large numbers of women who remained single and had to support themselves through their own work. How they did this can be seen in the English word that in the seventeenth century came to describe both a woman's marital status and her occupation: spinster.

Marriage with immigrants in the early modern period often built on earlier patterns. In West Africa, for example, Mandinka traders from the Mali Empire had moved into the area of Upper Guinea south of the Gambia River beginning in the thirteenth century; they married local women, par­ticularly among the Kassanke lineage who lived along the Casamance River, and the two groups accommodated to one another. The Kassanke adopted the Mandinka language, ritual practices and agricultural techniques, while the Mandinka often adopted Kassanke matrilineality and practices of lineage formation.¹⁶ Thus, when Portuguese traders arrived in the area in the fifteenth century, they encountered people who were already used to forming marriage alliances with outside traders. Many of those Portuguese traders were New Christians—converts from Judaism—who were them­selves already familiar with adopting new practices to fit in with a dominant culture, because that is just what they had done in Portugal. The pattern of

1 ⁵ Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

1 ⁶ Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). intermarriage and cultural accommodation continued, eventually creating Crioulo, the mixture of Portuguese and African languages that became common in the South Atlantic, and a broader “creolized” culture of mixture and syncretism that included the creation of new religions.

In the patrilineal societies of West Africa, such as the Wolof, Portuguese men and their mixed-race children were not allowed to marry local people of free standing, as this could give them claims to land use; their children could not inherit or join the kin and age-grade associations that shaped political power structures. Mixed-race sons generally continued in the trading occupation of their fathers, and in some places women became the major traders, with large households, extensive networks of trade, and many servants and slaves. Because these wealthy female traders—termed nharas in Crioulo and signares in French—had connections with both the African and European worlds, they were valued as both trade and marriage partners by the French and English traders who moved into this area in the eighteenth century. “Some of these women were married in church,” reported one French commentator, “others in the style of the land, which in general consists of the consent of both parties and the relatives.”¹⁷ In the latter form of marriage, the women's European husbands paid bridewealth to their new in-laws (instead of receiving a dowry as was the custom in Europe), provided a large feast and were expected to be sexually faithful. If the husband returned to Europe, the signare was free to marry again.

Short-distance migration and religious conversion also led to marriages between spouses from different groups. In Europe, religious leaders uni­formly opposed marriage across religious lines, but such mixed marriages occurred regularly after the Reformation, particularly in areas where Cath­olics and different types of Protestants lived in close proximity to one another, such as the territories within the Holy Roman Empire that were officially bi-confessional, or cities in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe that saw a great deal of trade and immigration.¹⁸

1 ⁷ Quoted in George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 214. Other studies that also examine gender in the early modern Afro-Portuguese Atlantic include: James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnation­alism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble (Princeton University Press, 2005).

1 ⁸ See Dagmar Friest, “Crossing Religious Borders: The Experience of Religious Difference and Its Impact on Mixed Marriages in Eighteenth-century Germany” and Bertrand Forclaz, “The Emergence of Confessional Identities: Family Relationships and Religious Coexistence in Seventeenth-century Utrecht” in Simon Dixon, Dagmar Friest and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 203-66. In Wilno (Vilnius), for example, the second capital of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were five kinds of Christians—Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox and Uniates—among its 20,000 inhabitants, plus Jews and Tatar Muslims. Marriages in which a Christian spouse married a Jewish or Muslim one were very rare, and always involved the conversion of the non-Christian, but those involving various types of Christians were common enough to occasion little comment. They occurred especially among the city's mercantile and governing elite, who also interacted in their neighbor­hoods and business networks, finding co-existence and toleration preferable to confessional rigidity.¹⁹ Quantifying mixed marriages is difficult, but in a few parts of Europe as much as 10 percent of marriages may have been religiously mixed. Clergy of all denominations denounced such marriages, and yet they still performed mixed weddings, reasoning that the risk to their church by not doing so was greater than that posed by performing the wedding, for spouses wed in their own confession were less likely to convert later.

In the Muslim world, members of Sufi tariqa brotherhoods, who were or claimed to be blood descendents of the Prophet Muhammad's family, intermarried with local women as they spread Islam from West Africa to the Philippines. Their heirs and successors (who could be very numerous given Islam's acceptance of multiple marriages) established lineages that blended Muslim and local claims to power and authority, which were further expanded when the descendent of an important Sufi traveled to a new area, gained further converts and patrons, and himself married local women.²⁰

Whether they brought together French men and Native American women in North America, Portuguese men and Wolof women in West Africa, Catholic men and Calvinist women in Poland-Lithuania, or Arab Sufis and Uyghur women in Central Asia, mixed marriages opened possibilities for cultural exchange and mixture, just as they created children who embodied that very mixture. They facilitated cultural hybridity in many parts of the increasingly interconnected early modern world.²¹

19

20

21

David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 211.

For more on this, see the chapter in this volume by Nile Green on Islam in the early modern world.

See many of the essays in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005) and Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008); and also Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex,

Third- and transgenders

Migration not only brought men and women from different groups together, but also introduced explorers, soldiers, settlers and officials to individuals who were understood in their own societies to be a third or fourth gender. The best known of these were found among several Native American peoples, and the Europeans who first encountered them regarded them as homosexuals and called them “berdaches,” from an Arabic word for male prostitute. Today, many Native Americans regard the word “berdache” as derogatory, and use either the word for this gender category from their own language, or “two-spirit people,” a phrase coined by Native queer activists in the 1990s. They note that although Europeans focused on their sexuality, two-spirit people were generally distinguished from others by their work or religious roles, as well as their sexual activities. They often had special ceremonial roles because they were regarded as having both a male and female spirit rather than the one spirit that most people had, and could mediate between both the male and female world and the divine and human world. The difference was thus one of gender rather than sexuality. Some of these individuals may have been intersexed, but more commonly they were morphologically male or female but understood to be something else—a third and fourth gender, or transcending gender completely. Male-bodied two-spirits were found among more groups than female-bodied two-spirits. Spanish conquistadors and missionaries encountered them in Mesoamerica, Florida, and the Andes, and French traders and missionaries in the western Great Lakes.

Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Magal M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003); Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-century North America (Oxford University Press, 2004); Thomas N. Ingersoll, To Intermix with our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removal (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Barbara Watson Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Hono­lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd edn. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541-1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

There is sharp disagreement about how to understand two-spirit people. Some scholars have asserted that most Native American groups valued femininity, so did not disparage men or boys who dressed as women or took the female role (i.e. passive and penetrated) in actual or ritualized same­sex relations.^[130] Others have argued that this is wishful thinking, and stress that sex was linked to conquest in both the pre-colonial and colonial period; wearing women's clothes or doing women’s work was a form of social failure for a male-bodied person, they argue, and the passive partner was mocked and vilified.^[131] One’s position in this debate shapes how one views the impact of European conquest, that is, whether the Spanish and Portuguese, and later other European powers, introduced new attitudes and punish­ments, or whether they reinforced existing ones.^[132]

Most scholarship on two-spirit people has, unsurprisingly, contextualized them within understandings of gender and sexuality, but Mark Rifkin considers them within the framework of state-building and the cultural interaction that is central to the global history of this era. He examines the ways in which European Americans sought to “insert American Indians into the ideological system of heterosexuality,” especially in an emphasis on the monogamous conjugal couple, which denied “the possibility of interpreting countervailing cultural patterns,” including polygamous households, same-sex attachments, two-spirit people and kin groups “as principles of geopolitical organization.”^[133]

The Americas were not the only area of the world in which there were individuals regarded as neither men nor women, or both men and women, or in some other way transcending dichotomous gender classifications in this era. In some cases these individuals appear to have been physically intersex, either from birth or as the result of castration, though in others their distinctiveness or androgyny was purely cultural, and was either permanent or temporary. In some cultures such individuals engaged in sexual activities or had permanent or temporary sexual relationships, while in others they did. 26 not.

The gender and sexuality of such individuals is thus complex and highly variable, but in many cultures where they were found, they had special ceremonial or religious roles. In the Philippines, religious leaders termed baylans or catalonans were generally married older women, regarded as to some degree androgynous because they were no longer able to have chil­dren. They were thought to be able to communicate with both male and female spirits, and this, in addition to their lack of fertility, gave them greater freedom of movement than younger women had. When men performed rituals as baylans or catalonans, they wore women's clothing or a mixture of men's and women's clothes.^{[134] [135]}

The Bugis people of South Sulawesi (today part of Indonesia) had five genders: men, women, calabai (male-bodied individuals who wear female clothing and carry out certain female-identified tasks), calalai (female-bodied individuals who wear male clothing and present themselves as men) and bissu, who combined gendered clothing, behaviors, and actions in a way that is now often labeled “gender transcendent.” The bissu could be intersexed or female-bodied, but were more often male-bodied. They were linked to the androgynous creator deity, acted as shamans and entered into divinatory trances.^[136] In the early modern period, bissu carried out special rituals thought to enhance and preserve the power and fertility of the rulers, which was conceptualized as “white blood,” a supernatural fluid that flowed in royal bodies.

In Northern India, divine androgyny was replicated in the human world by religious ascetics termed hijra, impotent or castrated men dedicated to the goddess Bahuchara Mata; they were regarded as having the power to grant fertility and so performed blessings at marriages and the births of male children.^[137] In Polynesian societies, mahus had certain ceremonial roles and generally performed women's work, though apparently they were morpho­logically male.^[138]

Some of these third- and transgender categories have continued to today, and studies of them are based on ethnographic research and interviews, with relatively little concern for change over time. Others have largely disap­peared, a process that often began in the early modern period. The erosion of gender variation resulted to some degree from the spread of Christianity and Islam, but also resulted from changes in indigenous traditions and local circumstances. In Central and South America, because third gender individ­uals were understood by Spanish and Portuguese authorities within a frame­work of aberrant sexuality, they were described as “sodomites” and treated as such. This included a notorious slaughter of men dressed as women by the conquistador Vasco de Balboa in his march across Panama in 1513, and questioning, accusations and occasional mass trials in church courts, much like the waves of persecution that characterized the handling of sodomy in Europe at the time. If third-gender individuals had ritual power, as in Chile and the Phillipines, their actions were prohibited by Catholic authorities as part of the suppression of indigenous religions.^[139] In South Sulawesi, the initial conversion of local rulers to Islam in the seventeenth century led to a brief period when the bissu were banned from the palace, but they soon returned and regained much of their influence. In the early nineteenth century, they were targeted by rulers influenced by scholars recently returning from the Arabian holy places with puritanical versions of Islam, but did not fully lose their advisory role until the Indonesian governments banned the local princely courts in 1957.^[140]

Gender and sexuality in religious transformations

Religious authorities had far broader aims in terms of gender and sexuality in this era than simply disciplining individuals who did not fit in the standard two gender categories. They sought to discipline men and women as well, transforming them into moral individuals whose actions reflected a purer piety. The sixteenth century in particular was a period of religious reform, in which individuals and groups decided that practices or institutions had grown stale or corrupt, and sought to focus on what they viewed as the core or developed new spiritual practices and sometimes new institutions they believed fit better with divine will. These new or reformed religious trad­itions were begun by individuals with a powerful sense of spiritual calling, and ultimately gained many adherents because large numbers of people found their message persuasive, or because they saw social, economic or political benefits in converting (or all three). Converts included rulers, who often demanded their subjects adhere to the same religion. Once they were established, these new religions became part of inherited traditions, as children followed the faith of their parents. Both reformers and those who supported older religious traditions set out certain duties as incumbent on a believer, often with distinctions between men and women. They viewed everyday activities and family life as opportunities for people to display religious and moral values, though at the same time criticized religious practices if they were done without the proper inward belief or faith.

Among these transformations, the simultaneous splintering of Christianity in Europe with the Protestant Reformation and spread of Catholic Christian­ity around the globe were the most dramatic. (Missionaries gained some converts to Protestant Christianity among people who were not European or European background before 1800, but not many.) Both brought new ideas about the relationship between sexuality and holiness to those who were their adherents. Protestant reformers rejected practices for which they did not see a Biblical basis, including clerical celibacy, which Martin Luther (1483 to 1546) and other reformers thought was a fruitless attempt to control a natural human drive and brought no spiritual benefits. Protestants pro­claimed family life in which men were serious, responsible husbands and fathers and women loving, obedient wives and mothers as the ideal for all men and women, and regarded unmarried people of both sexes as suspect. Most Protestant areas came to allow divorce and remarriage for a limited range of reasons, although the actual divorce rate remained very low, as marriage created a social and economic unit that could not easily be broken apart. The ideas of John Calvin (1509 to 1564) and others inspired a second wave of Protestant reform in the 1550s, in which order, piety and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor.

An emphasis on morality and social discipline emerged in Catholic areas as well, however, and Protestant and Catholic religious authorities both worked with rulers and other secular political officials to make people's behaviour more orderly and “moral.” This process, generally termed “social discipline” or “the reform of popular culture,” has been studied intensively over the last several decades in many parts of Europe and the European colonies. Schol­arship on social discipline recognizes the medieval roots of such processes as the restriction of sexuality to marriage, the encouragement of moral discip­line and sexual decorum, the glorification of heterosexual married love, and the establishing of institutions for regulating and regularizing behaviour, but it also emphasizes that all of these processes were strengthened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[141] Sexual practices that did not fit the norm, including prostitution, pregnancy out of wedlock and sodomy, were increasingly subject to punishment, in what some historians have termed the “criminalization of sin.”^[142]

The intensification of social discipline brought changes in men's lives as men in Christian areas. For craft masters, merchants and other middle-class men, the qualities of an ideal man increasingly centered on their role as heads of household: permanence, honesty, thrift, control of family members and servants. Manhood was linked to marriage, a connection that in Protestant parts of Europe and British and Dutch colonies even included the clergy. This notion of masculinity became increasingly hegemonic, and was enforced by law as well as custom. Men whose class and age would normally have conferred political power but who remained unmarried did not partici­pate to the same level as their married brothers; in some cities they were barred from being members of city councils. Unmarried men were viewed as increasingly suspect, for they were also not living up to what society viewed as their proper place in a gendered social order.^[143]

The enforcement of social discipline had an even greater impact on women's lives. Laws regarding such issues as adultery, divorce, “lascivious carriage” (flirting), enclosure of members of religious orders or inter­denominational marriages were rarely gender neutral. The enforcement of such laws was even more discriminatory, of course, for though undisciplined sexuality and immoral behaviour of both women and men were portrayed from the pulpit or press as a threat to Christian order, it was women's lack of discipline that was most often punished, by both secular and religious courts.^[144]

European colonizers took these ideas, laws and institutions with them. Along with explaining concepts central to Christianity, missionaries also attempted to persuade—or force—possible converts to adopt Christian practices of marriage, sexual morality and day-to-day behavior.^[145] A religious play written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, and performed in the 1530s, for example, centers on the fate of Lucia, an indigenous woman who did not marry in a Christian ceremony. The play ends with demons beating her and hauling her off to hell, as she screams that the “frightening fire serpent” that “signifies how I used to enjoy myself on earth” is winding around her neck.^[146]

Many people resisted Christian teachings and continued to follow their original spiritual practices. In some areas, such as the Andes of South America and the Philippines, women had been important leaders in animistic religions, and they were stronger opponents of conversion than were men; this pattern was enhanced by male missionaries' focus on boys and young men in their initial conversion efforts. Far more people became Christian, however, including women, who sometimes became fervent in their devo­tions or used priests and church courts to oppose their husbands or other male family members on matters of inheritance or the marriage of children.

The process of conversion used to be described by scholars as a “spiritual conquest,” in which indigenous beliefs and practices were largely wiped out through force and persuasion. The spread of Catholic Christianity is now viewed very differently, not simply as conquest and resistance—though it was that—but as a process of cultural negotiation and synthesis, during which Christian ideas and practices were selectively adopted, mixed with existing practices and openly, unknowingly or surreptitiously rejected in a process of creolization. Creolization included the creation of new gender patterns; although officials tried to impose European Catholic patterns— monogamous marriage, male-headed households, limited (or no) divorce— where these conflicted with existing patterns they were often modified and what emerged was a mixture of local and imported practices.^[147] The prominent men whom missionaries most hoped to convert often had multiple wives and concubines, and missionaries argued about whether they had to give up all but one before Christian baptism, or whether Christian practice would (they hoped) follow baptism.

Protestant Christianity was not the only new religious tradition to emerge in this period. At about the same time the Protestant reformers were first breaking with the Catholic Church, Nanak (1469 to 1538), a spiritual teacher living in the Punjab area of what is now the India-Pakistan border added his own insights to elements of Hinduism, Islam and other traditions to found what was later called Sikhism, a word taken from the Sanskrit word for “learner” or “disciple.” Nanak taught that people can come to know God by looking inward and recognizing their complete dependency on God. Worldly values such as money or fame are not evil in and of themselves, but they are unreality (maya), an illusion or deception that keeps people separate from God. Turning away from maya to God is difficult for humans to do alone, and in this they need a teacher, or guru, a word that came to be applied to Nanak and the line of successors who spread his teachings. The succession of gurus transformed his followers into a community, developing rituals and ceremonies for major life changes (including marriage), building temples, creating systems for gathering donations and compiling sacred writings. The Sikh community was initially too small to be viewed with much concern by the Muslim Mughals who ruled the Punjab, but by the early seventeenth century this changed, and later Sikh gurus were military as well as spiritual leaders.

In terms of gender, Sikh ideas included both egalitarian and hierarchical elements.^[148] Guru Nanak maintained that women (and members of lower castes) were able to obtain full enlightenment, and emphasized that proper devotional discipline could be done by people living in families and involved with the ordinary things of the world. In fact, service to others was an important part of spiritual life and living in the world with a family was spiritually superior to renouncing family ties, a position very different from that of most Hindu teachers of Nanak's time. But he also held that giving birth to sons was essential for women to fulfill their divine purpose, and described attachment to women as part of the maya that keeps a true believer from God. As Sikh practices became more institutionalized, formal positions of authority were limited to men (a common development in all types of groups, religious and otherwise). In 1699, the tenth and final guru, Gobind Rai, established the military brotherhood of the Khalsa, calling on all initiates to adopt the name “Singh,” wear five articles, including a sword, and be prepared to fight. Members of the Khalsa, all male, were increasingly regarded as the true Sikhs, and those who were not, including all women, had secondary status. Even God was militarized and masculinized, increas­ingly referred to as Sarab Loh, “All Steel,” rather than as Akal Purakh, “Timeless Being,” the most common descriptor of the early guru period.

Other religious transformations in the early modern period also had implications for ideas and practices of gender and sexuality. In Korea, the promotion of Confucianism by the Choson dynasty that took over power in 1392 led to a gradual restructuring of the kinship system from a relatively egalitarian one to one that emphasized patrilineal primogeniture; increas­ingly only the eldest son of the primary wife could carry out the proper rituals of ancestor worship. Women often responded by becoming support­ers of Buddhist monasteries and convents, and, as widows, nuns them- selves.⁴¹ In Japan, women were also important as patrons and leaders of Buddhist convents, and some became vocal and active proponents of Chris- tianity.⁴² In Mesoamerica, leaders in the Aztec Empire increasingly encour­aged the worship of the warrior god Huitzilopochtli in the fifteenth century, who demanded many sacrificial victims, preferably warriors; this led to special wars aimed at capture, and a growing emphasis on militarized masculinity in Aztec culture.⁴³ In Bengal, the Hindu thinker who later took the name Krishna Chaitanya (1486 to 1534) developed new spiritual insights and devotional practices to worship the great god Krishna; his most fervent followers believed that he became the goddess Radha and, like her, glowed golden in his passionate longing for Krishna. AmongJews, thinkers such as Isaac Luria (1534 to 1572) advocated stricter ethical principles based on the teachings of the Kabbalah, a group of mystical texts that originated in Spain and Southern France in the thirteenth century but looked back to much older

⁴¹ For more on these developments, see the chapter on religious change in East Asia by Eugenio Menegon and Gina Cogan in this volume.

⁴² Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

⁴³ Miguel Leon-Portilla, Mexica Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, Jack Emory David (trans.) (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963); and Rosemary A. Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2001).

traditions. The Kabbalah offered (and continues to offer) ways of approach­ing God through intense prayer, study, rituals, mystical ceremonies, interior individual piety and moral behavior, and was practiced by both women and men in many Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe.^[149]

Conclusions

The idea that gender and sexuality are socially constructed seemed radical when it was first articulated in the 1970s, but now seems patently obvious, with the global diversity of gender ideals and sexual norms evident in all media, gender-bending performers popular on television and YouTube chan­nels, and transsexual and transgender individuals asserting their rights around the world. Examples of the fluid and performative nature of gender and sexuality were widely evident in the early modern era as well, as on stage, in religious rituals and in daily life individuals conformed to or challenged societal expectations, developing new notions of gender as they did so. The idea that gender is not part of the natural or divinely ordained world, but a human creation, seems to be especially threatening, however. Even those willing to envision revolutionary change in other institutions and areas of life could not envision this for gender and, in fact, sometimes called for a strengthening of gender hierarchies and a narrowing of sexual possibil­ities, perhaps to compensate for the breaks with established ideas and practices they were advocating elsewhere. Such reassertions of “tradition” were never just that, however, but were themselves changes, and the traditions were sometimes invented rather than remembered. The global world of the early modern era was built on the foundation of existing structures of gender and sexuality, and every development brought change to people's lives as women, men or neither.

FURTHER READING

“AHR Forum: Transnational Sexualities,” American Historical Review 114(5) (2009), 1250-354.

Amussen, Susan D. and AUyson M. Poska, “Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of European Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Journal of Global History 7 (3) (November 2012), 342-63.

Andaya, Barbara Watson, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

(ed.), Other Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2000).

BaUantyne, Tony and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2008).

Barr, Juliana, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Brooks, George E., Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003).

Crawford, Katherine, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Foster, Thomas A. (ed.), Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 2007).

Gerard, Kent and Gert Hekma (eds.), The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989).

Herdt, Gilbert (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

Jacobs, Sue-EUen, Wesley Thomas and Sabine Lang (eds.), Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Jaffary, Nora E. (ed.), Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).

Jakobsh, Doris, Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Joyce, Rosemary A., Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2001).

Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Habboush and Joan R. Piggott (eds.), Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

Masterson, Lenore and Margaret Jolly (eds.), Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexual­ities in Asia and the Pacific (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Morgan, Jennifer, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Phila­delphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Rifkin, Mark, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Ruch, Barbara (ed.), Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, 2002).

Sigal, Pete, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000).

Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 2001).

Smith, Merril D., Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 1998).

Taylor, Jean Gelman, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd edn. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

Traub, Valerie, Making Sexual Knowledge: Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Phila­delphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Ward, Haruko Nawata, Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2010).

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Za'evi, Dror, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).