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AbstractMaarten Prak'sCitizens without Nationsmerits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept of citizenship to China and the Ottoman Empire where neither the ideological, nor the institutional features of European citizenship existed by discussing Chinese and Ottoman urban social, economic, and political practices that in early modern Europe relate to citizenship. Such a move makes invisible the early modern ideological and institutional foundations of the Chinese and Ottoman practices he recounts. It additionally creates the problem of determining how, if at all, what he calls Chinese and Ottoman citizenship mattered to nineteenth-century Chinese and Ottoman subjects as they encountered for the first time Western notions of citizenship. In order to write global history, we need more studies of Chinese, Ottoman, and other histories, which explain the changing political architecture of relations between people and those who ruled them to complement what Maarten Prak's fine study of citizens without nations gives us for European history.

Historically, for sustaining and reproducing their economic lives, people have obtained goods and services through various ways. How did people tackle issues that the market did not handle well? This volume compares early modern efforts to provide "public goods"—defined in contraposition to market-mediated goods and goods provided through personal relations, such as kinship ties. We examine poverty and famine relief, infrastructure building, and forestry management in East Asia and Europe, using Japan's Tokugawa era (1603–1868) as a benchmark from which consider the cases in Prussia, China, and England. Taking advantage of rich scholarship on the role of autonomous village and regional society in Japan's early modern history, the volume highlights the diverse approaches to providing public goods across societies, relativizing the discussion on the formation of fiscal state drawn from the experience in "advanced" Western Europe, and it constructs the beginnings of an early modern basis for forecasting the diversity in public-goods provision future into the modern and contemporary periods.

Overview: war and history -- The first military empire: the Assyrians -- The great strategy of the Byzantine Empire -- The Arabs -- The nomads of the Eurasian steppes -- The Seljuks, Mameluks, and the Crusades -- The Mongol Dmpire -- Tamerlane -- The Ottomans -- Safavid Iran -- The Ming and Chinese politico-military traditions -- The Manchu and the end of the nomads -- The Mughals and Islam in India -- Russia and the end of the Tatars -- The ascent of Europe -- The time of revolutions -- Guerilla warfare -- From total war to asymmetrical conflict -- Conclusion