This chapter starts with a historical review of ideas about blood flow around the body, culminating in an understanding of circulation, the mechanics of which are described. The propagation of the pressure pulse in arteries is discussed, as is the disturbance to smooth flow caused by the complex geometry of arteries. The deformation of blood cells during their passage along the smallest capillaries is considered, as are the interesting effects of gravity on the venous return to the heart in upright animals, notably those with long necks and legs, such as giraffes and dinosaurs.

Among the many, many transitions in American literature that have been attributed to the US Civil War, one of the less often noted is that the war years coincided with a decisive shift away from authorial anonymity. This transition can be observed in the publication practices of the day’s leading magazines. Harper’s, which had been started in 1850, began naming authors in the index to its twentieth volume (1860), while the Atlantic Monthly, introduced in 1857, began publishing the names of its authors in the index to its tenth volume (1862). The first series of Putnam’s, which ran in the 1850s, did not identify authors in either its issues or its volume indices, but the second series, begun in 1868, did, a distinction that holds when comparing the Continental Monthly, which ran during the war (1862–64) and never identified authors, with the Galaxy, which debuted in 1866 and always did. Even the hoary North American Review got into the act, and started attributing its authors with the January issue of 1868, after more than fifty years of never doing so. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend; antebellum periodicals like Graham’s Magazine or the Broadway Journal sometimes identified the more famous authors who contributed to their pages, while reprint journals like Littell’s Living Age (1844–96) attributed only the original publication sources of its contents, never the individual authors, even at the end of the century. In general, though, postbellum readers of American magazines would be much more likely than their antebellum forebears to know the name of the person who had written whichever article they were reading.

The introduction outlines the two major arguments of the book. Firstly, the sheer laboriousness of doing science in remote locations, and the inherent dependency of naturalists and surveyors on Himalayan peoples’ expertise and labour. Secondly, the way that the imagining and remaking of the Himalaya was complicated by comparisons with the Alps and the Andes, and the recognition of the commensurability of mountain environments globally. Together, these approaches work to offer wide-ranging insights into the trajectories and consequences of emerging imperial visions of the globe in the nineteenth century. The introduction also lays out the geography, scope and scale of the Himalaya as treated in this book, and how the remaking of these overwrote existing understandings of the mountains in South Asian cosmology. This is followed by a discussion of the story of measuring mountains in relation to wider debates in historical geography, the history of science and the history of the British Empire in South Asia, as well as interdisciplinary questions about mountains, exploration and indigenous labour.

This chapter examines East India Company botanical gardens at Saharanpur and Mussoorie. The history of colonial gardens has borne much fruit in recent years, but in the case of India, this has overwhelmingly focused on Calcutta. Instead, this chapter follows the largely untold story of the ‘northern’ gardens, and their roles in the remaking of the Himalaya in European scientific and imperial imaginations. In focusing on the ambiguous position of these gardens – straddling the uplands and lowlands – this chapter demonstrates the inherent complexity in attempts to categorise the vertical globe. The chapter begins with the modification of the existing Mughal garden at Saharanpur for the purposes of scientific botany. Next, it considers debates around the need for a higher garden and the way altitude factored in the acclimatisation of plants. This is followed by a discussion of the centrality of two South Asian gardeners – Hari Singh and Murdan Ali – to the functioning of Saharanpur, and the role of indigenous collectors in the mountains. The final section considers the problems of distance and limited resources as the gardens became spaces for an increasingly globally oriented science.

This chapter provides a framework for the companion by defining world crime fiction and outlining the key theoretical issues involved in studying crime fiction as a global genre. The first section explores the global and transnational prehistories of crime fiction; it covers various forms of premodern crime writing and discusses the global dissemination of Western crime fiction from the late nineteenth century, highlighting the role of translation, pseudotranslation and adaptation in the emergence of local crime literatures. The second section focusses on the transnationalism of contemporary world crime fiction, arguing that the global adaptations of the genre are not just a matter of adding local colour, but involve formal hybridization that results in new, local versions of the genre. The final section discusses how crime fiction studies, as a field traditionally tied to Western crime writing, has recently moved towards a global and transnational conception of the genre. The overarching argument of the chapter is that founding world crime fiction as a research area requires a rethinking of the crime genre itself beyond the Anglocentrism of the scholarly tradition.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood is one of the Scientific Revolution’s most influential and lasting achievements. But in spite of Harvey’s innovation, and paradoxically given the extent to which he came to be represented as a founder of modern science, he tied himself to ancient authorities and sought to insulate natural philosophy and the art of medicine from the new mechanical-corpuscular and chemical philosophies of the period. The reception of Harvey’s work, both in physiology and later in embryology, shows that Harvey’s research program won numerous early converts, who used his program for their own ends, including support for the new philosophies, in the cases of René Descartes and Robert Boyle. Untethered from his preferred Scholastic framework, Harvey’s conceptual foundations, techniques, and conclusions led to new discoveries, and unresolved questions in Harvey’s account about the movement of the heart, nature of the blood, and respiration would motivate intense inquiry. The circulation of the blood and later physiology therefore provide an essential perspective for the examination of early modern disputes about experimentation and its limits, the rhetoric of novelty, the unity of nature, and the very notion of life.

This chapter explores the relationship between postcolonialism, diaspora, and world literature. Taking as a starting premise the complex nature of Jorge Luis Borges’s the Library of Babel as a starting point, it traces the shift in critical orientations between Commonwealth Literature to Postcolonial Literature, and looks at the significance of diaspora literary studies in providing new metaphors by which to look to think about circulation both in the library and in the world of population movements more generally. It is suggested the library of the republic of letters is enriched by viewing it as exemplifying these two distinctive modes.

Frontiers became increasingly central to colonial spatial sciences as the nineteenth century progressed. Examining surveyors’ activities in the field along with the material processes by which maps were produced and circulated, this chapter analyses three broad junctures of frontier surveying based on distinct techniques of seeing and representing space. Route surveys of the 1820s to 1840s mostly gave way to triangulation from the 1850s on, and trigonometrical survey parties increasingly ventured into frontier regions from the later 1860s. By this later period, surveyors and ‘men of science’ in metropole and colony alike deemed comprehending frontier locales a key goal of imperial science. Agents of empire considered these regions as providing unparalleled opportunities, but also substantial challenges to established modes of spatial knowledge and representation. The chapter shows how this ambiguity reached a peculiar resolution, as many surveyors and geographers came to celebrate and to uphold the elusive quality of India’s frontiers.

India’s frontiers were areas of extraordinary human interest for agents of empire and men of science throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter investigates the production, dissemination, and reception of British knowledge of frontier inhabitants. Widespread recognition among personnel in colony and metropole alike that frontier people were important did not, however, emanate from or lead to settled knowledge of their origins or significant characteristics. Doubts over the validity of particular informants and modes of representation, disputes over competing theoretical frameworks, and controversies over the nature of frontier communities were at the heart of colonial ethnography. Frontier ethnography was a diverse field with complex relations to state power. Examining sketches and photographs as well as written material, the chapter demonstrates how processes of reproduction, adaptation, and circulation generated influential but highly unstable knowledge of human diversity.

This chapter groups discussion of TheMan of Law’s Tale into four broad topics. First is the intersecting representation of gender, race, and religious difference through which the tale complicates key questions about Christianity’s relationship to Islam, a relationship shaped as much by political and economic concerns as by theological ones. It thus opens equally complicated questions about the relationship between sacred and secular. Third is the tale’s preoccupation with the circulation of people and knowledge. Despite its generic similarity to saints’ Lives, the tale is perhaps less concerned with the truth of Christianity than with its transmission, with questions about the kind of knowledge stories produce, especially as they move across different discursive and territorial frames. The final section turns to narrative presentation and the teller’s status as a “Man of Law.” As an exploration of the impossibility of superimposing a stable system of meaning on a story about overlapping networks of mercantile, confessional, historical, and narrative practices, the tale has much to teach us about the layered, multipart narrative project of the Canterbury Tales itself.

Beginning with the shard market, held weekly in the city of Jingdezhen, this chapter explores the enduring attraction of locally made ceramics, even in their broken form. The objects for sale here fragments of porcelain objects made over the centuries in Jingdezhen point to the historical importance of what was manufactured here between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries as much as to the contemporary value of fine porcelains made locally for the imperial court. The manufacture of ceramics in Jingdezhen has attracted scholars working in many different disciplines; this chapter presents some of that scholarship but takes the research in new directions, drawing on the historical record, visual representations, objects and the records of administrators and visitors in Jingdezhen. The chapter situates the methodology of the book between global and local history, and explains its focus on the movement of objects, people and ideas during the many centuries in which Jingdezhen flourished. The shard market can only be explained by situating it in its historical context.

This chapter explores the emergence of blue-and-white porcelain in Jingdezhen. This has often been told as a global story that included cobalt from Central Asia, arriving in China by means of Islamic merchants who circulated throughout Eurasia, as did consumer demands from Central Asia. The emergence of cobalt blue decorations on the large dishes that were popular in the eating practices of the steppe and in Central Asian societies is often seen as a story of regional adaptation to global tastes, but this chapter adds a local dimension. It argues that the production of blue-and-white ceramics benefited the circulation of local technologies, especially the application of metal-based pigments onto the unglazed surfaces of ceramics to create line-drawings and brush-painted decorations. That process started in the northern kilns, especially in the wide region in which Cizhou and Cizhou-type ceramics were manufactured. Over time, the kilns in the south also started to apply painted decorations with brushes under the application of the glaze, as objects, ideas and people moved southwards. Jizhou played a key role in the transmission and circulation of materials and technologies.

Chapter 14 describes the opposition within early Greek metaphysics between the ontological privileging of (communal) circulation and of (individually owned) abstract value. Our three key processes of abstraction, monetisation and ritual are assessed as factors in the production of Parmenidean ‘reason’, a combination facilitated by the similarities between money and ritual, both of which contribute to the Greek doctrine of reincarnation, which was taught in mystic initiation and involved a cosmic projection (cosmisation) of monetised circulation.

How, and in what forms, did Chaucer’s poems reach medieval readers in the manuscript age? How was Chaucer’s writing (both process and actual content) affected by the manuscript culture within which he wrote? And for the modern reader of Chaucer, what insights are to be gained from a heightened awareness of the manuscript context from which his poetry emerged? The sheer difficulty of obtaining texts in the age of manuscript is difficult to imagine from a world with print, never mind one with instant internet access. A medieval reader keen to acquire a copy of Chaucer needed money, connections, and above all patience. A modern reader in search of Chaucer, meanwhile, needs to understand something of the vast, shifting manuscript matrix from which all modern editors have, like so many hopeful Dr Frankensteins, tried to re-create his texts. A better understanding of this manuscript culture, which robbed authors of control over their texts and could even remove their name, can also illuminate aspects of Chaucer’s process of composition, and may even help to explain his infamous use of an alter-ego narrator-figure, often explicitly named ‘Geffrey’, into his major poems.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.