Widely studied and hotly debated, the Silk Road is often viewed as a precursor to contemporary globalization, the merchants who traversed it as early agents of cultural exchange. Missing are the lives of the ordinary people who inhabited the route and contributed as much to its development as their itinerant counterparts. In this book, Kate Franklin takes the highlands of medieval Armenia as a compelling case study for examining how early globalization and everyday life intertwined along the Silk Road. She argues that Armenia—and the Silk Road itself—consisted of the overlapping worlds created by a diverse assortment of people: not only long-distance travelers but also the local rulers and subjects who lived in Armenia’s mountain valleys and along its highways. Franklin guides the reader through increasingly intimate scales of global exchange to highlight the cosmopolitan dimensions of daily life, as she vividly reconstructs how people living in and passing through the medieval Caucasus understood the world and their place within it. With its innovative focus on the far-reaching implications of local practices, Everyday Cosmopolitanisms brings the study of medieval Eurasia into relation with contemporary investigations of cosmopolitanism and globalization, challenging persistent divisions between modern and medieval, global and quotidian.

About the Author

Kate Franklin is Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Reviews

"A delightful and perceptive read. The author traces the threads which are woven throughout the land and sensory ‘scapes' of a valley in Armenia: its archaeology, architecture and people’s lives, past and present. She argues that, like other places across Afro-Eurasia, this valley and its people reveal their part in the wider ‘scape’ of a cosmopolitan medieval world, the Silk Roads."—Susan Whitfield, author of Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road

"Culminating in a tasty stew shared in a medieval Armenian caravanserai, Kate Franklin’s feminist analysis of different scales of the material culture of hospitality and its powers turns the heroic travel narratives of what we call the Silk Road inside out, recapturing the overlapping space-times of moving and staying that co-created the everyday cosmopolitanisms of the medieval world. A critical tour de force."—Francesca Bray, author of Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered

“This is a thought-provoking work of modern scholarship, a perfect marriage of historical theory and archaeological investigation. Works concentrating on the non-European world are often concerned with regional outlooks, seldom addressing larger issues of world history. Franklin’s book, on the other hand, brings the local perspective to a global context, contributing meaningfully to the emerging field of Global Middle Ages.”—Khodadad Rezakhani, author of ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity

“A master class in constructing an anthropological archaeological argument that incorporates a wide variety of sources in this field and others. Franklin provides us with a fresh new path along a well trodden road.”—Joshua Wright, University of Aberdeen