Charles H. Parker, St Louis University, Missouri

Charles Parker is Professor of History at St Louis University. He has published extensively on the religious and cultural history of early modern Europe, with a focus on the Low Countries. His books include Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (2008), The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (2006), and a co-edited volume, From the Middle Ages to Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (2008). His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of World History, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the Journal of Religious History, and the Journal of Early Modern History.

Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age is an interdisciplinary introduction to cross-cultural encounters in the early modern age (1400-1800) and their influences on the development of world societies. In the aftermath of Mongol expansion across Eurasia, the unprecedented rise of imperial states in the early modern period set in motion interactions between people from around the world. These included new commercial networks, large-scale migration streams, global biological exchanges, and transfers of knowledge across oceans and continents. These in turn wove together the major regions of the world. In an age of extensive cultural, political, military, and economic contact, a host of individuals, companies, tribes, states, and empires were in competition. Yet they also cooperated with one another, leading ultimately to the integration of global space.