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University of California Press

The Tropical Turn

Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean
by Sureshkumar Muthukumaran (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Mar 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780520390850
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 27 b/w illustrations, 10 maps
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About the Book

This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.

About the Author

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran is a historian of the ancient world. He is a Lecturer in History at the National University of Singapore and has previously taught at University College London and Yale-NUS College.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations 

Introduction 
1. The Historical Context 
2. Wool from Trees: Cotton 
3. The Golden Grain: Asiatic Rice 
4. Persian “Apples”: Citruses 
5. Familiar but Foreign: Eastern Cucurbits 
6. The Egyptian Bean: The Sacred Lotus 
7. A Forgotten Tuber: Taro 
8. Timber for God and King: Sissoo 
9. How to Turn Tropical 

References 
Index 

Reviews

"Based on an impressive collection of archaeological data and textual sources in many languages, Muthukumaran provides an inspiring voyage in space and time. . . . this original and innovative book provides a significant contribution to the growing literature on East-West connectivity in antiquity."
— Bryn Mawr Classical Review
"As a complete summary of recent palaeobotanical and textual research on plant diffusion, centred on a selected group of case studies, one cannot but congratulate him for this excellent book that should win the favour of historians, archaeologists and a broader public alike."
— THE CLASSICAL REVIEW
"The book will be of interest to those whose research lies in agriculture, environmental archaeology and cultural archaeology, but is written in a way that is accessible to non-specialists." 
— Antiquity
“Having grappled with a complex, sometimes contradictory, and often obscure corpus of data spanning multiple fields of scholarship, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date summary of the dispersal of ancient crops across South Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.”—Robert N. Spengler III, author of Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat
 
“Accessible, rigorous, and interdisciplinary, Muthukumaran’s Tropical Turn offers an absorbing plant-based historical journey from tropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. This lucid, thought-provoking account of agricultural plant migrations—which variously affected labor regimes, landscapes, and cultural traditions—demonstrates how fascinating and relevant to understanding our globalized world crop histories can be.”—Daniel Fuks, Research Associate, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

 

Awards

  • Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2024 2024, American Historical Association