Imagine that a traveller journeyed from East to West across the world in the period in and around the year 1500. As they ventured from Tokugawa Japan and Ming China, through the Islamic empires of the Mughals, Safavids and Ottomans, and eventually arrived in Europe, what impressions might they form about the societies they experienced? How were these societies structured politically and socially? What were their specific strengths and the weaknesses, and what challenges did they face as contacts between parts of the world accelerated? To answer these questions, you must use a minimum of four documents from Envisioning World Civilizations. You are not required to discuss all of the societies that we have looked at so far in the course, but you should include at least one each from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe in your analysis.

You may write your paper from the perspective of the traveller (as a first-person account) or you may write it in a more scholarly (third-person) voice. Either way, you must cite the works you use to write your paper. If you are using an essay from the Envisioning Reader, you can cite it by putting the document number in parenthesis at the end of a sentence that references the work. If you are using the textbook, you should put the author’s name Hanson and the page number in parenthesis. We encourage you to also use the lectures (you do not have to cite them), but we discourage outside sources. If you do use books, articles, or websites not assigned for this class, you must provide a full citation. And remember, direct quotes from any source must be in quotation marks.

Your paper should be six double-spaced pages long and use a traditional 10- or 12-point font (such as Times New Roman). You can submit the paper through Blackboard any time after Feb. 6 at 11am, but it must be turned in no later than Feb. 11 at 11am.

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