About the Author

Jerry Bentley

Jerry H. Bentley was professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i and editor of the

Journal of World History. His research on the religious, moral, and political writings of

Renaissance humanists led to the publication of Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament

Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983) and Politics and Culture in Renaissance

Naples (Princeton, 1987). More recently, his research was concentrated on global history

and particularly on processes of cross-cultural interaction. His book Old World Encounters:

Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993) examines

processes of cultural exchange and religious conversion before the modern era, and his pamphlet

Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship (Washington, D.C., 1996)

discusses the historiography of world history. His most recent publication is The Oxford

Handbook of World History (Oxford, 2011), and he served as a member of the editorial team

preparing the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World. Jerry Bentley passed away in

July 2012.

Herbert Ziegler

Herbert F. Ziegler is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawai'i. He has taught world history since 1980 and currently serves as director of the world history program at the University of Hawai'i. He also serves as book review editor of the Journal of World History. His interest in twentieth-century European social and political history led to the publication of Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy(1990). He is at present working on a study that explores from a global point of view the demographic trends of the past ten thousand years, along with their concomitant technological, economic, and social developments. His other current research project focuses on the application of complexity theory to a comparative study of societies and their internal dynamics.