2014.2

EDITOR’S NOTE

 Rudolf G. Wagner .04

ARTICLES

Bernd Schneidmüller
Fitting Medieval Europe into the World:
Patterns of Integration, Migration, and Uniqueness .08

Rudolph Ng
The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874):
Reexamining International Relations in the Nineteenth Century from a 
Transcultural Perspective .39

Benjamin Zachariah
A Voluntary Gleichschaltung?
Perspectives from India towards a non-Eurocentric
Understanding of Facism .63

Joyce Brodsky
Crossing Boundaries:
The Art of Anjali Deshmukh and Rohini Devasher
(In Collaboration with the Artists)  .101

Nikolas Jaspert
Cultural Brokerage:
A Medieval Mediterranean Perspective .132



2 Contributors

Transcultural Studies, No 2, 2013, ISSN: 2191-6411

Editors:
Monica Juneja, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Rudolf G. Wagner, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

Managing Editor:
Andrea Hacker

Editorial Board:
Christiane Brosius, Antje Fluechter, Madeleine Herren, Birgit Kellner, 
Joachim Kurtz, Axel Michaels, Barbara Mittler, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, 
Vladimir Tikhonov, and Roland Wenzlhuemer.

Transcultural Studies is an open-access e-journal published bi-annually by the 
Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics 
of Transculturality“ at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. For more 
information see: www.transculturalstudies.org

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE:

Bernd Schneidmüller is Professor of Medieval History at Heidelberg 
University, Director of the “Marsilius-Kolleg. Institute for Advanced Study”, 
and Vice President of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 
Within the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global 
Context” he directs a project on medieval concepts of ordering the world by 
continents and empires.

Rudolph Ng studied history in St. Louis (USA), Heidelberg, and Madrid. 
Currently, he is pursuing a doctoral degree at St. Catharine’s College, 
Cambridge, where his research interests include global history and migration 
patterns. His research project examines Spanish coolie trade in Asia in the 
nineteenth century when the Madrid government, its diplomatic outposts, and 
a few conglomerates contributed to an international network of human trade 
spanning Asia, Europe and the Americas. The search for primary sources and 
secondary literature led him to the story of the Chinese Commission to Cuba, 
a study of which is the subject of the paper in this issue.

www.transculturalstudies.org


3Transcultural Studies 2014.2

Benjamin Zachariah read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at 
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1999. He is the 
author of Nehru (Routledge, 2004). Developing India: an Intellectual and 
Social History, c. 1930-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2005, 2nd edn. 2012), 
and Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Yoda 
Press, 2011), and co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds 
and World Views, 1917-1939 (Sage, 2014). His current work is concerned with 
global movements of ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in 
particular with international revolutionary networks and global fascism.

Joyce Brodsky is Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz 
CA. She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals on a 
variety of topics in contemporary art and art theory. In 2008 she published 
Experiences of Passage: The Paintings of Yun Gee and Li-lan (University of 
Washington Press). Her most recent article, “Re-Orientalism and Globalization: 
Transnational Artists from India and Representations of the ‘Other’” will 
appear in a forthcoming issue of the periodical Visual Studies (Francis and 
Taylor, Routledge).

Nikolas Jaspert is Professor of Medieval History of the Institute of History 
at the Centre for the Study of European History and Culture, Ruprecht-Karsl-
Universität, Heidelberg. He specializes in Iberian history in the Middle Ages, 
crusades, history of orders and, German-Spanish relations. He is also the 
President of the Société Internationale des Historiens de la Méditerranée 
since 2013.

http://transculturalstudies.org