Chapter 2 offers an introduction to the history of Islam and Muslims with a focus on events and processes that influenced and remained important for the origin and development of the Muslim firaq. It examines the period of late antiquity, what the Qurʾan has to say about sectarian splintering, the Prophetic era, and the period after the death of the Prophet. It focuses in particular on the events of the Saqīfa, the first Muslim fitna (civil war), and the establishment of the early Muslim dynasties. The shift from the Umayyad to the ʿAbbāsid eras offers an introduction to the idea of a Muslim school of thought, while the notion of caliphal power is examined using the examples of Umayyad persecution of “heretics,” as well as the miḥna. The Turkic invasions, including the Mongols, offers an opportunity to examine the nature of political and military power, and to see how such configurations change with the introduction of gunpowder and the establishment of the “gunpowder empires.”

The front matter to “Cities of the World Ocean,” the second of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Plane, recounts the founding of Villa Navidad (“Christmas City”), the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Taino people, using wooden planks salvaged from the shipwrecked Santa Maria. The story serves to introduce the importance of humanity’s use of solar energy delivered by the winds and currents of the World Ocean to dramatically expand and merge all of Earth’s urban worlds into Earthopolis, a truly planetary Urban Planet for the first time. This development, a hinge between pre-modern and modern eras, rested on state violence delivered worldwide against city walls by gunpowder cannon; on the theft of massive amounts of land, labor, and wealth involved in the birth of global capitalism; and on the globalization of religious and secular knowledges and consumer culture that had impacts on the natural environment worldwide, including the World Ocean itself.

Chapter 7 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of the global gunpowder arms race that ensued in the wake of the discovery of the interconnected World Ocean from 1500 on. While giant imperial capitals played a continuing role in this drama, an Age of Parity between the empires of Afro-Eurasia persisted as transformations in urban fortification systems spread throughout the world along with the invention of wall-breaking cannon and gunpowder battleships. Europeans took the lead in sparking this arms race – especially along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean ironically because of their initially disadvantaged position – though the arms race involved numerous acts of ocean-ward expansion and military resistance based in the polities of cities and smaller settlements on all continents. The result was the construction of hundreds of new fortified cities on all shores of the World Ocean and the merging of all pre-modern urban worlds into a truly planetary realm of city-enabled human action for the first time.

Classically, the Ottoman Empire was considered as a polity that broke aristocracies by raising armies and bureaucracies of slaves beholden only to the sultan and an ideology both of equality and subjugation. In this interpretation, conflict between the ‘state’ and kinship characterized the empire. In fact, the empire contained numerous kinship-based elites, both formally recognized and informal. The empire’s longevity and several of its main conflicts can be understood by studying the charismatic power and legitimacy of its most central kinship group: the Ottoman dynasty. However, kinship-based elites were (a) mostly informal, (b) kept isolated by the imperial centre and (c) dealt with in an improvised ad hoc manner rather than through institutionalized procedures and organizations. Kinship elites were central to the empire and to its legitimacy but they remained without a legitimizing framework. Thus, the most successful Islamic polity collaborated with its many kinship-based elites.