The Global History Network (GHN) was recently founded by a group of scholars working on global history at prestigious universities and institutions in China, Japan, Mexico and Europe. This ambitious project began in 2011 when Professor Lucio de Sousa and I, working respectively in China and Japan, jointly identifed the historiographical need to render the expanding feld of global history that might be defned as truly relevant for the new century. Our current institutions, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, serve as academic platforms to expand our network and research in China and Japan. Undertaking such endeavours in both countries represents an opportunity to expand global history in environments with diverse academic traditions. Regardless of current efforts to internationalize Chinese and Japanese universities and research institutions, nobody can ignore the fact that today they remain very far from embracing a truly international and global academic agenda. Such a challenge should be flled with the use of new empirical data and cross-referencing sources from European, Asian and American archives and texts. This enables us to refresh the feld of global history via concrete case studies, especially when we confront meta narratives that aim to answer big-questions such as why the West (or, more specifcally, Great Britain and the Netherlands) fourished economically before China during the frst Industrial Revolution. As a result, our project crystalized with the award of the ERC-Starting Grant, Global Encounters between China and Europe (GECEM), by which this book is sponsored, as well as ongoing related projects. We believe that by joining forces and harmonizing diverse theories, sources and methods of different academic traditions like those from China and Japan, the feld of global history receives a new impulse through diverse case studies. The constant participation of specialists in this field is crucial, as they share their experiences and new ideas on how re-addressing new approaches and questions. The main partner institutions that take part of this network are the University Pablo de Olavide (Spain), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, followed by Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, the University of Tokyo, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France). Global history is in some instances a very sensitive feld, challenging both traditional and sometimes obsolete national narratives. It is crucial for this project, through concrete case studies, to rethink the ways in which global history is envisioned and conceptualized in China and Japan, as well as European and American countries. When a historian constructs a meta narratives, this will always contain a subjective element borne out of ideological and national constraints. Therefore, we should formulate the following pertinent question: how do global events connect to our local and national communities, and, by extension, to our academic environment? Global history is not a practice by which we can arbitrarily combine all type of histories, be it local, national, continental or transcontinental. It is rather an approach through which the historian seeks connections across space, chronologies and boundaries, combining local and global perspectives.1 Challenging and going beyond obsolete patriotic narratives should be the ultimate goal of a global historian.

This volume is the result of two workshops, the frst held at the University of Bergen in June 2014 and the second at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington D.C. in November 2014. Both meetings were funded by the project Gender and Pentecostal Christianity: A comparative analysis of Gender in Pentecostal Christianity with focus on Africa and Melanesia led by Professor Annelin Eriksen at the University of Bergen. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and this book is an important part of the dissemination of that project.

This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu—particularly Vaishnava Hindu—animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti—the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja—can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities.