Edgard Blochet (1870-1937), the French orientalist, left his mark in several areas of Middle Eastern and Asian studies. In 1910 his introduction to Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi' al-tawārīkh was published as volume XII in the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series. The Jāmi' al-tawārīkh has been described as the first 'world history'; written at the start of the fourteenth century, in the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia, it describes...