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Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History builds upon the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of functional aesthetic objects made across a broad temporal and geographic spectrum to broaden our understanding of an interconnected history of art.  Eschewing traditional binaries of East vs. West or Fine Art vs Decorative Art, and transcending the tendency for medium specific analysis, this volume examines the production, consumption, circulation, and meanings of objects made from clay, fiber, wood, and non-ferrous base metals, particularly in the period 800-1800.  In emphasizing interconnections, Cooke examines agency on several levels—object, maker, customer, and place—and in various strengths or concentrations. Interchange impacted materials, technologies, and aesthetics in new surroundings.  In carefully considering the materials and process of making, and connecting process to product and people, the volume explicates how objects themselves acted upon those who looked at, used, or acquired those very items. They retained traces of their intensely local fabrication profile while absorbing additional meanings and impacting people in both anticipated and unexpected ways as they moved through space and time.  In emphasizing multiple centers of art production amidst constant multidirectional movement and entanglement, the author builds off of and moves past regional history driven by geography, nation states, time period, or medium.