The central argument of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms is that roadside inns, or caravanserais, in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Armenia are useful places to glean a notion of medieval cosmopolitanism—that is, how premodern people saw themselves as not only “of a place, but also of the world” (14). “Great man” theories of history have positioned Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta as romantic, adventurist travelers who were “exemplar[s] of medieval cosmopolitanism,” respected men who could narrate their own lives (15). But in Chapter 1, Franklin mobilizes Derrida’s theory of hospitality as a cosmopolitan value to reveal how ordinary people—minor merchants, cooks in caravanserais, stonemasons, and travelers along the Silk Roads—lived cosmopolitan lives in the “local world of everyday life, of domestic work, and of routine maintenance” (16).1 Through this formulation, the carvanserai emerges as a setting dedicated to hospitality where the local and the global intertwine.
The book is organized in seven chapters...