Bonnie G. Smith (A.B. Smith College, PhD University of Rochester) is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History Emerita, Rutgers University. She has taught world history to both undergraduate and graduate students and has been supported in her research through awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, Shelby Cullom Davis Center (Princeton), European Union, and American Philosophical Society. She has published books in world, European, women's history, among the most recent "Modern Empires: A Reader" (Oxford 2017), and currently studies cultural hybridity. Marc Van De Mieroop (PhD Yale, 1983) is Professor of History at Columbia University. A specialist in the ancient history of the Middle East, he has published numerous books including A History of Ancient Egypt, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011 and A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000 - 323 B.C., third edition, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2016. His latest book is Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial foundation, and several European institutions. He is the recipient of Columbia University's Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for excellence in teaching. Marc covers the period from human origins to 500 CE (Part 1) in World in the Making. Richard von Glahn is Professor of History at UCLA. A specialist on China, Von Glahn is the author of dozens of books, articles, and reviews on Chinese history, most recently The Economic History of China from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2016). Von Glahn is also senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Asian History. Kris Lane (PhD University of Minnesota, 1996) holds the France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University in New Orleans. An award-winning teacher, he is author of Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (Yale, 2010), Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750 (Routledge, 2015), and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition (New Mexico, 2002). Lane has also edited the writings of failed Spanish conquistador Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, and he as published numerous articles on the history of slavery, witchcraft, crime, and mining in early modern Spanish America. He is also the author of textbooks on Latin American history and Atlantic history. Aided by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2015-16), Lane is completing a book about the global consequences of a mid-17th century mint fraud at Potosí, a world-famous silver mining town high in the Andes mountains of present-day Bolivia. Kris treats the period 1450 to 1750 (Part 2) in World in the Making.