In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for Mediterranean Studies at UC Santa Cruz.