World Thought in Translation makes a selection of the most important works of non-Western political, legal, social, and ethical thought available to English-speaking scholars, students, and other readers.   The series publishes important works from the Middle East, China, South Asia, and Latin America in editions of the highest literary and scholarly quality, and in formats – including both print and digital – that will be accessible to a global readership.  

The editorial board, together with the Press, identify both pre-modern and modern classics of interest to faculty and students in political science, anthropology, history, religious studies, area studies, law, and other fields. We commission authoritative translations and publish them alongside interpretive and analytic essays to give readers a basic introduction to the texts’ backgrounds, the circumstances in which they were written, and their subsequent influence within and outside their cultures. 

The project has three objectives:

• To address a teaching need:  to help English-speaking students understand that other civilizations have intellectual histories as deeply rooted, complex, and rich in debate as our own, and to let them grapple with some of the issues and styles of thinking that have influenced these civilizations.
• To serve an integrative role among scholars: By making works from a broad range of cultures available in English, we hope to provide these scholars the opportunity to give their fields of study a truly worldwide footing, rather than one that is largely Western-oriented. 
• To provide commonly recognized editions of significant works worldwide and to make these editions widely accessible in both print and digital forms:  Many of the works important to Islamic thought, for instance, were originally written in Arabic.  But today the Islamic world extends far beyond the Arabic-speaking countries.  In many places, English is the most common second language.  English-language editions may thus aid cross-cultural understanding among non-Western cultures by allowing readers access to works of seminal importance that were not previously available to them.