The boundary disputes between rival metropolitan jurisdictions functioned to enhance papal authority.

The conversion of Constantine delayed the growth of papal government for half a century.

This chapter explains the rationale of the book and discusses Murakami Naojirō’s significance for Japanese historical scholarship. It sets the stage for exploring the practices institutionalized academic historians employed in constructing narratives of early modern Japan’s progressive foreign relations. Translation and hegemonic knowledge claims were major factors in this process, which had lasting consequences for global intellectual trajectories and perpetuated unequal power relations. The imperialist agenda of Murakami and his colleagues was at the forefront of hegemonic thinking about how history ought to be studied: which sources were relevant, whose actions and achievements were important, which groups had histories worth implementing into meta narratives, and whose voices were to be heard and included. The introduction also elaborates on key methodological frameworks such as entangled biography, empirical imperialism, and implicit comparison, and finally discusses important concepts as well as spatial and temporal dimensions of the study.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Chapter 2 examines Joel Augustus Rogers’ semi-autobiographical debate novel From “Superman” to Man (1917), which features an erudite Pullman porter methodically debunking the anti-Black racist arguments of a Southern senator traveling on his route. Signifying on the pseudoscientific foundations of Jim Crow bigotry, the New Negro porter turns what Eric Lott calls the “black mirror” back on the senator to reveal, ultimately, the utter abjection of white supremacy. Having already “proved” the Negro’s humanity through his erudition, the porter’s explicit reading of a gruesome lynching becomes a catalyst for the senator’s “liminal crucible” moment, a moral transformation great enough that he offers the porter a job in his film studio now devoted to producing some films that “create a better understanding of the Negro.” By examining the revisions Rogers made to his 1917 novel in his 1923 serialization, I reveal Rogers’ increasing anger over the growing brutality and frequency of white mob violence as well as the race-baiting newspapers that fomented it.

The epilogue discusses new and old challenges for history as an academic discipline that overemphasizes the written archive and fails to deliver on its promise to be transparent about the motivations behind and process of source selection. It highlights the shortcomings of the document-based and state-, male-, and literate-centric history-writing as a violent technology of European and Japanese imperialisms.

The papacy played a key role in establishing the canon of the Bible for the West.

Chapter 3 launches into the Tesla wars with an inside account of the first big battle in New Jersey in 2014. It shows how the dealers tried to pivot from the original dealer protection motivation of the state laws to a consumer protection justification and the tactics the dealers used to advance their position. Drawing on public choice theory, the chapter also answers the question of why the dealers have managed to cling onto their protected position for so long, despite business, technological, and political changes that have entirely undermined the original purposes of the franchise dealer laws.

Chapter 6 analyses how kinship is both a relationship over time creating the next generation, and one that is spatially promiscuous, adapting the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The riverbank villages had become strengthened by their hinterland networks but also by their own internal connections by the mid eighteenth century. The reforms of the Portuguese Crown in the 1750s supported this process with greater resources, control, and scrutiny. Each community, or village, continued to hold its own ethnic profile through the endurance of viable kin units and marriages within and across ethnic identities.

The papacy supported leper houses.