This chapter examines the economic resources to which local priests had access, drawing in particular from evidence from the region around Trier in the Moselle valley and Freising in Bavaria. It traces the sources of income available to these priests, including tithes and oblations, and investigates how these revenues changed in the course of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. On the one hand, the scope for action that priests themselves had at their disposal becomes clear; at the same time, however, the chapter also shows how the various sources of income that existed at a local church were formalised during the period under investigation and could become the subject of increasingly complex transactions.

This chapter connects the French introduction of fast-growing, exotic hard timber species in Vietnam to the intensive search for mine timber to support the coal mining industry. The filao tree known scientifically as Casuarina equisetifolia, and the eucalyptus were introduced in Vietnam by the French in 1896 for the dual purpose of harvesting their hard timber for mine props and using them to reforest the shifting sand dunes along the coast of Annam, a French protectorate in what is now central Vietnam. Through a long and complex process of growing and acclimating the trees to Annam’s coastal sand dunes, French foresters were able to successfully grow the filao in industrial-style plantations and nurseries. Their success helped establish the filao as a popular exotic hard timber species for the reforestation of coastal sand dunes, not just in Vietnam but also in other French colonies, such as Senegal and Madagascar. Overall, the stories of the filao shed light on transnational connections between coal mining and the environment during the age of the empire, when the mining-driven search for hard timber commodities transformed the landscapes of both Vietnam and Africa.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field of diplomatic history took a cultural turn – or rather, a series of turns. Inspired by a host of factors internal and external to the discipline as a whole, a number of foreign relations historians came to feel that there were forces other than strategy, economics, politics, or national interest narrowly defined, at play in the shaping of American policy. The symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz had already had enormous influence on social and cultural history, emphasizing what he called -borrowing from Max Weber – the “webs of significance” that shaped the everyday experience of human beings. Borrowing from Geertz, and from scholars of cultural and subaltern studies, historians explored the impact on US relations with others of ritual, gesture, body language, identity (e.g., race, gender, and religion), language, emotion, and the senses. The cultural turn, significantly, led to a greater interest in imperialism and colonialism, and, with that, to greater appreciation for the participation of all sides in international encounters. The study of culture invites self-reflection, allowing historians who deploy it to think hard about the assumptions, stereotypes, prejudices, and emotions that they bring to their work.

In order to make sense of literary texts, writers and readers require some common understanding of what happened and what matters in history, of what has already been written, and of where people and things are located in relation to other people and things. The academic study of African literature, too, relies on common notions of Africa, its past and its location in the world. We are calling these shared understandings, integral to imagining a work in the first place and necessary for it to be understood by those who receive it, the archive of African literature. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves in a tradition and center themselves in the world. Mental maps define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions to which producers of texts must respond: where stories are set, who writers write for, how texts have meaning. Writers need to imagine themselves contributing to a body of literature; readers need to understand the field in which texts are produced.