This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.

Chapter 1 provides a long view of the living standards and economic growth from the Mughal Empire to the end of British rule, followed by economic changes in independent India. Living standards are measured in terms of income categories such as average wages and estimates of per capita incomes. I show that Indian per capita GDP was 60 percent of British level in 1600. But Indian per capita GDP began to decline from the seventeenth century, well before the conquest of Bengal by the East India Company. It stabilized in the nineteenth century and stagnated until the end of colonial rule. The economy moved from stagnation to positive economic growth after independence until the policies of regulation and import substitution. Although the rate of growth was low compared to recent decades, it marked a structural break with its historical trend and set India on the path of modern economic growth.

From a scattering of fishing villages on the Kanto plain far from the bustling capital of Kyoto and the centers of samurai power, medieval Edo transformed first into a castle town and military headquarters for the ambitious warrior Tokugawa Ieyasu and then into the early modern capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early 1600s, driven by the logics of military defense and the societal supremacy of samurai, the warrior government built mechanisms and symbols of its power into the city. Edo Castle rose at its center and the rest of the city spun outward in a spiral pattern that shaped where people lived and how neighborhoods developed. As its physical footprint, economic pull, and political importance grew, early modern Edo catapulted over Kyoto and Osaka to become the largest city of the realm in mere decades.

The chapter argues that prior to Hitler’s accession, Germany’s corporate elite was fatefully ambivalent toward Jews: sympathetic to those who were part of it, suspicious of those who were critical of it or newly arrived in the country. This ambivalence meant that corporate executives were generally neither antisemites nor anti-antisemites or that they were simultaneously both.

The chapter argues that Germany’s major corporate leaders largely agreed between 1918 and 1932 on a self-serving analysis of Germany’s economic problems and an unpopular approach to dealing with them (the Consensus) but splintered and dithered in identifying an appropriate political vehicle for these views (the Dissensus). As a result, they neither defended the Republic nor brought Hitler to power.

The moment that Albert the Bear conquered the Wends is often viewed as foundational. So too are the moments when the two settlements of Cölln and Berlin are first mentioned in written records. The chapter sketches the development of the emerging twin trading towns during the medieval centuries, marked by continuing immigration and punctuated by periodic violence and bouts of plague. It concludes with the advent of Hohenzollern rule, when citizens lost their powers of self-government and the city began to be transformed into a courtly residence.

During the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore sought to spread his intellectual ideas in a fight against a scientific racist ideology which presented non-White or non-European individuals as downtrodden and in need of European colonialism to civilize them. Tagore was born in 1861 into a prominent Bengali Brahmin family as the youngest of thirteen children. His family was extremely wealthy, mainly due to the success of his grandfather Dwarkanath who had amassed a fortune through his firm, Carr, Tagore and Co. Dwarkanath had earned a great deal of respect from the British for his business accomplishments. From an early age, Tagore was an avid reader. Heavily influenced by the Upanishads, he was inspired to become a writer himself. In his works, Tagore set out to find unity and “a stability of belief and moral principal to give meaning and order to everything he did.”1 He looked for harmony in all things while paying attention to the deep religious beliefs of ancient India. Tagore believed the “unity of God and his creation was the unity of a creative personality.”2 He expressed his creative passions by writing poetry that had strong spiritual messages. His writings referred heavily to the landscape of eastern India where he described the flowers, forests, birds, and the sacred Ganges River. Many of Tagore's poems created a sense of nostalgia. In one of his poems, titled Shah Jahan, named after the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, Tagore lamented the end of the Mughal Empire, writing, “You are gone now emperor – Your empire has dissolved like a dream, Your throne is shattered, Your armies, whose marching shook the earth, Today have no more weight than the windblown dust on the Delhi road.”3 Tagore believed that the British Raj neglected the histories of the great Indian empires within their schools for Indian pupils. He wanted Indians to be proud of their ancestry, and sought to reassert their cultural brilliance both at home and abroad.

An introductory chapter briefly outlines relevant historiography of courtier studies in general and analyses of elite female servants more narrowly. This introduction establishes important classifications of household servants and demonstrates how roles and terminology shifted over time as the royal court and household grew in both size and complexity over the course of the later Middle Ages. In addition to illuminating categories of female service, the introduction details the sources and methodology employed to produce this analysis of medieval English ladies-in-waiting, highlighting the goals, successes, and limits of this kind of prosopographical methodology. The introduction argues that an analysis of ladies-in-waiting offers insight into female social networks, gender dynamics at court, and issues of power, authority, and wealth, along with how women accessed these features, in late medieval society.

In this first global history of strategic practice, we define strategy making (following K. Kagan) as making choices, prioritising means in pursuit of political ends in the context of armed conflict, actual or threatened. The usage of the term took a long time to spread from the East Roman Empire to the Occident, and most civilisations discussed in these volumes did not have a distinct word to describe what they were doing in the modern sense. Yet by applying Kagan’s definition, we see evidence of complex reasoning and prioritisation of means and ways; even the greatest empires could not pursue unlimited ends. Our volumes bring together experts on each individual civilisation and period to explore analogous dimensions of strategy making: who are the enemies, and why? What means are available to them? What are the political strategic goals? And the central questions: how were ultimate and immediate goals formulated, and how were they linked up with military means? What were the enablers and limitations, in terms of geography, resources and other means, which produced distinctive approaches? But also, was there a transfer of ideas and methods? How were they translated, adopted, enacted, imitated and emulated in warfare around the world?

This book seeks to present an understanding of some of the major social, political, and cultural trends that have lately been shaping (or perhaps better, reshaping) Israeli society. Rapid change is a cardinal feature of nearly all contemporary societies, and Israel is hardly an exception. Indeed, many Israelis take a certain pride and marvel too at the scope and speed of change in their own compact, highly differentiated society and culture.

Here we lay the ground and define the parameters of this project. Definitions of strategy are discussed, giving the rationale for the one chosen to guide our work: Kimberly Kagan’s definition that sees evidence of strategy where prioritisation and choices about means of pursuing political aims at the level of the state (or higher social entity) have been made. This allows us to identify strategic decision making even when no documents have survived that contain explicit articulations of such reasoning.

This introduction outlines the main questions and debates which the book addresses, followed by an overview of the history of the Heimat idea and the study’s methodological approach. While scholars have looked at post-war cinematic and literary Heimat tropes, the book argues for more attention to Heimat as specific sites of home. On the question of the concept’s Germanness, it steers a middle path that recognizes how the history of German-speaking Europe has shaped the concept, while acknowledging its connection to broader questions about place attachment. Rather than positing a single “German” understanding across time and space, the work approaches discussions about Heimat as an evolving and contested discourse about place attachments and their relationship to diverse political and social issues. The introduction continues by outlining the book’s contribution to debates about West German democratization, reconstruction, post-war confrontation with dissonant lives, and expellee history. It concludes by outlining the book’s findings on the history of efforts to eliminate the concept in the 1960s and left-wing attempts to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter examines the institutional bases of the new German state, the constitution, efforts to establish national systems of transportation, communication, law, education, and the military. It also introduces the class of people who most favored these developments.

This chapter outlines attempts by global cities scholars to explain historic networks. Research in global cities studies shows that we are living in an urban age, a high period for intercity relations that promises a reconsideration of history. Today’s world city network emerged in tandem with major shifts in the global economy, along with the gradual erosion of national borders in many spheres of politics. Global cities studies pose two major questions for cities today: First, how are cities shaping globalization? Second, how is globalization shaping lived experiences in cities? Global cities studies, led by John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, and Peter J. Taylor presciently posed these questions in the midst of drastic contemporary changes in the architecture of the world economic system. The emphasis on late capitalism in world cities studies creates problems in the literature in need of challenge. This chapter stresses the need for a political history of city networks, identifying the absence of history of the literature as a flaw in need of change. Today’s world city network is far from a steady state or “end of history.”

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

Managing Mobility tells the story of the British imperial state’s involvement in the huge mid nineteenth-century migrations around the burgeoning British Empire. These migrations involved the ostensibly minimal mid Victorian imperial state in big social-engineering projects that had deeply ambivalent moral consequences. Irish Famine emigration implicated that state in mass death while showing its commitment to convert the Irish countryside from a subsistence economy of peasants and potatoes to an export economy of cattle and sheep. The transition from convict to assisted emigration showed the imperial government’s new commitment to transforming Australia from a set of penal colonies to conspicuously moral colonies of free white settlers. The emigration of ‘freed’ enslaved people from West Africa and indentured workers from India to Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana showed the British imperial state’s commitment to saving plantation society in the British Caribbean from the twin threats posed by slave emancipation and free trade in sugar. The social-engineering projects examined in Managing Mobility provide a novel way to understand the most important story about the British Empire in the mid nineteenth century: its bifurcation into a white zone of growing freedom and autonomy and a Black and Brown zone of ongoing coercion and subordination.

On 15 August 2021, images of heavily armed bearded men behind and around a desk in the Citadel of Kabul were broadcast by media outlets all over the world. They were vividly illustrating the breaking news that the warriors of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Də Afghānistān Islāmī Imārat; henceforth IEA), colloquially known as “The Taliban”, had taken the Afghan capital for the second time, while President Ashraf Ghanī (b. 1949), having precipitately fled his country to the safety of Tashkent, declared his resignation via Facebook. All of a sudden, it seemed, those who had confidently been declared defeated by a USA-led military invasion in late 2001 in reprisal for the infamous al-Qāʿida attacks on 11 September of that year were back in charge.

This introduction sets out the aims and approach of the book. Following an introduction to the Norwegian post-war reckoning and a review of the existing literature on the topic, it argues that only an analysis of the full time span of the trials can uncover their complex dynamics and the changing positions of their key actors over time. The introduction then sets out the analytical framework of the book, which is to explore the – at times competing – legal and political rationales of the trials in face of a rapidly changing political and social climate.