The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

This introduction engages with the story of a generation of Italian Hegelians, who began to engage with Hegel’s political thought shortly after his death, in 1832, and continued to grapple with it until the end of the century. It discusses the contribution of this book to the most recent scholarly debates on Hegel and Italian Hegelianism, to the broader field of the history of political thought, as well as to the research on nineteenth-century Italian political thought. It outlines a new perspective on a time of radical political and intellectual transformation undergone by one of the most spectacular instances of nation- and state-building of nineteenth-century Europe by presenting one of the main feature of modern Italian political thought. It argues that Italian Hegelianism shows that it is in history that philosophy acquires its political relevance.

This study explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. Weaving together thousands of archival fragments, the book recreates the worlds and dilemmas of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, while mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, and a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, these actions were those of everyday and extraordinary individuals who were important intellectual actors in the early modern Atlantic world. They reckoned in their daily lives with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. They discussed ideas about slavery and freedom with Black kin, friends, and associates in the sites where they lived and across vast distances, sometimes generating spheres of communication that stretched across the early modern Atlantic world. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of the early modern Atlantic. This introduction provides an outline of the book’s main argument, methodology, and the six chapters and the coda that follow.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

Often referred to as the ‘Oil Century’, the Twentieth Century marked the rise of petroleum as a pivotal force in global economics and politics. While many studies have explored the political relations between oil corporations and the Iranian state, this innovative book builds an intricate picture of the social history of petroleum in Iran, after its discovery there in 1908. Through expert interviews and on-the-ground reports, Touraj Atabaki shows the seismic impact of oil: from the building of roads to an influx of migrant labour. Offering insights into the lives and challenges of oil workers alongside analysis of wider geopolitical conflicts, Toiling for Oil traverses two world wars, industrialisation and modernisation, attempts at nationalisation in the 1950s and the political crises of the late 1970s. An essential read for anyone interested in Iran’s unique position in the global economic landscape as oil continues to shape our world.

Chapter One examines the historical and legal context that resulted in the abolition of the East India Company and the formal transfer of political sovereignty from the Mughal state to the British Crown. It focuses on the Uprising of 1857 and is arranged around two questions: How did the colonial state attempt to erase the memory of Mughal sovereignty and the popular character of the violence enacted in its name, and what role did mercy play in this story? The chapter positions the trial and punishment of Bahadur Shah Zafar II as a founding trial of colonial sovereignty which exposed both the extraordinary violence and the absolute limits of colonial sovereign power. A former sovereign would be transformed into a criminal and brought within the British imperial order, but for the sake of the future legitimacy of this political project, he could not be killed.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in the European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Overall, the transformations of rights during this period were so great that it can make earlier expressions of rights seem unrelated. But, as this volume shows, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a crucial time of transformation, repackaging rights for a modern world

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

This chapter explores the transition from a medieval picture of manorial courts as being focused on seignorial concerns to an early modern picture of being focused on community concerns. Through categorising presentments, it demonstrates that the role of manorial officials went through two transitions between c.1300 and c.1650. Firstly, there was a shift away from seignorial and royal business to a community-focused ‘little commonwealth’ where courts worked to maintain local infrastructure and common lands. In a second transition, in the seventeenth century some courts began to be purely focused on land registration and transfers. However, these changes occurred in the context of local variation and a wider East Anglian versus western/south-western divide. These findings support two conclusions. Firstly, they challenge a narrative of the decline of manorial structures, showing how the adaptability of courts allowed them to be put to a wide range of uses by communities. Secondly, they highlight that manorial institutions were not imposed by lords in a top-down process, but were shaped by local officials, who recognised the utility of these institutions for their own purposes.