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.

What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

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.

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

This chapter demonstrates the routine prevalence of forced labor in Germany prior to World War II, its expansion during the early years of the fighting, the slow introduction of concentration camp slave labor to the German economy, and the reasons for its adoption by nearly every major German enterprise. Contrary to common belief, the chief motivation driving both processes was the shortage of German workers, thanks to conscription and wartime demand for output, not the cost of the forced and slave laborers. But the great growth of German industrial capacity during the war owed much to these labor inputs.

Adolf Hitler sought to transform Berlin as capital of the Nazi Third Reich. Berlin’s topography of power changed dramatically, including the construction of grandiose new buildings and the imposition of ideological visions on both housing and public spaces. Nazi plans for ‘Germania’ were never fully achieved; instead, the impact of Nazi rule was destructive. The overwhelming majority of Berlin Jews who did not flee abroad in time were ultimately deported to ghettos, slave labour, and extermination camps, as were Roma and Sinti; only a tiny minority survived. During the war, Berlin’s already militarised architecture was massively augmented by the building of flak towers, bunkers and air-raid shelters. By the time of defeat in 1945, the city lay in ruins, devastated by the effects of bombing and having been forced to continue fighting to the last. Surviving Berliners eked out a living among ruins, searching for food and fuel, and fearing rape or robbery by Soviet troops.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

By the 1960s, quite different societies were developing in the two halves of Berlin, one under capitalist auspices and the other under communism. With West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the early 1970s, a series of treaties resulted in recognition of the GDR and easing of travel restrictions from west to east. Under GDR leader Erich Honecker, the modernity of ‘actually existing socialism’ was expressed in an energetic housing development programme, significant public buildings, and some leeway for cultural experimentation; yet the secret police or Stasi continued to expand, and the physical apparatus of the Wall was further refined. Divergent identities between East and West were evident not only in differing political ideologies, social profiles, and degrees of freedom, consumerism, and material well-being, but also in patterns of historical memorialisation. In the 1980s the economic and environmental decline of the GDR became ever more visible. Growing unrest culminated in challenges to communist rule and the opening of the Wall on 9 November 1989, and led to German reunification in October 1990.

With the foundation of Imperial Germany in 1871, Berlin became capital of an enlarged and increasingly significant Empire, or Reich. Unification precipitated an economic boom, soon followed by a crash; but industry continued to expand rapidly, with an exponential growth of the population through immigrants seeking work in the city. In the half century following unification the population quadrupled, from around one million in 1871 to nearly four million in the expanded metropolis of Greater Berlin in 1920. New forms of transportation altered the dynamics of the city, while adequate housing and public health became matters of growing concern. In an era of competing nation states, Imperial Germany too began to acquire overseas colonies, including in southwest Africa and eastern Africa (today’s Namibia and Tanzania) as well as elsewhere in Africa and the Pacific. But defeat in the First World War shattered the dreams of the newly rich, the imperialists and colonisers, those who trumpeted racial superiority and dreamed of world mastery.