In chapter 6, Guarantee at last? (May 26 - June 1), it becomes clear that even though the Austrian parliament passed a law authorizing the government to guarantee Credit Anstalt’s deposits, the struggle is far from over. It is difficult to get information from Credit Anstalt and nervousness about Germany and reparations grows as the Austrian crisis is also developing into a currency crisis. International bankers set up an International Creditors Committee, while the BIS and the Bank of England insist on controllers being associated with the Credit Anstalt and the Austrian National Bank (ANB). Norman confesses to have difficulty separating cause and effect and he grows impatient with the BIS and the ANB.

The development of Russian strategy over a near forty-year period from 1877 to 1914 was characterised by gradual movement towards the formation of modern military forces based on a massive army and developed industry. The foundation for this path was laid out by radical military reforms in the 1860–1870s.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 were fundamentally different from each other in many respects. The first was fought in a thoroughly studied theatre and against a well-known adversary, with whom Russia had fought regularly for approximately 200 years. The second was conducted in a remote and underexplored location against an enemy whose strength was severely underestimated. The land and naval forces involved in the two wars significantly differed as well.

Preparations for a large-scale European war have always remained the basis of strategic planning. An important milestone was the formation of the Russian-French alliance. A possible coalition war against Germany required the adoption of an offensive strategy from the onset of the possible conflict. The First World War was the final test that measured the effectiveness of the efforts undertaken by the Russian government since the period of military reforms.

Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.

In chapter 15, Going off the gold standard? (July 14 - August 21) attention shifts to Great Britain and the weakness of sterling. As pressure on sterling increases, Norman fall sick with ’stress’ and he has to take leave of absence from the bank in late July, only to return after Britain has left gold on September 21, 1931. With Norman out of the picture, his deputy Ernest Harvey takes over as the Banque de France and the New York Fed arrange a $200 million credit to the Bank of England. Tensions arise between Harvey on the one hand and Clément Moret (Banque de France) and Harrison on the other, about the use of the credit. The weakening of sterling continues and in late August, Harry Siepmann writes an ominous note discussing the consequences of Great Britain leaving gold.

Chapter 7 investigates the nationalizations of property adopted by the communist regime during the crucial (formative) six years of its power (1945–1950) and their role in shaping the lives of Jewish individuals and communities, especially in relation to their emigration from Romania. It shows that many Jews feared and opposed the communist measures of nationalizing private and communal property and that many of them were victimized through these dispossession policies in a higher proportion than the majority gentile population.

After the putsch that toppled the Antonescu regime in August 1944, Romania changed sides: It abandoned the Axis and joined the Allies. Even though the new transitional governments proceeded to build a democratic society, formally abolished the Romanianization legislation, and adopted the main restitution laws rather quickly (by the summer of 1945), restitution did not proceed smoothly in practice. A fair, rapid, complete, and permanent restitution of real estate, businesses and other rights did not take place. Restituting Romanianized Jewish property and repairing Holocaust injustices in the aftermath of the Antonescu regime proved to be a complicated process involving Jewish leaders and ordinary survivors, Jewish domestic and international organizations, individual gentile profiteers, Romania’s transitional governments, and political and social groups.

For over 400 years, Sassanid Persia was the greatest state in Asia. To the east, the Kushan Empire was already in decline. The only strong opponent of Iran was the Roman Empire in the west. Military competition for influence in northern Mesopotamia, Armenia and the Caucasus region dominated Iranian–Roman relations, orienting the strategic activities of the early Sassanids to the western fringes of the empire. The breakthrough came in the mid-fourth century, with the emergence of the Kidara Huns in the east. Iran faced a ‘strategic dilemma’: it was crucial to avoid wars on multiple fronts. The Hephthalites or White Huns, became the most important enemy of the Sassanians until the end of the following century; the adoption of such a strategic paradigm enforced the maintenance of peace with the Roman Empire in the west. However, the Sassanian ruler, having secured the eastern territories, was able to move against Iran’s age-old enemy, Rome, this way beginning a period of wars in the west that, with few interruptions, lasted almost until the collapse of the Persian state. Defending such an enormous area was a challenge, as was preventing it from centrifugal tendencies, typical for multi-ethnic states. Despite these factors, the Iranian state managed to assure the territorial integrity of its core areas for four centuries. The tool to achieve this was the army – mobile, efficient, disciplined and motivated.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by discussing the intersection of Assyriology and the history of science. This chapter defines the cuneiform scribal-scholarly knowledge termed ṭupšarrūtu in Akkadian as a basis for understanding the scope and character of cuneiform science.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

This book was originally completed in November 2022, at the time of the Israeli election and the formation of a new government. The Epilogue was added more than a year later, in March 2024. This addition was necessary since Israeli society has been experiencing two unanticipated major crises. First, the government’s planned ‘judicial reform’ divided society into two sharply antagonistic blocs that battled each other for many months. Second, the sudden October 2023 outbreak of the Hamas–Israel War in and around Gaza has already had profound results. The ‘judicial reform’ is presently dormant, while the Gaza War is intense and continuing. This therefore is an ‘interim epilogue’, an analysis of critical events whose outcomes are uncertain, and that will influence and mold society for years, if not decades, to come.