The history of Sino-American relations during World War II can offer a window onto understanding the contemporary relations between the two countries. By way of a conclusion, the chapter offers three main “lessons” from the volume that point toward a new perspective on this critical relationship: 1. We must pay attention to grassroots interactions, 2. Drawing on Chinese sources is critical in understanding relations, 3. We must question our assumptions about the other side.

Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

The origins of Indian indentured migration to the Caribbean revealed the outsized ambition of the imperial state’s commitment to a more ‘useful’ empire. It was prepared to ship Indian labourers literally halfway round the world in pursuit of that ambition – by the hundreds of thousands over the eighty-year history of Indian indentured migration. This social-engineering scheme was highly improvisatory, in ways that were sometimes deadly to its poor subjects. If there had been enough ‘liberated’ African migrants to restore the threatened sugar monoculture of the British West Indies, Indians would never have been recruited. For bureaucrats and planters alike had concluded that the results of the initial 1840s experiment with Indian indentured labour had been, at best, mixed with respect to sugar production, and deadly to a great many of the migrants.

The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

While the Mansfeld Regiment traveled through southern Germany in August 1625, flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze accidentally shot and killed his friend Hans Heinrich Tauerling during a drinking bout. Two days later, one of the regiment’s cavalry companies started a fire in the small town of Remmingen near Ulm. Thick descriptions of these events reveal daily life in the Mansfeld Regiment, as well as attitudes toward masculinity, murder, guilt, drunkenness, and violent death.

The treason trials after 1945 were shaped by Norway’s particular experience of German occupation. The central importance of Nasjonal Samling to German Nazification efforts in Norway meant that those planning for a post-war reckoning soon focused their attention on how to criminalise the actions of party members. This chapter outlines the course of the Norwegian occupation, including the manifold actions on the part of Norwegian citizens that would later give rise to punishment. It details how the exile government in London and the resistance forces in Norway jointly prepared the legal groundwork for the post-war reckoning. In doing so, this chapter highlights the reasoning behind the introduction of the extraordinary legal provisions that would both determine the course of the trials and cause significant controversy after the war.

The chapter examines the methodological conundrums of producing knowledge about past traditions through present-day realities, a dilemma we navigate using the “progressive-regressive” method, a term first articulated by Marc Bloch. But beyond the study of the past, the study of the non-Western world poses particular challenges, which we explicate using Joan Cocks’ concept of neo-cosmopolitanism. The Islamic world, while culturally and historically distinct, has always operated within global circuits of economic and political exchange and has shared social imaginaries with the universal civilization of a given time. Where necessary we transcend the limits of three epistemic postures: Enlightenment liberalism, Orientalism, and postmodernism. We examine the status of “science” in the Abbasid world in relation to Ghazālī’s distinction between profane natural knowledge and sacred signs (āyat). Political fragmentation and economic change overlapped with Islam’s encounter with foreign scientific traditions. Ghazālī intervened to differentiate ẓāhir (the apparent) and baṭin (the hidden) as reconcilable components of knowledge, rendering these encounters theoretically coherent.

This conclusion briefly summarises the main findings of the book. It emphasises that the aim of the book is not to assess the trials from a legal or moral standpoint, but rather to seek to understand what drove different actors at different stages of their implementation. In doing so, the conclusion argues that while the Norwegian post-war reckoning was largely contained in legal form, this did not make the process of coming to terms with the past any easier or less controversial than comparable processes seen in other European countries.

On November 30, 1625, a substantial quantity of fabric from a shipment intended for the Mansfeld Regiment’s third-most-honorable company went missing. The regimental legal establishment investigated the theft but covered up one key detail, revealed at the end of this chapter. This incident sheds light on the way this company interacted with a cloth trade that spanned Europe, in addition to the criminal activities of its captain/owner, regimental quartermaster Wolfgang Winckelmann. The investigation revealed that Winckelmann’s flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze also stole some fabric and distributed it to some men in this company. These men can be traced using social network analysis. This chapter argues that the concept of small group cohesion should be supplemented with the broader concept of military social networks.

The chapter reviews interpretations of Ghazālī’s thought prevalent in debates on political Islam, predicated on Islam’s encounter with the West and modernity, inquiring into Ghazālī’s relevance to contemporary Western conceptions of Islam. Participants consistently invoked Ghazālī in terms of his significance to rationalism. Ghazālī is either depicted as an enemy of Enlightenment or a precursor to postmodern critiques of modernity. We analyze three contemporary Ghazālī representations, including Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), Abdul Latif Salazar’s documentary Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness (2004), and a 2010 academic conference on “The Rise of Intellectual Reform in Islam,” hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center featuring Baber Johansen, Ebrahim Moosa, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Talal Asad. We posit that Ghazālī was a reformer responding to a theologico-political crisis. Ghazālī’s The Alchemy of Happiness, written shortly before 1105 CE, and his dīn/dunyā distinction, separated universal truth from religious identity to secure the autonomy and validity of worldly knowledge crucial to the functioning of the Abbasid Empire.