By 1948, the trials had far exceeded estimates for their original time frame. This chapter looks at the effects the growing distance from the occupation had on court practice and the broader administration of the trials. It highlights how the unexpectedly long duration of the trials confronted the Ministry of Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions with two specific challenges: firstly, it emerged that verdicts had been handed down unevenly over time; secondly, broader attitudes towards the trials in civil society had by now changed perceptibly. At the same time, the authorities in charge of the trials had a number of reservations against changing their legal parameters, as they were concerned for their long-term legacy should they be softened. This fundamental tension, along with the decision not to prosecute a number of wartime crimes such as economic collaboration, defined the later stages of the trials.

This chapter examines how the China Institute in America, a New York-based cultural organization that promoted public understandings of China since its founding in 1926, weathered unprecedented financial challenges in the 1940s and 1950s. Much more than a single cultural organization’s bottom line, the China Institute’s trans-Pacific fundraising with different American philanthropists and the Chinese Nationalist government was an understudied bellwether of the shifting political and philanthropic foundations of public discussions of China in the mid-twentieth century United States. Given existing evidence, these efforts were more about the Institute’s survival and its adaptation to increasingly politicized philanthropy than any inherent ideological orientation. A nodal point, active participant, strategic beneficiary, and collateral damage in this philanthropic Cold War, the China Institute amplifies the uneasy engagement between China and the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Following the money allows historians to make better sense of the China Institute’s political posturing in a tumultuous period rather than simply take its public rhetoric at face value.

In assessing the challenges faced by the legal apparatus at the outset of the trials, this chapter demonstrates how the political promises for a swift handling of the trials were jeopardised by the limited capacity of the institutions entrusted with administering them, generating a whole new set of political and institutional tensions. These tensions were in turn compounded by the difficulties faced by the judiciary in interpreting the provisions adopted during the war and applying them to the situation on the ground. In addition, this chapter looks at three distinct groups to whose opposition to different aspects of the trials the Ministry of Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions had to respond to during the remainder of 1945: industrial workers, jurists and opposition politicians. Within months of the liberation, this chapter shows, the trials that were meant to unite the liberated nation had become a politically contested topic.

Mesoamerica is one of only three world regions to have developed pristine cities, that is, without outside influence. Mesoamerica scholarship, especially the influential work of Richard E. Blanton, has vigorously applied world systems theory to the region in a way reminiscent of Mesopotamia studies. Teotihuacan, for which this analysis is apt, bears similarities to today’s migrant magnets, replete with expat neighborhoods and multilingual apartment blocks. Moreover, it reaped the benefit of trade relations outside its sphere, growing to massive size. The chapter culminates with Tenochtitlan, the apogee of Mesoamerican urbanism, at its height when Europeans arrived in 1519. It did not directly hold territory, making the Spanish-derived term “Aztec Empire” somewhat misleading. This chapter stresses the multiplicity of exchanges between cities. Environmental scarcity was central to the ebb and flow of urbanization. Tenochtitlan, like modern world cities, inspired European imaginations much the way Venice did. Its imagery fascinated renaissance figures in Europe such as Albrecht Dürer, in this sense making it the first “global” city.

Although debate has long raged about how to understand the emergence of modern industrial society, it has generally been agreed until recently that Europe’s (and especially Britain’s) pioneering role was enabled by certain distinctive features of its history, economy, or society. Today, however, certain scholars deny this, arguing that other societies had reached a level of development from which a transition similar to Britain’s could have emerged, and that the special trajectory Britain followed was enabled only by accidental or incidental factors or circumstances. The two proposed candidates are China and India, and this chapter takes up and seeks to refute the claims made in regard to each, in the process developing comparisons that show the utility of the categories of autonomy and teleocracy employed throughout this book for the history of industry. The impressive achievements of both countries are acknowledged and described, but growth and sophistication are shown to be insufficient without the structural features that made British society the special case it was.

There is an enduring tradition that the first Europeans in the Americas and Hawai’i were perceived as gods, a phenomenon known as “apotheosis” or “the act of turning men into gods.” The tradition is especially strong in relation to two historical figures: the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the British navigator Captain James Cook in Hawai’i. It is, however, by no means confined to these two figures. Furthermore, considerable explanatory power is attributed to this divine identification: indigenous peoples apparently submitted before the demonstration of godly power. In the heyday of European imperialism – the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – this tradition was accepted uncritically by western historians. In the wake of decolonization, from the 1950s and 1960s, increasing interest in non-European perspectives on these early encounters caused historians to call this interpretation into question. Three key issues emerge: what evidence is there that such an apotheosis took place? If it did not, how did the tradition arise? And how did native peoples in fact perceive Europeans?

Although France and Germany would acquire modern industrial economies after 1850, neither was in a position to do so even a few decades earlier. Only the coming of railroads would give either country the kind of national market that was so important in Britain. The same was true for science in France, but not in Germany, for reasons that had to do with the same fragmentation that kept its economy traditional. The impact of railroad construction made up for that absence in making economic transformation possible, so that organizing spheres in accord with principles derived from the activities carried on within them would come as a concomitant of industrial transformation rather than a precondition for it. Its most striking expression would be the organization of national professional organizations, dedicated to giving doctors, engineers, chemists, and academic researchers control over their own domains, and providing essential services for modern industrial societies.

After having already probed here and there into the earlier political history of the region, our archaeological endeavour proper sets in at the pivotal moment that inhabitants of the Pashtun Borderland developed manifest imperial aspirations themselves.

At that time, the region had been dominated more by views on community and society, alongside mechanisms to put these into practice, which were somewhat at odds with the various forms of imperialism to which they had been subjected. Yet, without the latter, a distinct Pashtun ethnic identity would perhaps not have emerged to such an extent that it could serve as a major element in the ideological justification of their own imperial ambitions. After all, while larger empires around the Pashtun Borderland had emerged and disappeared, the Borderland itself, alongside a distinct ethnic identity which was considered worth defending against external forces, remained rather fluid in shape until the early eighteenth century.

This chapter looks at the cooperation and competition between Chinese, British, and American actors in the context of the changing situation and the decline of British influence in South China during the war. The many military formations and organizations of the three powers, often with limited resources because of their relative perceived importance in their countries’ overall planning, competed for influence in the area while waging war against Japan. While the Americans enjoyed clear superiority in materials and resources, the British in South China relied on preexisting networks and local knowledge. The Chinese Nationalists and Communists, on the other hand, interacted with the British and Americans to advance their positions. In all, despite competition, the Allied forces in South China did operate effectively against Japan, especially in terms of sustaining an air campaign against Japanese logistics and infrastructure in the area, although such cooperation was strained to limits in 1944–1945. The war eventually led to a collapse of British influence in South China and the emergence of increased Sino-American ties.

The legacy of Dietterlin’s Architectura is evident in the enduring role of empiricism across seventeenth-century architecture and natural philosophy. The Architectura served as the culmination of a breed of architectural image-making informed by the humanistic philosophy of learned empiricism, which intertwined the iconography of the fantastical and the occult with empirical ideas and practices. The decline of learned empiricism’s influence over architectural images is already anticipated in Dürer’s Melencolia I, which inspired the final etching of Dietterlin’s Architectura as an elegy to that tradition. Dietterlin’s contributions to the consolidation of architectural images as platforms for empirical scientific inquiry, as well as the waning of learned empiricism, resonated in seventeenth-century England and France, where architectural images eschewed symbolic representations for a novel visuality that foregrounded purely empirical evidence. Dietterlin’s Architectura catalyzed the new relationship between architecture and science by exposing the limits of humanist symbolism and the vast potential of architectural images as agents of empirical thinking, philosophy, and practices.

This book begins with a close examination of Cochin’s natural environment. Barring some notable exceptions, histories of port cities have either completely neglected or failed to adequately engage with the coastal environments within which such cities are located. This has been an unfortunate omission since port cities have of course been fundamentally shaped by environmental transformations. In Cochin, the harbour’s very birth is often attributed to a flood that is said to have swept through the coast in the fourteenth century. Memories of this flood have lingered along the volatile coastline as has the fate of its most prominent casualty, the ancient city of Muziris, which is said to have been destroyed by the very same waters that gave birth to Cochin. From the colonial period onwards, therefore, the eventful history of Cochin’s coastline had begun to attract considerable interest and scrutiny. Through a focus on the discussions surrounding the port’s coastline, this chapter will examine how perceptions of the port’s environment intersected with visions for its development over the course of the late nineteenth century.