The tradition of the apotheosis probably arose through the confluence of native and European beliefs and actions, rather than as simply a one-sided European creation or imposition. Indigenous understandings of the significance of white men originated not with Europeans but with native peoples themselves. Natives are on record as rejecting European claims, and they formed their own view independently. There is no evidence for an apotheosis in Mesoamerica or the Andes in the original sixteenth-century sources, especially those written at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. The myth of Viracocha and the myth of Quetzalcoatl both reflect a retrospective view rather than one held at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival. Europeans channeled a life force that made them “more-than-human,” or “human-plus.” Both native peoples and Europeans interpreted their mutual contact in terms of their preexisting mythology. The traditional contrast between scientific, rational, modern Europeans, on the one hand, and myth-bound, irrational, premodern indigenous peoples, on the other, is entirely misleading. Both groups made interpretations based on reason and rational enquiry, and at the same time employed mythological explanations.

Chapter seven opens with an account of the arrival of Captain James Cook’s expedition at Hawai’i, his association with the native ancestor god, Lono, and his death at the hands of the islanders. It then examines in depth the evidence for Cook’s identification with Lono, and the meaning of the Polynesian concept of mana. The rest of the chapter considers the merits of the two opposing views on how Hawaiians perceived Cook, the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation, and the “Cook-as-Lono-as-myth” interpretation. It suggests that the “Cook-as-Lono” interpretation may be closer to the realities of Hawaiian ethnography, as long as we bear in mind that Lono, as an akua or “ancestor god” bore little resemblance to the western notion of “God;” and that the binary nature of the discussion (two clashing perspectives) may be a hindrance to appreciating a third interpretation which takes account of both sides. For Hawaiians, there was no inconsistency in seeing Cook as, all at once, a (Hawaiian) god, an ancestor spirit, a sacred high chief, and a man; both human and more-than-human (or human-plus) at the same time.

This chapter demonstrates how the overarching reach of the dyad of UGCC versus CPP obscures the culture of debate that predates these two political camps. The intellectual and political histories of Ghana, remain obscured by their heated and divisive debates about how to frame the nation. At the core of Ghana’s foundation debates lie issues of national identity and belonging, legitimacy and power. Issuing a coin that singled Nkrumah as Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor, and the 1958 declaration of Nkrumah’s birthday as Founder’s Day effectively erased and delegitimised other nationalists. Addressing how Nkrumah’s CPP dominated post-independence publications and politics with heavy doses of an Nkrumah as founder narrative, contextualises the accounts by pointing to unequal advantages. The grand narrative is thus complicated and expanded upon. A founder theory communicates the end result while excluding a multiplicity of actors, their debates, and the process. Such information situates the Founder versus Founders debate.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

Alexander the Great envisioned a city network designed to control “spear won” territory in the wake of his conquests. Alexander imagined a world bridging Greek and Asian cultures – a new era of globalization. He was willing to force whole populations across continents to this end, via city mergers, mass deportations, and resettlements. From its Macedonian foundations, the Hellenistic Age had urban roots. Greek economic influence spanned from Afghanistan to the Atlantic. Trade increased markedly, as did cultural exchange. There was unprecedented hybridization, closely reflected in city building. The urban form dwarfed what existed in the old poleis. Their geopolitical importance increased under territorial empires, the dominant form of statecraft. Cities managed flows of resources. They defended trading routes against nomads, projecting royal military power. Out of Alexander’s splintered empire, his namesake Alexandria was the closest realization of his global vision. There were darker sides to this: Alexandria was part of a system entailing political domination over peripheral zones.

This chapter offers a reading of Ebrahim Moosa’s Al-Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, which, through the concept of dihlīz, identifies “the Ghazālian secret” to overcoming false binaries, whether between Ghazālī and his peers or between Islam and the West, as the embrace of a liminal existence. Moosa renders the debate between Ghazālī and the Muslim philosophers (p. falāsifa) of his time as analogous to the contemporary struggle between post-imperialism and globalization. Although his reinterpretation of dihlīz opens new perspectives, we contend that his argument imposes postmodern precepts onto an Abbasid thinker. The historical Ghazālī conceived of the Abbasid Empire in terms of an unfolding divine will and so sought to empower it. Ultimately, we suggest that Moosa marshals Ghazālī to accord mysticism, which replaces objectivity as the “master” paradigm, higher epistemic value than modern reason. This does not correspond to the life and thought of the historical Ghazālī, whose priorities concerned guaranteeing the success of a state project to which he was existentially committed.

The British imperial state’s immigration projects examined in this book were always improvised, frequently challenged, often attenuated, and always circumscribed. Nevertheless, its relationship with the worldwide movement of poor people at the dawn of the first age of mass overseas migration provides an important way of understanding how, two generations after Emancipation, the Empire remained deliberately bifurcated – between white zones of relative freedom and autonomy and Black and Brown zones of ongoing coercion and subordination.

This prologue sets out the rationale of a book-length study of Stockholm as a central place in the rise of global environmental governance. The main reason is necessity. Ever since the 1970s, the importance of the 1972 UN Conference on “the human environment” has been underscored in the scholarly literature. However, precisely how this importance grew and why and how it was linked to Stockholm and Sweden have never been very well articulated. The prologue explains how the book intends to fill this gap with a rich “Stockholm story” based on primary sources. It also elaborates on the rationale of the book’s title. “The human environment” is a play on the multiple meanings of the words “human” and “environment.” Stockholm institutions and Swedish politics provided a human environment for work in science, diplomacy, and activism that engaged a highly international community of insightful human beings and their institutions and networks. Sharing many humane values, these actors have been turning threatened nature into planetary governable objects and hence a prerequisite for global environmental governance.

The caliph Al Mansur literally forged the city plan in fire in 762 CE. His Round City was an architectural symbol of order in a vast combustible empire. Ninth-century Baghdad had relations extending from the Atlantic to China, with tranches of coins found as far afield as Scandinavia. The city was by design the heart of a vast city network at a time of pronounced urbanization, an urban golden age by standard reckonings. At the height of Abbasid power its population was an estimated 840,000. It thereby stretched the geographic boundaries of time and space across Eurasia, a Silk Roads terminus in its own right. Baghdad was one of the world’s preeminent “open cities,” incubating trade, knowledge in art, astronomy, mathematics, amidst a myriad of other cross-cultural exchanges. It attracted generations of scientists, philosophers, planners, and literati, especially from Central Asia. Migratory flows included a durable revolving network linking Baghdad to Merv and other key centers of learning and trade along the Silk Roads. Rapidly expanding Islamic civilization had to develop new forms of city building to spread Dar al Islam (the realm of Islam) across vast disparate realms.

Committed to the same Aristotelian and Ptolemaic principles as their European counterparts, Arab astronomers produced highly accurate records of celestial motions and sought solutions to the same discrepancies between observation and theory. But none of these involved questioning geocentrism; astronomy was often pursued as an aid to religious observance, giving accurate times for holidays and rituals. Copernicus drew on Islamic writings as on many others, but claims that his heliocentrism in some way depended on them are unacceptable, given their unquestioning geocentrism. In his great work on Chinese science, Joseph Needham showed that it was often superior to Western natural philosophy both empirically and in its understanding of basic natural processes. He attributed its failure to produce a Copernican-Newtonian revolution to various external factors. But the notion that it had such potential rests on the false assumption that its strengths were the ground out of which a science capable of overturning the bases of its own practices might emerge. Such a capacity depends instead on the presence of conditions favorable to rendering the sphere of science autonomous. Only in the nineteenth century, spurred by modern chemistry, biology and physics brought by Western medical missionaries, would Chinese science take this turn.

This chapter looks at the ways how, from 1948 onwards, the meaning of the trials changed in light of the broader Cold War context internationally and intensifying criticism domestically. Administratively, the trials were coming to an end. They had, from the perspective of the public authorities, succeeded in their original purposes of securing inner peace and stability during the early months following the liberation. Yet, from 1948 onwards, they became acutely relevant in light of the new political threats and challenges the Norwegian state faced, at the same time as the authorities sought to defend their legacy in light of mounting criticism from some sentenced collaborators and public intellectuals. This chapter therefore argues that the final stages of the trials assumed a renewed demonstrative dimension as the government sought to reassert its administrative and interpretative authority over the trials in a changed political context.

This chapter analyzes interactions between the Mansfeld Regiment and its surroundings, including confessional conflict, fights, burials, and the regiment’s effect on local demographics. The Mansfelders were both Protestant and Catholic, but the regiment was quartered in a Catholic land. Its members fought with or plundered locals. However, its effects on baptism, marriage, and death rates in most of the areas I analyzed were ambiguous. The exception is tiny Pontestura: Not only was the effect of numerous armies magnified in such a small town, but wrongdoings there were less likely to come to the attention of the authorities. I also locate a woman who may have been the wife of the enigmatic regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner in local baptismal records, exemplifying that interactions between Mansfelders and locals were not solely hostile. This chapter examines military death rates, which were awful even outside of combat, and may find evidence of the great Italian plague of 1629–1631 in the deaths of soldiers and other marginal men.