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.

This chapter places the actions of the Mansfeld Regiment within the context of military pay for the Saxon army during the 1620s. Pay for individual infantrymen varied substantially, and this chapter argues that it can be used as a proxy to determine these men’s social status. Mercenary soldiers and female members of the military community could act as subcontractors in their own right, which shaped the way they found sexual partners. Pay in the Saxon army in the 1620s seems high, and was disbursed on time. Although the Saxon army was at paper strength throughout the 1620s, this massive outlay may have been one reason Saxon finances fell apart in the 1640s. Meanwhile, the Mansfeld Regiment was paid far less than the customary rate in the Saxon army, and was swindled by the Governor of Milan.

In fall 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William K. Evans, the US Army’s chief civil affairs officer in Taiwan, smuggled sixty kilograms of gold bullion that he confiscated from the Japanese Tenth Area Army and offloaded it on Shanghai’s black market, returning to the United States with $108,000 in cash (worth approximately $1.5 million today). The gold was supposed to go the Chinese Nationalist government. Although US military authorities found overwhelming evidence of Evans’ guilt and had recently sentenced another colonel to ten years in prison for a nearly identical crime committed in Tokyo, Evans walked away a free man after a protracted Sino-US diplomatic struggle and two mistrials in federal court. By examining the Evans case, this chapter sheds light on the transition from extraterritoriality and formal colonialism to America’s postcolonial model of using status of forces agreements (SOFAs) to exercise jurisdiction over US forces stationed abroad.

Managing Mobility tells the story of the British imperial state’s involvement in the huge mid nineteenth-century migrations around the burgeoning British Empire. These migrations involved the ostensibly minimal mid Victorian imperial state in big social-engineering projects that had deeply ambivalent moral consequences. Irish Famine emigration implicated that state in mass death while showing its commitment to convert the Irish countryside from a subsistence economy of peasants and potatoes to an export economy of cattle and sheep. The transition from convict to assisted emigration showed the imperial government’s new commitment to transforming Australia from a set of penal colonies to conspicuously moral colonies of free white settlers. The emigration of ‘freed’ enslaved people from West Africa and indentured workers from India to Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana showed the British imperial state’s commitment to saving plantation society in the British Caribbean from the twin threats posed by slave emancipation and free trade in sugar. The social-engineering projects examined in Managing Mobility provide a novel way to understand the most important story about the British Empire in the mid nineteenth century: its bifurcation into a white zone of growing freedom and autonomy and a Black and Brown zone of ongoing coercion and subordination.

Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India’s southwest coastline. Devika Shankar probes this complicated relationship between crisis and development through a focus on a port development project executed in Cochin in the first quarter of the twentieth century amidst significant political and ecological uncertainty. While ecological concerns were triggered by increasing coastal erosion, a political crisis was precipitated by a neighbouring princely state’s unprecedented attempt to extend its sovereignty over the British port. This integrative environmental, legal and political history brings together the history of British India and the princely states to show how these anxieties ultimately paved the way for an ambitious port development project in the final years of colonial rule. In the process, it deepens our understanding of environmental transformations and development in modern South Asia and the uneven nature of colonial sovereignty.

This chapter analyses the ways in which the government sought to respond to the mounting administrative and political pressures on the treason trials in 1946 and 1947 and how the courts adjudicated on a wide range of offences, gradually producing a vast corpus of verdicts against the backdrop of a rapidly changing political climate. By this stage, the legal apparatus was struggling with the workload and the trials were being subjected to increasing social and political scrutiny, with many groups now cautioning that the trials were too harsh. These pressures, coupled with the need for legal consistency, produced an enormous dilemma for the authorities in charge. The complex balancing act between legal consistency and political and societal change, this chapter argues, reflected how the initial consensus around the trials was beginning to collapse.