For several crucial months after the war that brought the Mansfeld Regiment to Milan ended, its superiors forgot it existed and failed to secure funding for it. In summer 1627, the regiment disintegrated. Although Wolf von Mansfeld wanted the regiment to travel north from Milan to liaise with the forces of Albrecht von Wallenstein, it mutinied on the way through Switzerland and only 600 starving men reached Frankfurt am Main. Because these soldiers proceeded to mistreat civilians in the region, this chapter also analyzes atrocities in a flash-back to October 1625. During that horrific month, the Mansfeld Regiment suffered numerous attacks including an incident in which twenty soldiers were killed and their bodies were never found. They retaliated by sacking two small settlements near Alessandria. This chapter also situates the Mansfeld Regiment within events after it fell apart: The eventual Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659.

This chapter analyzes the impact of American funds, technology, and expertise on Chinese civil aviation during the 1940s, focusing on the case of the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). It argues that socioeconomic crisis and disparity both shaped and was intensified by Sino-American aviation projects. Driving forces in cooperation lay in American efforts to establish political, technical, and economic foundations for Pan Am’s planned trans-Pacific routes, as well as Chinese hopes of accessing American technology and funding to support domestic aviation. The resulting programs rarely made concrete progress on this goal. Rather, they reflected the messy entanglement of Chinese and American engineers, businessmen, and officials in a web of quasi-official relationships sharing knowledge, equipment, and financial resources.

This chapter elaborates upon the latter part of the Stockholm Conference preparation period, including key Swedish science diplomacy interventions and the production of three landmark scientific reports on climate change, acid rain, and environmental monitoring. It also recounts the efforts of Maurice Strong and Barbara Ward to reconcile the emerging North–South divide ahead of Stockholm by organizing a meeting of development economists in Founex, Switzerland. The drafting of the Stockholm Declaration, as well as other aspects of the actual Conference, its parallel events, and its final outcomes, are examined. The chapter also explores other important early-1970s developments in Stockholm related to the Conference and the ongoing institutionalization of international climate science. These include the environmental turn at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences embodied by the launch of the journal Ambio in 1972, a large donation to the Academy by a Swedish industrialist that led to the establishment of the influential Beijer Institute, and the convening of another major GARP Conference in Stockholm in 1974.

Three thick descriptions offer detailed accounts of the ongoing squabbles among the Mansfeld Regiment’s third-in-command/regimental quartermaster Wolfgang Winckelman and two officers in his company: flag-bearer Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and lieutenant Felix Steter. These men’s actions demonstrate the importance of individual agency in addition to structural accounts of history, as well as the history of alcohol and drunkenness, dueling, and masculinity.

The subject of Chapter 2 is the tradition of the apotheosis in Mesoamerica, principally Central Mexico. The chapter opens with the context of indigenous political and social organization, and a summary of Spanish penetration of Mexico from 1519. There follows a fictive reconstruction of dialogue between the Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his counsellors in order to offer one plausible, source-based scenario for how the ruling elite might have interpreted the advent of the Spaniards on the basis of rational, pragmatic considerations. The chapter then analyzes the response of Moctezuma and the Mexica, outlines the lack of evidence for an apotheosis in the Spanish and native chroniclers, and examines the significance of Nahuatl terminology, in particular the concept of teotl, which was the word often translated as “god.” The Quetzalcoatl myth (the notion of the identification of Cortés with the god Quetzalcoatl) is presented as a post-conquest construct, devised retrospectively to make sense of the momentous events. The tradition of pre-conquest omens is discussed. No evidence is found that the emperor Moctezuma treated Cortés as a god at their meetings.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.

Although no comparable preoccupation with freedom developed in any other part of the world, each region had its own experiences of it. This was true of Africa, but the difficult conditions of survival promoted a reliance on other values, such as courage, honor, and loyalty. The widespread presence of slavery, only rarely as harsh as in the West, and sometimes entered into voluntarily to ward off some crisis, impeded the diffusion of liberty as a value for society as a whole. Islamic society was pervaded by an egalitarian spirit based on the universal submission of everyone to God, but political rule was absolute once established, and only justice, not liberty, set limits to what rulers could do. Formally an empire, Mughal India displayed many forms of local independence, but those who exercised local authority regarded themselves as channels of sovereign power rather than as barriers to it. In China imperial authority was formally absolute but in practice people enjoyed much freedom of action, even against state officials. As in India, however, these limits on imperial authority were not conceived as liberties, chiefly because the state was regarded as essential to providing the moral order on which stable civilized life depended.

This chapter analyzes Sino-American public diplomacy during WWII by focusing on the extraordinary career of Gong Peng – a cosmopolitan young Communist who worked as an interpreter, informal diplomat, and press attaché at the Communists’ Southern Bureau in China’s wartime capital of Chongqing. Due to the exclusion of the Communists from official US-China diplomacy, Gong Peng secured channels for the distribution of international propaganda by cultivating close friendships with the many American journalists, soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence officers who converged on Chongqing during the war. Gong Peng practised public diplomacy by forging an atmosphere of cosmopolitan sociability – a whirlwind of dinner parties and secret rendezvous, late-night meetings and narrow escapes. The informal practices of public diplomacy that Gong Peng developed in wartime Chongqing likewise contributed to the formalization of “people’s diplomacy” as a key element of China’s diplomatic infrastructure after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.