Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organization Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas’s intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the author analyzes the development of Hamas’s various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas’s activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

This chapter discusses the role of Christian churchmen in the credit business and, more broadly, in creating ties of indebtedness in the early Islamic empire. With the help of a multilingual corpus of papyri from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods, it wishes to contribute to a broader conversation about historical expressions of indebtedness in the premodern Middle East, sustained by anthropological literature on the “debt–credit nexus.” It points to the versatility and multilingualism of early Islamicate documents about debt and to their relation to a wide range of activities, going beyond impoverishment due to high taxation.

This chapter explores the significant impact of Nigerians in participating in World War II on the intensification of nationalist efforts and the call for decolonization in Nigeria. It starts by debunking accounts that downplay the role of British colonies in the war and demonstrates that even without the participation of the United States of America, the war would have still been a global affair. It highlights how Nigerians, especially traditional rulers, helped boost the morale of Nigerians to participate in the war and even pledged economic support in terms of kernel production. This was because the British colonies created a sense of solidarity with the British Empire. The chapter is motivated by the following question: what events could have happened throughout the war to have warranted this giant shift in attitudes toward colonialism in the country? This question is answered by tracing the history of Nigeria’s participation in World War II, the effects of the outbreak of war on British colonies, and events that generated the resolve for total self-rule in the aftermath of the war. Taking advantage of the great economic losses and human lives by Britain in World War II, the British’s imperial power and control over its territories became threatened.

London’s seasonal foreign trade reflected its access to northern and continental Europe and the City’s association with the East and West Indies, but coal and other coastal trades dominated daily port activity. London was a tidal river port centred below London Bridge, with waterfront industry spread more widely. Organisationally, it was complex, with many different interests. As foreign trade increased, legal restrictions on landing places for foreign produce were blamed by merchants for congestion. A campaign by mercantile interests for the introduction of docks followed. The author examines the motives here. For leading West India merchants, specialised dock facilities would enable them to control and discipline a directly employed labour force, reducing theft. The eventual outcome, the construction of docks by joint-stock companies, owed much to State support. Its involvement went beyond the introduction of docks. For the government, this was an element of a warehousing scheme designed to develop London as an entrepôt. General port efficiency would be promoted by appointing the Corporation of London as harbour authority.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

From a strategic standpoint, the final years of the American war in Vietnam highlighted a persistent uncertainty over how the conflict would end. Both civil and military leaders wrestled with confusing estimates on the war’s progress. These uncertainties mattered because they influenced the timing of and ways in which US forces withdrew from a war that would not end once the Americans had departed. Despite arguments that General Creighton Abrams had fought a “better war” in Vietnam leading to a military victory, a sense of strategic stalemate hung over these final years. Problems remained in assessing the political aspects of pacification, the staying power of the South Vietnamese armed forces once American troops departed, and the longterm viability of the Saigon regime. By early 1969, Abrams also had to confront political decisions leading to the first withdrawal of US troops, decisions that would pit him against the Nixon administration and bring to the surface grave civil–military tensions. Despite years of effort, a key question remained unanswered as these withdrawals began – how stable would South Vietnam be once Americans departed? Ultimately, these final years left the Americans no closer to answering the question of whether they would achieve “victory” in Vietnam.

What are the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection for thinking, prejudicial or otherwise, about foreigners, race, Jews, sexual orientation, and women? Did Darwin himself, caught in Victorian prejudices, have any awareness of the full implications of his theorizing?

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of international law issues that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and moved towards massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins with the debate about what law applied to the conflict, which turned on the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal legacy of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, the First and Second Additional Protocols, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts.

This chapter claims that the language of rights was central to Catholic thought in the long nineteenth century. Rather than rejecting the concept of human rights, Catholic social theorists, theologians, and church leaders embraced it, and utilized it in their effort to update the Church’s teachings to the era of upheavals. The chapter highlights three spheres in which rights proved especially important. First, in response to the French Revolution and the discourse of individual rights, Catholics argued that rights must be understood alongside correlative duties. Theorists like Nicola Spedalieri and Antonio Rosmini claimed that only the Church’s supervision could secure an order in which individual and communal freedoms were secured. Second, Catholics utilized human rights in their evolving struggle against socialism and its challenge to social hierarchies. Influential writers such as Matteo Liberatore claimed that “true” rights required the preservation of “natural” inequality between employers and workers, ideas that were codified in Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Finally, rights were useful for Catholic mobilization against feminism and sex reform movements in the late nineteenth century. Popular experts of sexuality such as Joseph Mausbach and Friedrich Wilhelm Förster maintained that only heterosexual marriage and the wife’s submission to the husband could realize the two sexes’ “true” rights.

The jurisdictional complexity and layered sovereignty of empires converted struggles over rights – their definition, deployment, and distribution – into contests over authority. This chapter examines the close relationship between authority and rights, together with the emergence of variegated rights regimes, in the British, Spanish, and Russian empires. All three empires relied on long-standing routines for assigning different sets of rights to different categories of subjects. This approach to the history of rights is different from the familiar focus on the circulation of ideas about natural or universal rights. The chapter examines the politics of rights in relation to imperial claims of protection over various groups and in coerced labor regimes. It then turns to the question of how conflicts over rights inside empires influenced global stratification. The right to be sovereign – the right to give rights, to order them, and to protect them – emerged in the long nineteenth century as a capacity possessed and decided by European imperial powers.

This chapter explores the debates over human origins in the popular media to show how the topic influenced the ways in which Darwin’s theory was perceived (and misunderstood). The impact of the public’s fascination with the gorilla as a possible human ancestor helped to sustain the image of evolution as the ascent of a ladder. The cultural evolutionism promoted by archaeologists and anthropologists also adopted the linear model of development. Physical anthropologists saw the allegedly ‘lower’ races as intermediate steps in the ascent from the apes, in effect as ‘living fossils’ filling the gap created by the lack of genuinely ancient remains at the time. The impact of Darwin’s Descent of Man is explored in the context of the existing preconceptions generated in the 1860s. The relationship between general models of evolution and emerging ideas of social evolution, not all Darwinian in form, is explained.