Although Mo Tianci maintained the ties of vassalage that his father had forged with the Nguyễn, Cochinchina only constituted one important foundation of his rule. He continued The Port’s traditional subordination to Cambodia and actually increased his involvement in the kingdom. He backed a ruler that leaned toward Cochinchina’s rival, Siam. After a succession struggle during the mid-1750s, Tianci emerged as the real power behind the throne. He forged a partnership with Batavia, presenting himself as an Austronesian principality within the sphere of influence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He also integrated The Port with the Chinese community of Batavia. The grandson of the city’s Chinese kapitan took charge of the Qing merchants at The Port, and a translocal justice system ensured the smooth conduct of trade across maritime East Asia The secret to Tianci’s ability to juggle simultaneous identities and allegiances lay in his understanding and manipulation of the conventions of the Sinosphere and the Southeast Asia mandala system. As a result, he achieved outside recognition of the autonomous status of his realm without the need to declare a formally independent state.

Urban structure and interpersonal networks are frequently linked. This chapter draws on the very fine-grained information on the Islamic garrison town of Kufa during the seventh century to exemplarily reconstruct the urban structure and material environment of the quarter of Kinda. Due to the focus of the extant narratives, the discussion is centered on periods of civil strife in which Kufa and the quarter of Kinda were involved. By combining information on the spatial configuration of the quarter of Kinda with narratives describing the involvement of Kindī multipliers in the social history of Kufa, this contribution suggests a reconstruction of the different types of social, urban, and economic capital available to interpersonal multipliers across the first three generations of Islam.

Darwin was no rebel. Every item in his theory of evolution was drawn from his culture or society. However, Darwin reordered the elements, like a kaleidoscope, to produce a truly revolutionary vision of the world – in science, in philosophy, in religion, and in literature, with major implications for our thinking about social issues.

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.

After the Vietnam War, unified Vietnam charted a twisty trajectory in search of its place in the world. This course went through five major turning points - in 1977, 1986, 1989, 2003, and 2014 – as the ruling Communist Party responded to fundamental changes in Vietnam’s strategic environment. Reflecting competing worldviews in the elites, these responses resulted from the struggle between two long-term choices: to reject the Western-led world order and oppose Western influence, or to accept the Western-led world order and adapt Western influence. At a deeper level and from a long historical perspective, this struggle was complicated primarily by Vietnam’s location vis-à-vis China and the major transoceanic routes. If the Vietnam War ended with the triumph of the anti-Western choice, the post-war period has seen Vietnam alternate between anti-Westernism and international integration. Decades of zig-zagging eventually turned Vietnam from an “outpost of socialism” and “spearhead of the world national liberation movement” to an “engaged and responsible member of the international community” and from a fierce opponent to a discreet ally of the United States, while not fundamentally shaking its commitment to denying Chinese regional dominance.

For years now, Kerala has had the distinction of being ruled by a communist-partyled coalition. The communist alliance won the first state assembly elections in 1957, lost in 1960, returned to power, and ruled the state in 1967–70 (first under E.M.S. Namboothiripad till 1969 and then under C. Achuthamenon), 1970–77, 1978–79 1980–81, 1987–91, 1996–2001, 2006– 11 and since 2016. In between, there were years when the state was under President's Rule, that is, the federal government governed it. The composition of the left coalition changed. It was never a body consisting of only the ideologically left parties: the Muslim League and some Christian factions allied with the communists. However, the main constituents of the coalition were the Communist Party of India (CPI) until 1964 and the CPI (Marxist), or CPI(M), after the CPI split into two parties.

In no other state of India, except West Bengal (and later Tripura), did the CPI or CPI(M) command a popular support base large enough to win elections. In common with West Bengal, tenants and agricultural labourers in these acutely land-scarce regions formed the main support base for the party. The communists won elections on the promise of land reforms. There was another historic factor behind their popularity. Caste equality movements coalesced around the leftist movement. Because of their commitment to the rural and land-dependent poor, the left delivered land reforms in Kerala and West Bengal in the 1970s. And in both states, ruling left parties indirectly drove private capital out of trade and industry. Ideological differences within the Communist Party of India led to a split in 1964. A faction led by S.A. Dange tended to have cooperation with the Indian National Congress, which then had a good relationship with the Soviet Union. That and the debates on National Bourgeoisie led to the split.

This is not a paradox. The paradox was that from the 1990s, if not earlier, the left quietly turned friendly towards private capital. By then, agriculture was in retreat, the old base of the left was not significant anymore, and the state was rapidly falling behind India in economic growth (and investment rates).

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.

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 details the circumstances and techniques behind the colonial acquisitions and conquests of Nigeria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details two broad categories of methods used by colonial forces: forceful acquisitions and acquisitions achieved through diplomacy. While broad categorizations of colonial techniques are made, this chapter outlines that different techniques could and were used for every Indigenous polity involved. The strategy behind every colonial conquest depended on numerous factors such as the size, “sophistication,” geography, and local political landscape of the polity in question. However, while the techniques behind the colonial acquisitions could drastically differ, this chapter outlines the common goals behind each strategy: to drive a set of processes that weakened the power and authority of indigenous power structures. This would create a power void that, through gradual or rapid action, would be filled by colonial forces or actors aligned with colonial interests. The reactions and independent actions taken by indigenous polities are equally crucial to the history in question. Like their European counterparts, the indigenous states of Nigeria reacted to colonial meddling and the actions of their fellow polities in many different ways, with varying degrees of success.

Based on Vietnamese sources, some located in the archive of the Communist Party of Vietnam, this chapter depicts the landscape and environment of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965–73). It analyzes the policies of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) to build a North Vietnamese homefront. This chapter argues that, inspired by patriotism, and thanks to sacrifice of millions of people, North Vietnam could simultaneously successfully carry out two interrelated strategic tasks: building socialism in the North and supplying the South. Without building up socialism, there would nothing to supply the South with. And without supplying South, the construction of socialism would be impossible. In short, Vietnam came out of the war victorious thanks to the policy of turning the North into a strong and reliable homefront that served as a material as well as a spiritual mainstay for a long and brutal war.

Situating Enlightenment theories of rights in a broader arc extending back to the Scientific Revolution, this chapter focuses on the Italian jurists and philosophers who incorporated these theories into constitutional thought. Drawing on the works of Montesquieu and Rousseau, in particular, Gaetano Filangieri sought to reformulate arguments about natural rights in terms of a legislative “science.” This science, which would be eagerly received across Europe and Spanish America, sought to incorporate rights and popular sovereignty into constitutional law. Filangieri also drew on Italian intellectual traditions, which (in the case of Antonio Genovesi) insisted on social, alongside individual, rights. Following the influential example of Cesare Beccaria, Filangieri also paid particular attention to rights in penal matters. His constitutional principles were poignantly, if briefly, embodied in the 1799 Constitution of the Neapolitan Republic, drafted by Francesco Pagano.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

Chapters Three concludes the study of this political and constitutional transition by exploring the most important legal reform of this time: the Indian Penal Code (1860). Codification represented a highly political exercise that established the terms of the relationship between the subject and sovereign in India, while also further entrenching ideas of colonial difference into the everyday administration of criminal justice. In this chapter, I first examine how the crisis of 1857 shaped the final design of the IPC. I then pay close attention to the figure of the judge and the institution of the jury. I argue that colonial ideas of caste, culture, race, and gender informed the distribution of discretionary authority across the code in ways that would prove consequential for the administration of colonial justice.

This chapter looks at the different ways in which a free person might come to forfeit their freedom in the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. Although frowned upon and theoretically illegal, free persons might opt, due to extreme poverty or privation, to sell themselves or their family, offering their labor in return for basic sustenance. Otherwise, loss of free status might occur due to a debt default, which, if the sale of a debtor’s assets realized insufficient credit, could see them being forced to work to pay off what they owed. This solution was common in the fouth–eighth centuries, but by the ninth century it was increasingly deemed unacceptable. This chapter considers what led to this shift in legal thinking, the degree to which Islamic law continued late antique practice and the nature of this continuity.

This chapter addresses the relationship between rights and property and the role of each in determining the form of government. It begins by challenging J. G. A. Pocock’s division of the history of political thought into liberal and republican traditions, with the first based on a juridical conception of politics and the second focused on political participation to the exclusion of a concern with rights. David Hume, whose skepticism led him to deny that justice was a natural virtue, traced property rights to an appreciation of their social utility. In addition, like Montesquieu, Hume denied any necessary relation between the degree of political participation in government and the security of rights. Edmund Burke accepted that fundamental rights were ultimately derived from nature, but objected to how the French revolutionaries ignored the role of prescription in stabilizing justice. Ultimately, Hegel broke down the distinction between rights and welfare, drawing on Rousseau and Kant’s emphasis on freedom as the true source of justice and humanity.