This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

This chapter discusses the subject of archives: what they are, how they are uniquely constructed and preserved, their importance for creating historiographies and scholarly traditions, how they are subject to human error, the consequences of said error, and alternative sources of historical records. These topics are explored primarily through the case study of Nigeria’s Colonial and National Archives. The chapter will explain how the Colonial Archives were used as tools to extend colonial power while also springboarding African historiography through consequential and highly problematic methods. Next, it will explore the transformation of the Colonial Archives into Nigeria’s National Archives, pioneered by Kenneth Dike at the University of Ibadan. This transformation fostered significant changes in Nigeria’s historiography, the details of which will be examined. The chapter will also address the many issues present within Nigeria’s National Archive. Finally, it will explore the alternative voices to the domineering Eurocentric frameworks in “modern” (colonial) African historiography. They include but are not limited to written documents from Northern Nigeria, such as the Kano chronicles, oral traditions from the Yoruba and Igbo peoples from Nigeria’s south and east, rituals, customs, festivals, and much more.

A large number of Arabic decrees (ar. sijill, manšūr or marsūm) from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk periods have been preserved in Christian, Jewish and Muslim caches. Besides original pieces, dozens of documents that are now lost have survived through copies made in chancery manuals. Although S. M. Stern and more recently Marina Rustow have sought to find continuities between the Fatimid decrees and their Abbasid forerunners, so far there is very little concrete evidence and, above all, no identified decree for the Abbasid period. In this article, Naïm Vanthieghem argues, as both suspected, that this genre indeed had forerunners in the Abbasid period, of which five have survived. Besides a study of their formulary, structure and script, the article tries to reconstruct how they worked and were used and how far this genre spread out through the Empire.

Most of the available statistics on the Vietnam War come from the US government. Those for US military personnel strengths in Vietnam, and US casualties, are relatively accurate. Most of the rest are problematic. Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces personnel strengths were exaggerated; more men were listed on unit rosters than were actually serving. US figures for RVNAF casualties were below the actual levels in some periods. US estimates of communist personnel strength were usually well below the actual level. In US figures for communist losses, inflated “body counts” were balanced by communist personnel who died under circumstances not allowing US or RVN forces to count their bodies, so the overall totals may not have been exaggerations. The United States used air power on a huge scale. The bomb tonnage delivered on South Vietnam was the largest for any country in history, and that on Laos the second-largest. But it was indigenous forces that did most of the ground combat and therefore suffered most of the losses. The number of RVNAF personnel who died was far larger than the number of Americans. The number of communist personnel who died was larger still.

At mid-century, the north bank companies faced two main problems: wharf competition and the failure of earnings to keep pace with an increase in the shipping and cargoes handled. Adding to these challenges from the 1860s was accommodating steam shipping by investment in facilities, including new docks, and in the 1880s, a resurgence of fierce rivalry between themselves and a financial crisis created by the new Tilbury dock resulted in effective amalgamation. Their common response to diminishing profitability was the introduction of sub-contracting – to the detriment of the lives and livelihoods of a resistant workforce. Skilled port workers were unionised, unskilled generally not, but strikes by particular groups were not uncommon. Port-wide action by dock workers in the 1850s failed but stoppages in the early 1870s achieved wage rises, as also did the port-wide 1889 Great Dock Strike.

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.

This chapter explores two major anthropological ties: sharing food and contracting marriage in the Syrian-Orthodox church and the early Islamic community in the first Islamic century. To consolidate their authority over pagan and Christian Arabs, both early Syrian-Orthodox bishops and proto-Muslim authorities such as the readers of the Qurʾan (qurrāʾ) had to build religious communities. Miaphysite clerics attempted to separate those who were undoubtedly Christians from those who were uncertain. Banning interfaith social bonds among laypeople through canonical rulings proved to be the most effective legal method to confine them to their specific communal church. It seems that Muslim scholars also sought to delimit their own community (umma) by prohibiting their followers from engaging in the same social relations: through restrictions on food and marriage but not here relations with all Christians, as the Qurʾan permits these, but especially with the liminal category of “Christian Arabs.” To prevent the risk of diluting their umma, Muslim scholars, in turn, developed the same argument as Syriac scholars: that (Christian) Arabs were (crypto-)pagans.

This chapter situates the economic history of the Vietnam War in global context. Beginning in the colonial era, it situates the wars origins in relation to the extractive logic of French colonization. But the United States acted in Indochina for different motivations. Animated by geopolitical fears more than acquisitive purposes, US policymakers pumped economic resources into Vietnam from the early 1950s, wreaking devastation in the process. The war was asymmetric, but the resources Washington committed were sufficient to destabilize the US economy, hastening the end of the postwar boom. For all its might, the United States failed to subdue the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Instead, Soviet and Chinese resource flows and Hanois highly effective war mobilization sustained the communist war effort against improbable odds. But solutions that proved effective at waging war proved less effective in the production of peacetime growth. After 1975, Vietnam stagnated. A decade of economic failure prompted the Vietnamese Workers Party to mobilize the defeated Souths experience with global capitalism from the mid-1980s as a resource that could inform Vietnams reengagement with the world economy and the United States.

In 1956 (and even now), two distinct types of agriculture existed in the state: cultivation of seasonal field crops and cultivation of tree crops. The latter held steady in the long run. But traditional agriculture, especially paddy cultivation, for which the lowlands and the river basins were especially suitable, has seen a relentless decline since 1970. Twenty years into the new millennium, traditional agriculture was an insignificant employer and earner, and for most people still engaged in it, the land provided no more than a subsidiary income. A relative retreat from traditional agriculture is not news. It happened everywhere. In the state the fall was spectacular.

What was this a change from? Although agriculture employed a smaller proportion of the workforce than in India at the start of this journey, it was not a marginal livelihood. Land control secured the political power of the elites in the princely states. A variety of crops were cultivated throughout the state, from monsoon rice to tapioca, ginger, groundnut, sugarcane and pulses. Most were rarely traded outside the region but were vital to sustaining local consumption. Good croplands occurred in clusters. Because of the topography, land available for the cultivation of traditional field crops was less than half the total land area of the state. Alluvial soil occurs in a narrow strip along the coast or in river valleys. Land elsewhere is not as fertile, though frequently suitable for tree crops. Unlike in most regions of India, access to water was not a serious problem. Soil quality and drainage of excess water were bigger problems.

Good land, however, was extremely scarce relative to the population. The exceptionally high population density in the areas of cultivation ensured a level of available land per head that was a fraction of the Indian figure (0.6 acres against an Indian average of 3.1 acres around 1970) and low by any benchmark. Partly, the density reflected high labour demand in lowlands to deal with drainage and seasonal flooding. Paddy yield was very high in these areas, but paddy cultivation needed a lot of people. From the 1940s, this zone in the middle was emerging as a political battleground.

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.

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.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

Evolutionary ideas were in circulation before Charles Darwin began his work and were widely disseminated, arousing much controversy. In addition to the writings of Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather), French ideas gained some currency in the English-speaking world, especially the views of J. B. Lamarck. These ideas were taken up by radical thinkers who rejected divine creation, to the horror of conservatives. Early discoveries of fossils played a significant role in arousing public interest in the history of life and were often seen as evidence that life had ascended a scale of development (the chain of being) toward humanity. The first-known dinosaurs were fitted into the chain as gigantic lizards, not as evidence of creatures totally unlike anything now alive. This model was adapted to middle-class values in Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, again arousing controversy but gradually gaining some credibility beyond the scientific community.

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.