Chapter 11 chronicles the efforts of Nigeria’s colonial government to construct and consolidate an effective administrative and legal system, detailing the numerous challenges faced in this endeavor. This “system” of law of order was not singular, varying from region to region, nor was it static. Over the colonial period, its legal, judicial, and law enforcement systems would evolve to better suit the wants and needs of the British Empire. Once an aspect of this system is explained, the chapter explores their broader impact on the pre-existing Indigenous institutions and people.

Standard narratives of the American war in Vietnam contend that the US Army squandered its chances of victory because of misguided strategy. Such works claim that once President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed American ground combat troops to South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, the US military commander in Vietnam, pursued an ill-advised strategy of attrition. Worse, these narratives continue, the general implemented this strategy despite being presented with a clearly better alternative from US Marine Corps commanders operating in the northern provinces of South Vietnam. Such conventional wisdom, however, presents a flawed understanding of American strategy under Westmoreland, who never subscribed to an “either–or” approach to confronting the political-military threat inside South Vietnam. At no point did Westmoreland concentrate solely on conventional battle at the expense of counterinsurgency. Likewise, the general never believed local civic action or pacification programs to be a panacea. In reality, American strategy from 1964 to 1968 rested on a belief that South Vietnam was facing a dual threat – both conventional and unconventional – that required a similarly comprehensive response. By reexamining American strategy under Westmoreland, one finds no “missed opportunity,” a conclusion that raises important questions about the limits of American military power abroad in the mid-1960s.

Superficially, the Vietnam War might seem a high point of congressional resistance to the Cold War consensus. After all, two consecutive presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, faced ferocious criticism as they expanded the US military commitment in Southeast Asia. Yet for most of the Johnson and Nixon years, Congress was mostly reacting to executive decisions, and struggled to stop either the escalation of the war under Johnson or its expansion under Nixon. Ironically, perhaps the best chance for Congress to influence Vietnam policy came before a significant commitment of US combat forces, during the Kennedy administration. Yet for a combination of ideological and tactical reasons, members of both the House and the Senate who might have been inclined to challenge the administration’s approach to Vietnam declined to do so in a meaningful way.

President Lyndon Johnson reluctantly began the sustained bombing of North Vietnam with Operation Rolling Thunder on March 2, 1965. Johnson initially thought that gradually increasing attacks against the North Vietnamese heartland might break the North’s morale and end its support of the insurgency, but the significant restrictions that the president placed on bombing limited its effectiveness. More importantly, the character of the war fought by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese – an infrequently waged guerrilla conflict that required minimal supplies to wage – negated the utility of bombing the North’s supply lines, oil, and its meager amount of industry. Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, air force, navy, and marine fighters and helicopters supported American and South Vietnamese ground operations, as did US Air Force B-52s, which began bombing Southern targets in a massive campaign known as Arc Light in June 1965. Compared to bombing the North, air attacks on South Vietnamese territory had few limitations and often inflicted significant civilian casualties. Though air power often tilted the scales toward American forces in rare conventional engagements like Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, it could not guarantee survival of a Southern government that was fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with its populace.

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 traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.

Amongst the thousands of papyrus and paper documents from medieval Egypt written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic there are a large number of letters of requests and petition letters. This chapter examines how the senders of these letters used the argument of being alone and helpless to persuade the letter’s recipient to undertake some action to help the petitioners. By presenting the petitioner as someone without friends, family or anyone else to help them, a relationship is created with the petitioned who can help based on the social and moral expectations that prevailed in early Islamic Egyptian society.

Chapter Four focuses on how the colonial judiciary and the local government wielded the discretion available in the IPC to manage the punishment of capital crimes. The chapter begins by studying the implications of the new High Courts Act of 1861. I then explore sentencing practices for the crimes of domestic murder and infanticide to consider when and why decision-makers passed more or less severe punishments. I argue that the decision to save some subjects from the gallows helped the law build vital but ultimately fragile alliances between local elites as colonial authorities sought access to the most intimate and politicized areas of Indian life. This process also sharpened colonial terror by regulating the decision to send certain subjects to their death.

This chapter seeks to elucidate the confusing rhetoric about rights at the time of the American founding. Influenced by social contractarian principles and common law traditions, American elites generally thought about rights in three ways. Inalienable natural rights, such as religious conscience, were aspects of freedom that individuals could not rightfully surrender to the control of the body politic. Retained natural rights, often summarized as life, liberty, and property, were rights that individuals voluntarily retained upon entering into a political society but that were regulable by law in promotion of the public good. And fundamental positive rights, such as the right to a jury trial, were rights that individuals acquired only upon the creation of political society. By recovering these categories, the chapter attempts to show not only the malleable and multifaceted nature of eighteenth-century American rights talk but also its overall intelligibility.

The Nguyễn lords initially sought to control Mo Jiu and his descendants by means of stationing troops, marriage alliances, and symbolism and ritual. Jiu managed to secure autonomy for his realm by forging ties with horizontal translocal networks. Buddhist monks connected him to other Chinese communities while serving as intermediaries to the Cochinchinese state. The remnants of the Dragon Gate under Chen Shangchuan’s descendants bolstered Jiu’s military capabilities while helping him forge ties with the Qing Guangdong gentry. He further sought to provide a welcoming climate for Chinese merchants, sojourners, and immigrants by manipulating allusions in Chinese history, especially the Tang, in labeling and categorizing the major landscapes and features of The Port. The Austronesian networks helped him forge ties with island Southeast Asian ports, while the Portuguese creoles set up a mint. The brief Qing maritime ban in 1717, which exempted Vietnam, cemented The Port’s role as an emerging transshipment point, natural resource exporter, and financial center able to interact and compete in its own right with more established emporia, such as Guangzhou, Batavia, and Ayutthaya.

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.

Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in the European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Overall, the transformations of rights during this period were so great that it can make earlier expressions of rights seem unrelated. But, as this volume shows, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a crucial time of transformation, repackaging rights for a modern world

This chapter recounts the Vietnam War in the context of the Sino-Soviet competition for leadership in the global communist movement. It shows that after Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in October 1964, the Soviet leadership sought to build up their own revolutionary legitimacy by supporting Hanoi’s war effort. The Chinese leaders resented Soviet involvement, and tried to dissuade North Vietnam from overdependence on Moscow. However, China’s descent into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution lessened Beijing’s leverage over North Vietnam. From the late 1960s, Hanoi increasingly began to tilt in the Soviet direction, beginning a geopolitical shift that would completely reshape the region in the coming years.