This chapter describes how Hamas operatives set up tactical observation posts during the First Intifada, the years after the Oslo Accord, and the Second Intifada, and explores the systematization of this activity after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Eventually, Hamas established the murabitun, a border patrol force that staffs observation posts and serves as the first responder to any Israeli incursion, and instituted an observation section of the ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The members of the latter section used more advanced equipment than had previously been deployed and documented their findings for in-depth analysis. This chapter also describes Hamas’s efforts to develop and operate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for observation missions.

This chapter explores how Britain’s indirect rule policy was adapted to suit the preference of the colonial administrators and the specific circumstances of different Nigerian societies. It argues that the reasons that account for this adaptation were because Indigenous Nigerians had solid precolonial administrative and governance systems. When the British attempted to implement radical changes, they encountered massive resistance from the local people, resulting in an attempt to solve what the British described as the “Native Question.” It further discusses how Lord Lugard proposed an indirect rule system developed from the principle of the Dual Mandate as a response to the Native Question. However, it recognizes that the indirect rule system was not unique to the British, but was also implemented elsewhere by the Portuguese in Mozambique, the French in Tunisia and Algeria, and the Belgians in Rwanda and Burundi. By implementing the indirect rule system, Britain sought to forge cooperation between the native administration and colonial government. It further traces the history of native administration which back dates to 9000 BC and demonstrates the complexities of the precolonial states (such as the Oyo Empire and Sokoto Caliphate), and their centralized and decentralized administrative systems.

This chapter explores the history of urbanization in Nigeria, focusing primarily on the colonial era and, to a lesser degree, precolonial Nigeria in areas that hosted large, Indigenous urban centers like Ibadan or Kano. This chapter will argue that the primary factor that pushed Nigeria toward urbanization was colonialism, driven primarily by economic interests. This development was informed by Nigeria’s unique geographic, social, and political conditions, the specifics of which will be showcased through the exploration of Nigeria’s most prominent cities. Finally, the chapter will detail the urban policies of colonial officials and the actual development of these cities, along with the challenges that arose from uneven, exploitative practices. These issues would mire Nigeria’s urban landscape with poor planning, crime, poverty, and numerous other challenges which continue to plague the nation today.

More than 2.7 million men and approximately 65,000 women served in Vietnam or in the Southeast Asian theater between 1963 and 1975. Yet much of the literature on the American side of the Vietnam War discusses the role of decision-making by presidents and their civilian advisors, along with military strategy developed and directed by general-grade officers. This chapter instead deals with the combat soldiers and marines who actually did the fighting in the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam. These “grunts” had to first be selected, then trained, then sent to “repo-depots” where they became replacements for those who had been killed or wounded by the National Liberation Front or People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers. They were then sent to the field with their new units and would serve one year before “coming home.” Society would then have to deal with thousands of returning veterans, many with PTS(D) and some with a newly identified condition – moral injury.

The triumph of Darwinian evolutionary biology in the second half of the twentieth century brought social behavior into the picture, although – labeled “sociobiology” – not without controversy. The mechanism–organicism split continued to divide evolutionists, with “Standard Evolutionary Thinkers” firmly mechanist, and challengers “Extended Evolutionary Synthesists” – often appealing to evolutionary development (“evo-devo”) – firmly organicist.

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.

For Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, the significance of rights lay in the value of freedom. The distinctive feature of persons, their capacity to determine their own ends, grounded the obligation of other human beings to respect the conditions of free agency and thus to acknowledge one another as bearers of rights. All understood rights as universal and intersubjective: it follows that rights can only be fully realized in an appropriately constituted social state. For Kant, this meant that rights in the state of nature are merely provisional, and that to make rights claims is to commit oneself to the pursuit of a civil state, indeed to a civil state in federation with other such states, subject to principles of international law and cosmopolitan right. For Fichte, the intersubjective nature of rights was even more central to their meaning, for the guarantee of rights enables our self-understanding as free beings, with the capacity to cultivate our individuality and pursue a distinctive identity. Rights thus understood not only respect our personhood but actually constitute us as persons. Kant’s emphasis on external freedom, freedom from outside interference, led him to focus almost exclusively on property rights, while Fichte recognized far more expansive socioeconomic rights as security the material conditions of free agency. Finally, Hegel’s account, though deeply influenced by Kant and Fichte’s grounding of rights in the value of freedom, maintained that individual rights are insufficient for the realization of complete freedom, which must be realized in common. In so doing he partly anticipated Marx’s critique of the limitations of rights as fundamentally bourgeois property rights and thus as incapable of undergirding truly human emancipation.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

The series to which this book belongs began with the intuition that the pathway of economic change since independence from colonial rule (1947) differed fundamentally between the states of India because their prehistory, geography, political make-up and initial conditions were very different. So large is the difference that each case deserves a book. Contributions to the series will inevitably structure their work to adapt to the specific experience of the states and cannot follow a single template. In that decision, one thing matters: whether to write a chronological narrative or a thematic one.

There is no ideal choice. We decided to follow the thematic format because we wished to concentrate on the main drivers of economic change, like migration, trends in private investment or environmental change, which did not unfold in a coordinated way. We felt a chronological story suggesting that the 1970s saw one kind of change and the 1980s another would miss the point. Still, to keep chronology in the foreground, we discuss the changing character of the state's economy in the introduction and the conclusion (Chapters 1 and 9).

We wish to acknowledge the anonymous readers of the book proposal, and the reader of the manuscript, for their comments and suggestions that significantly improved the quality of this text. We thank Upasana Guha, who provided valuable research assistance, for her careful and diligent work. The help rendered by Rachel Mathew, Dulhaqe S. and Benna Fathima is also gratefully acknowledged.

A note on placenames: Many placenames have changed since 1956. In every chapter, in the first usage we write both old and new names and use the changed name in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 2 on history uses the old names in subsequent usages.

A brief introduction to the life of Charles Darwin and his discovery of the causal role of natural selection in explaining evolutionary change. The effect of the publication of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the long delay and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

This chapter explores the history of Americans’ opposition to their country’s military involvement in Vietnam. Energized by the escalation of the conflict, and the emergence of the wider student New Left, the relatively modest protests that had taken place in the early 1960s soon burgeoned into a genuine mass movement: by the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973 some 6 million Americans had taken to the streets or engaged in other forms of dissent. Highlighting the diversity of activists and the range and creativity of their tactics, the movement’s vital – if sometimes prickly – relations with contemporaneous social movements, and its wide geographical reach, the chapter concludes by evaluating the legacy and impact of American opposition to the war. While the protests certainly helped to shape the nation’s political culture – not least by inspiring subsequent social activism on both the left (gay liberation) and right (the early anti-abortion movement) – it remains far from clear what role, if any, domestic opposition to the Vietnam War had on the eventual outcome on the conflict in southeast Asia.

This chapter proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

This chapter discusses the various social changes experienced in Nigeria during its colonial phase. It brings together the various events, changes, and processes established in previous chapters, focusing on their impacts, specifically on the social landscape of Nigeria. It takes important topics such as women’s rights and industry and explores what they were like in precolonial times, the changes seen during the colonial period, and the social ramifications of these changes. In colonial Nigeria, colonial officials fostered social change to promote British economic and political interests. Generally, this meant the diffusion of Western ideas, customs, material culture, and institutions, among many others. These were to be promoted (often violently) at the direct expense of their Indigenous counterparts (except for Northern Nigeria, which retained many Islamic and Indigenous institutions). The specific impacts of these efforts and the social changes seen during this period will be explored in detail. Finally, the chapter explores the social development of Nigeria’s Western-educated elite. Through direct exposure to Western customs and their hypocrisy, they would organize in opposition to colonial rule, culminating in Nigeria’s independence.