After a few years of competition following the end of monopolies and exacerbated by the new St. Katharine’s Dock Company, rivalry was muted by rate agreements and the amalgamation of the East and West India Companies. However, except in the Baltic trade south bank docks, regional cargo specialisation to a large extent came to an end. All north bank companies had a core of permanent employees, but most were casually employed. Company records reveal how managers organised, motivated and disciplined their labouring workforce and also how those men with particular skills resisted such control. Relations with the Customs could also be difficult. In 1848, both the London and St. Katharine’s companies were raided, accused of defrauding the revenue by passing off sugar as waste. After a very public row, significant reputational damage to the companies and the intervention of a parliamentary committee, a compromise was reached.

The transition from sail to steam shipping shaped the later-nineteenth-century Port of London. When limited to river trade and traffic, steamers had little effect on facilities. Once improvements in technology extended the economic viability of steamers on ever more distant passages, larger and deeper docks were needed. This led to existing facility improvements and downstream docks. The new steam port, served by major shipping lines, depended on barge transhipment of cargoes to waterfront wharves, which flourished as a result. Trade volumes responded to metropolitan population growth, but the national share remained stable or fell. Wool and grain replaced sugar as leading trades. Re-export business declined. The capital’s relationship with the port changed. In the 1860s, its perceived importance led to the rejection of an eastern Thames embankment. In the 1880s, Tower Bridge went ahead.

This chapter highlights the crucial role of property in the history of rights, both as one of the key concepts driving the development of rights theories (and protections) onward from an early time, and their modern adaptations in the eighteenth century. Given property’s oversized importance in this history, it is surprisingly missing from many recent accounts. But since the French Revolution, property has been at the heart of most political efforts to secure and protect rights. As this chapter demonstrates, the centrality of property for so many later reforms can in large part be credited to the insistent claims of the Physiocrats. Political society, they argued, must extend natural rights, rather than replace them with positive laws. Economic circulation was itself part and parcel of a “natural order,” with subjective rights at its basis. The chapter suggests that contemporary theories and assessments of the role of rights in political society remain partial as long as they do not include an understanding of the historical role that property has played among them.

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 the outset, US military intervention in Vietnam provoked popular campaigns and mass rallies in support of the United States global anticommunist agenda. While these early initiatives were often orchestrated by rightwing activists long versed in the practices of populist anticommunism, the burgeoning of domestic opposition to the war intensified and greatly diversified prowar activism. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders rallied popular support in favor of total victory but later endorsed Richard Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” As the war dragged on, internal divisions eroded the confidence of prowar conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Rightwing activists still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement and wider social changes. In so doing, conservatives altered the nature and direction of their agenda, and furthered a new majoritarian political coalition. This chapter explores the origins and nature of these grassroots campaigns in support of the Vietnam War and demonstrates that the groundwork for a decades-long resurgence in populist rightwing patriotism was born amidst domestic strife over American purpose in Vietnam.

The chapter sheds light on Hamas’s signal intelligence (SIGINT) and cyber warfare. It describes how, in the first decade of the 2000s, Hamas gained SIGINT capabilities that made it possible for Hamas to intercept the camera broadcasts of IDF UAVs, as well as the IDF’s visible tactical communication traffic. In the 2010s, Hamas began to invest in cyber warfare. This chapter also surveys Hamas’s successful use of various hacking methods to penetrate the smartphones of IDF soldiers and officers, extracting information and installing spyware and using social engineering techniques; descriptions of several real-life cases are included for illustration.

Kerala Is Different … Not the Way You Think

The book began with a one-liner – ‘Kerala is different’. The series to which this book belongs emerged from the intuition that every state in India ‘is different’. Kerala was not more different than Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or West Bengal. Geography and resource endowments, social conditions such as patterns of inequality, politics and markets were significantly dissimilar between the larger Indian states, and sometimes between regions within these states. Scholars doing development or history have not explored the differences enough.

And yet that shallow slogan has had an unparalleled impact on development discourse in the late twentieth century. Why has this one state drawn so much attention in the development scholarship? Because of a misreading of its economic history, the book argues.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the state's economic trajectory can be summed up, if crudely, with a chart with three lines, one measuring economic growth and the other two education and life expectancy. The state's position relative to India fell with the social indices but dramatically improved with economic growth. A preoccupation with social development lacks a strong justification, at least for economic historians of the state. The more challenging task for us was explaining the economic growth divergence with reference to prehistory and the state's geography.

The misreading emerged in the 1980s through an overstatement of human development performance. Many scholars inferred that the state's political ideology was more enlightened and developmental than that of other Indian provinces and that the state government's heart was in the right place. Whether due to the communist movement or Travancore and Cochin's princely heritage, the governments prioritised poor people's access to primary education and healthcare. Others further claimed that the state showed the world that economic growth was not needed for development.

This reading is not wrong. But, historically speaking, it is a naive reading. It is naive for three reasons. First, suppose Kerala was ahead of India in the 1950s and 1960s. In that case, a story of enlightened government does not make much sense because governments were relatively small then, and many factors besides the government were at work behind the initial advances in education and health.

This chapter concentrates on the pivotal figure of Jean Barbeyrac, translator extraordinaire of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, and others. A French Huguenot refugee, Barbeyrac introduced the great Protestant natural law treatises to a French (and ultimately English) audience. But Barbeyrac was much more than a translator. He recast earlier natural law theories around individual conscience and made subjective right the foundation for society and politics. Where Grotius and Pufendorf had conceived of permission or “natural liberty” as the freedom to do whatever the law did not forbid (and thus, not really a right), Barbeyrac insisted a contrario that both natural and civil law tacitly determined – and thus legalized – what was permissible for subjects to do. For Barbeyrac, rights thus took precedence over duties, though only because every action had been made permissible by God. He extended this argument to property, which originated from a God-given natural right to first possession.

In the late twentieth century, television provided more immediate ways of representing the processes of evolution, while the press increasingly seized on debates arising from their human implications. Progress remained an important theme, although the image of a linear ascent to humanity was usually qualified by recognition of diversity. The air of unity promoted in the synthesis era evaporated as biologists explored new and disturbing implications of the selection mechanism, including sociobiology and the notion of the ‘selfish gene.’ Studies of primates were used to throw light on human behaviour. Along with new challenges to the plausibility of the Darwinian theory, the resulting controversies were played out in a blaze of publicity. Darwinism also had to be modified to take account of growing evidence for discontinuities in the ascent of life, including mass extinctions. Creationists presented these ‘Darwin wars’ as evidence that evolutionism was losing its credibility even within science.

This chapter calls attention to the dream world of aesthetic representations that almost immediately engulfed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as its 1793 successor. These representations played an important political role, notably by legitimating and disseminating the foundations of the new regime. This visual language, widely viewed as more popular and (after 1792) republican, also influenced the meaning of the Declaration, by emphasizing both its universal applicability to all (including, eventually, enslaved) peoples, and its “lethality” for both internal enemies and foreign tyrants.

This chapter seeks to discern the nature of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and military contribution it made to the wider Vietnam War. Often written off as a mere stooge of the West or a puppet of imperialism, the ARVN needs to be understood as a Vietnamese institution. Though it grew from the shattered wreckage of French colonialism and served a flawed American war effort, the ARVN was indeed Vietnamese. And although it failed in the end that failure needs to be seen from within a Vietnamese context. The ARVN for years commanded the loyalty and sacrifice of millions and fought much more effectively than its American sponsors were willing to admit or its North Vietnamese foes ever expected. Understanding ARVN as an institution is critical to understanding the Vietnam War. And understanding both its military successes and critical failures are key to understanding why the American war in Vietnam failed. That the ARVN perhaps had a real chance to succeed brings the larger failings of the American war in Vietnam into focus.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Darwinian selection theory was linked to genetics, providing it with a secure foundation, although wider dissemination of this initiative was limited until the 1940s. Historians note that the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ was a rhetorical device to create an impression of unity, leaving the various disciplines involved still functioning independently. Radio now became an important means of disseminating science news, as in the 1959 celebrations of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The new version of Darwinism eroded the plausibility of eugenics and race theory, although these ideologies remained active in less visible forms. Popular accounts of evolutionism now stressed its open-endedness and played down the old assumption that humanity must be the inevitable outcome of progress. Julian Huxley tried to give the synthesis a moral dimension by linking it to his philosophy of humanism, but creationists saw the new initiative in science as a continuation of Darwinian materialism and renewed their attacks.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.