Chapter 8 explains why the most powerful chiefs in Hawaii decided to be baptised a few years after dispensing with their old cult. The most important of these factors revolved around immanent power: The ability of the new god to deliver victory in battle in the immediate aftermath of the abolition, and to Christian forces at the battle of Waimea in 1824, made a great impression, while healing was, as always, also a matter of concern. The impotence of the old gods was confirmed by deliberate challenges to the volcano goddess Pele and the female prophets who spoke for her and by the iconoclastic tours of Ka‘ahumanu, who was now taking centre stage. Meanwhile, the high chiefs also felt the need to repair the sacral basis to their authority, if now in a more righteous mode, while the strict form of Protestantism provided a way of ‘restoring the tabus’, disciplining both their subjects and the Euro-American inhabitants of Honolulu.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

This chapter examines the conditions for revolution, its premises and accelerators, and its unravelling. Between 1959 and 1961, Rwanda made the transition from a Tutsi-dominated monarchy to a Hutu-dominated republic, creating the conditions for the armed return of the Tutsi exiles discussed in Chapter 6.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

This chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely trans-regional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take some distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds.

Chapter 6 narrates the 2nd Texas’ post Shiloh service record, including the bloody battle of Corinth in October 1862, which resulted in the martyred death of Colonel Rogers. Although there were questions surrounding his death, a celebratory tale of him took shape, portraying him as a martyr for the Confederate cause. After Corinth, the 2nd Texas had transformed into an elite fighting unit, but the stigma of Shiloh seemed to linger. The chapter closes with their final days in Galveston, depleted and demoralized.

This chapter explores the views of prominent Western thinkers between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries who addressed the relationship between political thought and the historiography of international law. The chapter’s early modern chronological scope puts into sharp relief the precursors and originalities of the so-called nineteenth-century turn in international law’s historiography. A survey of consequential understandings of the link between international legal historiography and political thought finds that early modern thinkers systematically connected politics and international law by examining their shared epistemological, ontological and genealogical foundations, drawing interweaving lines of reasoning on how these fields are understood, and how they arise and evolve. Thus the arc of texts from Francisco de Vitoria to Jean Barbeyrac that specifically focus on this topic suggests that considerable sophistication existed before the nineteenth-century master narrative of international law’s historiography, and has been partly lost.

Chapter 5 investigates the impact of prohibitions against fighting on clerical masculinity. It examines two clerical groups: those who acted violently but wished to remain clerics and those who abandoned their religious status. Both Western and Eastern canon law forbade clerical fighting, with an important difference: the Western Church put emphasis on bloodshed; the Eastern was more concerned with the clerics’ state of mind and the avoidance of anger. This meant that, in Romanía, outside of strict prohibitions against killing, there was more of an overlap in the exercise of moderate force. The situation was different for clerics who abandoned religious life. Eastern canon law insisted on strict religious/secular distinctions through a focus on vestments, but authors of histories accepted such shifts with little comment. In Romanía, religious status – and, as a result, one’s gender – could prove to be rather fluid throughout one’s life. The chapter ends with a case study focusing on Michael Chōniatēs’ Life of Niketas, the eunuch bishop of Chonai, who fought visible and invisible enemies. His example offers a limit case for how an ecclesiastic could show his masculinity while maintaining an attitude that was considered acceptable, and even ideal, for a clerical man within religious circles.

Folk stories in Mewat narrate how, in the sixteenth century, Sahab Khan, the Mughal governor of Tijara, near the present-day Alwar district in eastern Rajasthan in north India, summoned Laldas (1540–1648 CE) to account for not practising Islam, despite being born into a Muslim family. Sahab Khan offered him meat, saying it was Muslim food that a Muslim should willingly eat. This move was intended to symbolise the saint's Muslim identity and to reintroduce him to the Islamic fold from which he had strayed. The meeting with Sahab Khan is documented in a hagiography—compiled and written in rhyming verses by a Laldas devotee called Dungarisi Sadh:

Although the Mughal officer's invitation for Laldas to consume kebab might seem like a respectful act, it was, in fact, a deliberate tactic aimed to ascertain the saint's religious standing. By depicting Laldas's religious conduct as transgressing Islamic boundaries in these hagiographic narratives, the text seeks to establish his identity as a Hindu saint. According to the verses, Sahab Khan heard reports that Laldas did not pray as a Muslim: he neither performed ablution nor invoked the name of the Prophet, despite being a member of the Meo Muslim caste and the ‘Islam’ religion. In another set of stanzas, Dungarisi Sadh goes on to narrate the doctrine taught by the saint to both Hindus and Muslims, which got him in trouble:

The conclusion situates this volume in its wider historical context and assesses the gains derived from the methodology it employs. Unlike its situation after 1948, during the last decades of Ottoman rule Gaza was in no way an anomaly but rather an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. This contrast helps better understand depictions of Gaza in current day discourse: it was never integrated into any modern nation-state, and more closely resembles a relic of the pre-nation-state period. Countering the widespread fallacy that Gaza does not fit into any meaningful historical narrative, this work reimagines Gaza without the cumulative effects of the successive catastrophic events since WWI and the strictures of the Gaza Strip, but rather in terms of its multiple connections in time and space as they evolved over the centuries. Its reliance on an empirical, source-driven GIS-supported methodology constitutes a major advance that highlights the centrality of political factionalism for the city and its region and sheds light on the lifeworlds of Gaza’s commoner population. Overall, this work provides a rich terrain for formulating new hypotheses on social strategies in Gaza’s society and examining the strategic constructedness of claims found in contemporary texts.

The chapter begins with an effort to explain the book’s starting-point in the Enlightenment. Moving from historiography to the events of the time, it begins by telling the tale of the essay competition on the question “What is Enlightenment?,” in which Moses Mendelssohn came first, followed by Immanuel Kant. Mentioning that some 200 years later, the French post-modernist historian-philosopher Michel Foucault wrote yet another essay under the same title, in which he explicitly combined German and Jewish history, the chapter moves once again from historiography to history, concentrating on the biography of Moses Mendelssohn, especially on his repeated confrontation with the religious intolerance of some of his enlightened colleagues and then, stressing the ambivalence of the situation, typical of the German Enlightenment as a whole, the chapter ends with a comment on Lessing’s Nathan der Weise.