Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

This chapter begins with the contrasting narratives of the Third Indochina War from the perspectives of Singapore and Cambodia which serves as the springboard to the study of the Cambodia conflict. It then proceeds to describe the debates on the war in Cambodia, following which the chapter outlines the objectives of the book and provides a historiography of the existing literature.

Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

Take a broad look at American family and friendhip ntworks, examining marriage, child-rearing, and other family and personal relations among the consuls and members of the American community in the Mediterranean.

Writing first appears with the beginnings of urban civilisation and the emergence of the state in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and Egypt’s Nile Valley at the end of the 4th millennium bc. This chapter describes the many and different contributions of the technology of writing and the force and impacts achieved with the revolutionary innovation.

This chapter addresses the concrete application of the regime of indirect rule in Rwanda. As seen in Chapter 2, Belgium started from a vague and general concept that from the outset contained the germs of its central contradiction: respecting indigenous political institutions and practices while simultaneously adapting and using them in its ‘sacred mission of civilisation’. The introduction of this policy was to induce profound modifications to the functioning of the indigenous authorities and their relations with the population.

Although woodblock printing of books has an earlier origin in China, Korea and Japan, the invention of printing with movable metal type that began in Europe in the middle of the 15th century was truly revolutionary. The innovation of printed books spread rapidly and stimulated the process to democratise knowledge as the medieval world transformed into the early modern, with new genres and audiences for books established in just a few decades.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

Chapter 7 deals with the violence unfolding at the local level and with the cobreros’ extrajudicial forms of mobilization in tandem with legal actions. Here the story of legal action merges with one of extrajudicial actions such as fugitivity and more violent action and shows how judicial and extrajudicial actions were entangled with each other. Cosme’s letters from Madrid also provided legitimacy to the cobreros’ extrajudicial actions by directly informing the community that the king’s edicts favored their freedom. Factoring into the escalating threat of violence and political conflict on the ground was the broader Atlantic context of revolution in Saint Domingue and war with the British during the 1790s. Imperial designs in this period seem to conflict with colonial ones in a triangulation of conflict that included the cobreros’ actions.

Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.

Based on discursive analysis, Chapter 3 focuses on the briefs produced in Madrid and the colony to mount the plaintiffs’ case for collective freedom. It examines the meanings of freedom in the Spanish Atlantic and the battery of legal tools, including the rarified one of prescription, deployed in the plaintiffs’ memorials to buttress their case of wrongful enslavement and collective freedom. The case entered unchartered terrain with the claim that belonging to a pueblo constituted a way of enacting and producing freedom collectively, an innovative claim based on notions of corporate belonging in the Spanish Atlantic world especially related to municipal bodies such as pueblos. The chapter parses a distinction between civil and political freedom made in some briefs. Civil freedom was understood in opposition to slavery as personal freedoms that free subjects could enjoy as royal vassals even in the context of colonialism and royal absolutism. Political freedom depended on municipal belonging, the space in which limited self-rule and citizenship could be locally enacted in an absolute monarchy. The chapter draws out the possible normative implications of this claim for Afro descendants at large who, at most, could only enjoy civil freedom rights in the empire.

The new dynamics on the border epitomize how the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution compounded the already wobbly state building campaign at the border. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, the war and the chaotic sociopolitical movement militarized the Sino-Vietnamese border and made this far-off region more relevant to the decision-making in Beijing and Hanoi about their internal power struggles and national security policies. Yet, these developments also shifted state-society relations on the political periphery in favor of a more porous boundary. Thus, the extension and contraction of state power took place simultaneously. Both Chinese and Vietnamese authorities launched ambitious infrastructure projects in the border area to facilitate the transportation of aid to Vietnam and mobilized the local society against the possible expansion of the war. The Sino-Vietnamese land and maritime border region, as well as the transportation lines running through it, became spaces of frequent interactions between the Chinese and Vietnamese officials regarding the provision of aid and the coordination of border defenses. The efficiency of these interactions, however, was increasingly susceptible to the decline of the Sino-Vietnamese partnership following the Tết Offensive and the start of negotiations between Hanoi and Washington in 1968.

After the Green Revolution successfully raised wheat and rice yields in more auspicious farming contexts, attention in agricultural development turned to crops that grew on poorer soils and in regions of indifferent rainfall. When Rockefeller Foundation agronomists reached out to India with an urge to establish an international center for research on such crops in the 1970s, they found eager hosts. The foundation’s agronomists had been active in India during the 1950s and 1960s and built a community of local collaborators. Indian scientists saw the proposal for an international center as offering the next frontier in crop development. The possibility of a center also met with considerable appeal among the political establishment in India. Two prime ministers from opposite political camps, Indira Gandhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh, came to support the eventual International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) due to common ground in their respective politics of the poor and farmers’ politics. As the chapter shows, the circumstances of postcolonial India allowed for the emergence of institutionalized expertise outside the direct realm of the local state.