Since 1971, international aid for agricultural research has been shaped by an unusual and ambitious partnership: an organization founded as an ad hoc consortium of national governments, foreign aid offices, philanthropies, United Nations agencies, and international financial institutions that is known today as CGIAR. At its founding, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research was tasked with fostering scientific research that would help “developing nations … increase and improve the quality of their agricultural output.” Representative of an era of broad multilateral cooperation, and reliant on complex international funding networks, CGIAR assumed the profoundly localized mission of reshaping farmers and fields across diverse cultural, economic, and environmental contexts. The tensions arising as researchers and institutions navigated the demands and expectations of these distinct scales form the crux of CGIAR history. They have affected the changing disciplinary orientations of research centers, the ecologies prioritized in breeding, the expectations for intellectual property management, and even the words used to describe crops.

Until about twenty-five years ago, economic historians (both those in economics departments and in history departments) had little to say about international law. There possible causes of this (beyond the possible insignificance of international law to the project of economic history) are likely the similar intellectual bases for economics and international law prior to the twentieth century, the lack of an accessible archival and intellectual base upon which to conduct the research, and the professional bias of academic historians against writing about events to close to the present. But as time as marched onward, the development of international economic law in the twentieth century has become of increasing interest to historians broadly interested in the history of international institutions and capitalism.

The first republic born from the revolution rapidly became authoritarian and crumbled under its own contradictions, and was toppled by a military coup in 1973. The second republic again fell prey to personal and regional conflicts. It failed to solve the refugee problem and embarked too late on a democratisation process.

In this treatise, Bartolus of Sassoferrato explores the phenomenon of factionalism in the fourteenth-century Italian city republics. He gives an account of the local nomenclature of Guelfs and Ghibellines, relating these labels historically to the papal and imperial camps in the contested region of northern Italy. He explains that, nowadays, such labels have only local relevance, not ideological significance. He then analyses the legality of joining such parties, concluding that if the reason for doing so is to uphold the common good, it is lawful.

This work is an exploratory study of the commemoration of women in cultural spaces during the early colonial period in South Asia. Based on a reading of the rather neglected compendia of women writers composing verses in Urdu and Persian in the varied and multiple pasts of Hindustan, it looks at memories of women's active participation in the literary spaces. Written in the nineteenth century, these compendia (tazkiras) written in Urdu were texts of memorialization, and reproduced memories of the freshness and depth that women poets brought to the literary culture. I read these texts as, following Pierre Nora, ‘sites of memory’ (lieu de memoire), and the life stories and poetic compositions found therein indeed serve to remind us of women's participation in the ‘literary public sphere’. These texts are not acts of recollection, but exercises in construction crucially motivated by significant sociopolitical considerations, one of which was to push for women's literacy within an indigenous frame of reference and to dispel the picture of the culture in Hindustan, found in British imperial writings and policy initiatives, as marked by inertia and stasis, particularly in matters relating to the lives of women.

This study then contests the commonplace assumption that the literary public sphere in the colonial period was markedly homosocial and gender exclusive, and argues instead that female scholars actively participated in shaping the norms of aesthetics and literary expression, and introduced fresh signifiers and linguistic practices to apprehend their emotions, experiences, and world views. Based on a reading of the largely ignored tazkiras of women poets, I suggest here that their compositions could be seen as a form of, in the language of Foucault, ‘erudite’ knowledge in that they enriched the literary space, even as they evoked considerable anxieties, and stood in a paradoxical relationship with the dominant episteme, both reinforcing and challenging its cultural assumptions and truth-claims. Women's poetry was neither antithetical nor excluded from the prevailing episteme and was in circulation in dispersed cultural spaces, such as the salons of the courtesans, the marketplace, household assemblies, and literary meetings. Indeed, in memorializing their voices from such dispersed locations, the authors of women's tazkiras were undertaking a genealogical exercise of recovering the ‘subjugated’ and suppressed voices in literary culture.

What counts as a significant innovation in human history, and what might we identify beyond the topics included in this book? In our concept of progress are we too influenced by the sense of our own era as the culmination of history, and can we avoid a presentist bias?

Bartolus analyses the problem of tyranny according to biblical, Aristotelian, and legal authority. Starting from Pope Gregory the Great’s definition of the tyrant as one who rules without right in the commonwealth, Bartolus distinguishes between a tryant for want of just title, and a tyrant who possesses such just title but is tyrannical in his exercise of power. He is particularly interested in the validity or otherwise of legal transactions conducted by tyrants, and by those living under tyranny, and in how to prove by convincing legal means that a tyranny is or was in existence. The concept of fear, which invalidates certain legal agreements if proved, plays a major role in his argument here. He is especially interested in ‘veiled’ or covert tyrants, who have satisfied the legal formalities for legitimate government but are nonetheless tyrants. This leads him to explore the mechanics of popular election. Bartolus complicates the matter by noting that even legitimate governments need to behave in ways defined as tyrannical by Aristotle, and uses the concept of the common good as the ultimate criterion between legitimate and tyrannical rule.