Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.

This chapter analyzes the major trends in late Ottoman Gaza’s economy, society, and geostrategic importance. It tackles the misconception that during this period Gaza was a city in “decline.” It discusses a wide range of topics such as the impact of early globalization and the change in the hajj pilgrimage route on the status of Gaza as a caravan city; the impact of the barley boom in the Northern Negev between 1890 and 1910 as a result of the growing demand of Britain’s beer industry on Gaza’s economy; the city’s lack of a proper port infrastructure and its implications; the Ottoman government state-building measures and division of the region’s administrative borders, the establishment of Beersheba to reduce Gaza’s influence on the Bedouins of the Negev, and the governmental development plans envisioned for the Gaza region; the extensive relationships between Gaza and Egypt, including the effects of the occupation of Egypt by Britain in 1882 and the creation of the administrate dividing line between Egypt and Palestine in 1906 on Gaza’s geostrategic importance. Finally, it explores whether the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 constituted a turning point in Gaza’s importance in the eyes of the central government and how it affected the city’s development.

Linking up with the precolonial past, after seizing power the RPF privileged military solutions and used a performant armed force ‒ based in part on experience in its Ugandan years ‒ to capture power, which was its aim since the 1990 attack. During the civil war and after its takeover, the maintenance of military norms and ethos motivated the military’s centrality and penetration of all society’s sectors, economically, politically, socially and institutionally, with the ultimate aim of first capturing and later retaining power. The achievements of good technocratic/bureaucratic governance risk being undone by flawed political governance.

This chapter revisits the efforts mostly spearheaded by ASEAN to bring the Third Indochina War to an end. As ASEAN is the sum of its parts, the chapter describes the perspectives of the various ASEAN member states as well as how they arrived at a collective decision.

This chapter analyzes the two states’ regulation of long-existing cross-border connections and their strategies to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable cross-border movements and to extract revenues from the acceptable ones between 1954 and 1957. The Chinese and Vietnamese communists pursued two interrelated goals at the territorial limits of their countries. First, they wanted to build an inward-oriented economy and society at their respective borders by consolidating the national administration of territory. Second, they sought to impose a contrived Cold War “comradeship” between the PRC and the DRV over and in place of the organic interdependence of peoples within the borderlands that had already existed for centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese border, therefore, encountered “joint state building” by the two communist governments, which made the cross-border movement of people and goods more visible, malleable, and, more importantly, taxable to the state. The pursuit of both national and international communist goals by central governments, however, often left the local state apparatus, which bore the burden of implementing these policies, confused and bogged down by conflicting priorities. Moreover, the culturally diverse and fluid on-the-ground realities of the borderlands did not fit easily into the nationalist or internationalist agenda of the two states.

Examines the growth of the early US consular system, why individuals became consuls, and how they were appointed.

Chapter 4 explains why Christianity did not become the faith of more than a small minority of warlords and why it was rejected and ultimately persecuted by the rulers who unified Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plural religious scene – including competing sects of Buddhism, alongside Confucianism and Shinto – afforded an intellectual opening for Christianity. This mattered in particular to the conversion of certain elites in the Gokinai of the 1560s. However, the most emotional debates centred on the dynamics of immanent power noted in the last chapter, and here Buddhism, as a transcendentalist system, found ways of countering the force of Christian arguments. Indeed, on an institutional level, too, the sangha represented a formidable enemy for daimyo contemplating conversion. This chapter then proceeds to analyse the actions, diplomatic letters and anti-Christian edicts of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in order to identify the terms by which Christianity was identified as a subversive and unnecessary force. The transcendental elements of Japanese religion therefore played a decisive role in constraining the reach of the Japanese Christian movement. Lastly, the unifiers were intent on sacralising their authority, particularly post-mortem, and Christianity had little to offer in this regard.

This book tells the story of the birth, growth, and decline of the early American community in the Mediterranean world. Despite recent interest in American history outside of US borders, this is a subject that has received very little attention. The only monograph to address it, James A. Field’s America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882, was written nearly sixty years ago and focused primarily on issues of diplomacy. While some recent work has dealt with specific topics in the Mediterranean world such as naval activity, trading networks, missionaries, and above all the Barbary Wars and the interaction with Islam, these authors have not conceptualized their topics as particularly Mediterranean. In fact, the most authoritative recent study of the Barbary Wars is subtitled “American Independence in the Atlantic World”!1

I begin the analysis of oil-financed institutionalized practices with a focus on government transfers and subsidies, highlighting the variation in access to resources in Gulf monarchies. I describe various types of transfers: 1) universal – those, such as free health care and subsidized household utilities, which all citizens enjoy; 2) particularist – those which are extended to specific communities – as in allowances to members of tribes or royal families and contracts to business elites; 3) idiosyncratic – as in funds to men to assist with their marriage expenses. I note changes to government distributions from mid-2014 and the oil price downturn. I then explore matters of equity and exclusion, highlighting those social categories who are privileged and those who are discriminated against in access to distributions in these states. I argue that the hierarchization of society and the related variation in access to resources are both integral to the shaping of the national community and a means for the state to exercise control insofar as key social categories are appeased via the relative marginalization of others.

I consider how Gulf Arabs evaluate their government’s behavior relative to the circulation of wealth. On the basis of roughly 350 interviews in the four countries with scholars, economists, dissidents, bankers, members of government, representatives of public and private foundations and NGOs and official and independent ‘ulama, I summarize their views, quoting from their responses to a set of questions and sharing the evidence they provide. I note the extent to which my interlocutors criticize their rulers in ethical terms, especially insofar as their commitment to social justice, equity and inclusion is concerned. In short, they confirm that there is no genuine concern for equity in the distribution of resources, and no indication that religious norms are integrated into this domain of governance. Rather, fairly narrow political and material interests prevail. Then, I briefly describe episodes of resistance to Gulf rulers from religious forces in society. The aim is twofold: to demonstrate how they too instrumentalize Islam for political capital and how rulers respond to the challenge they face from the religious field.