The freedman Gregorio Cosme Osorio’s extant letters from Madrid in 1795 are the focus of Chapter 6. They provide a direct perspective of a cobrero leader’s legal culture, his views on the case, and his activities as liaison between Madrid and El Cobre (including an alleged meeting with the king). Cosme’s missives from the royal court, which high colonial officials considered subversive, critiqued politics of the law in the colony and kept the cobreros abreast of the imperial edicts issued in Madrid in their favor which colonial authorities ignored. His liaison role during fifteen years was crucial to keep the case alive in the royal court.

This chapter deals with the historiography of international law in tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, as well as other successor states of the Soviet Union. It examines how the understanding of international law has changed in this geographic space, depending on ideologies and needs of the time. Historical contributions and interpretations of outstanding international lawyers and diplomats such as Shafirov, Martens, Baron Taube, Hrabar (Grabar), Kozhevnikov and others are mapped and discussed. Moreover, the chapter also maps how Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars have understood the role of their respective countries in the global history of international law, especially the complex and sometimes problematic role of the Soviet Union and Russia.

This chapter tells the tragic tale of the Weimar Republic. It begins with a description of the political violence that was typical of its early years, based on the half-forgotten book by the socialist statistician Emil Julius Gumbel. It then moves on to observe the double message of the new republic to the Jews. As everyone was suffering the consequences of one economic or political crisis after another, and the endless social strife and political disagreements, Jews had to confront antisemitism too, and that just as they learned to enjoy their final and complete equality. From the tale of the “stab in the back” till the rise of the Nazi Party, Jews were targets of hate and repeated public attacks. Three women represent here three generations of Jews living under these conditions: the social activist Bertha Pappenheim, the socialist physician Käte Frankenthal, and the young Hannah Arendt. Their life-stories allow us to glimpse the social-work efforts of the older Jewish community, the attraction of the socialist vision for Jewish men and women of the middle generation, and the creative intellectual work of some members of the younger generation.

Before the taming of horses, human lives and activities were limited by the speed of walking or boats, and without the wheeled vehicle transport of goods was restricted to human strength. All this would change when humans had finally established control of the horse, breeding, training and using this unique species, and in due course attaching it to haul chariot, cart and wagon.

This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level

Examines the dispersion of the Mediterranean community into Latin America and other areas and the reconfiguration of the consular service away from the former Mediterranean focus and toward a more professional organization.

This chapter focuses on the complex relationships between Gaza’s urban elite and the rural population around the city, especially the network of villages in the Subdistrict (kaza) of Gaza. It discusses the composition of the rural population and the ethnic, social, and economic barriers between them including peasants, Bedouins and Egyptians, the involvement of the rural population in urban politics and its alignment with rival coalitions within the city, and the complex relationships with Bedouin groups in the city’s vicinity and farther away.

Departing from the conventional narrative that views borders exclusively as a source of hostility in inter-Asian relations, this book tells a story of how two revolutionary states launched movements and pursued policies that echoed each other as well as collaborated in extending their authority to the border to temper the transnational tendencies there – a process that the author characterizes as “joint state invasion,” which challenges both the Scottian narrative of state evasion and the Tillyan model of state formation. The Guangxi-northeastern Vietnam border is geographically, economically, and ethnically diverse and includes highlands, lowlands, and access to the Gulf of Tonkin. State activities at the border in the second half of the twentieth century were initiated in the context of historical precedents of successful, and equally importantly, unsuccessful state intrusions into the borderlands. There was a qualitative difference between state activities on the Sino-Vietnamese border that began during the Cold War and those that came before, where “distracted states” facing continuous wars were often unable to devote adequate resources to the task of border making. More importantly, limited coordination between the successive Chinese governments and the French colonial state left the border people significant “wiggle room” to circumvent the political authority.

Chapter 3 uses the letters of Gregorios Antiochos to explore the scholar’s body. Antiochos, who experienced chronic illness from a young age, combined his own bodily feeling with gender discourses to create a subversive image of the scholar which challenged ideals of military masculinity. He juxtaposed the strong body of the soldier, forged through physical exercise, to the frail body of the learned man hunched over his books, and declared his preference for the latter. He also expressed his own relationship with books and the furniture that facilitated his scholarly work, in disability terms: his cane, staff, armrest and guides. When at points the connection with scholarship was severed, Antiochos felt truly disabled. A body in crisis emerged that was assailed by unwanted becomings, prime among them the possibility of becoming-horse and losing his rationality. Despite this emphasis on reason, speech and self-determination, Antiochos’ letters present us with unexpected configurations of human and non-human bodies which blur the lines between organic and inorganic and help decentre man. In doing so, they posit the Eastern Roman scholar with his books and study furniture as a kind of antipode to the Western knight and his horse.

The conclusion outlines continuity and change over the longue durée, whereby continuities outweigh changes.

Studying the women poets in BN and TN, the reader is quickly confronted with two important components in the narrative structure. The first is the biographical prelude that precedes their literary compositions; in both the tazkiras, there is a clipping from their life stories that sets the context for delving into their poems. This is a standard writing technique in poetic tazkiras, but it is not without some significance here; one of its objectives is to guide the reader into the poet's work. It is as if a woman poet's life story or clippings therefrom provide the framework for the appreciation of her work. There is a thick enmeshment of the art with the person, and the life (and the body) of a poet with her poetic compositions. The second important element of the narrative structure is an overwhelming, but still permeable, distinction between ‘the secluded women’ (pardah nashīn) and ‘the public women’ (bāzāri ‘aurat); interestingly, the latter are further divided by the fluid and often overlapping categories of the courtesan (tawāi’f), the prostitute (randī), the slave girl (kanīz), the skilled dancer-cum-harlot (khāngī), the lower caste prostitute (kanchanī), and professional entertainers (domnīs).

‘Women of the Bazaar’: Internal Hierarchies and the Representation of Difference

There were many more distinctions that divided the bāzārī women, but the shifting boundaries among them always made it difficult to define any of these categories with any sense of precision. In an interesting interlude, Nadir informs us that the kanchanīs were called kanjars in Punjab, and in some places in Hindustan, they were also called the ‘children of Lord Ram’ or rām-janiyān. At several other places, he says, they were called pātar, gāyinān, and abchar; while they all came from lower caste groups, the distinctions in nomenclature referred not only to the regional specificities but also their sub-caste affiliations. In his ethno-historical aside on ‘public women’, he points out that owing to the lower social status of the kanchanīs, the khāngīs refrained from associating with them, even as they were both engaged in prostitution. He further informs us that the khāngī community was a close-knit group, with strict rules of inclusion.