Tracing clothing’s dissemination across the region, Chapter 2 explores processes of transculturation, highlighting how sustained contact with other traditions changed the way recipient communities defined their own cultural milieus. While indebted to previous studies, this chapter shows how new questions continue to emerge about stylistic Ottomanization of costume in Poland Lithuania: How are we to understand the seeming paradox of adapting Islamic fashions for the needs of a predominantly Christian noble society? How could the exotic be identified as native without raising the eyebrows of this early modern nobility? The adaptation of Ottoman fashion was more than simply a projection of Ottoman sartorial style onto the material culture of Poland Lithuania. Highlighting the popularity of Ottomanesque material forms in the Commonwealth, this chapter points beyond the dichotomy of Orient and Occident, revealing the process of inventing a self-avowedly Occidental sartorial tradition that was deeply embedded in ‘Oriental’ models, however inappropriately termed.

Chapter 1 asks what it meant for Poland Lithuania to emerge as a cartographic image associated with an ancient barbaric people from the Eurasian steppe—the Sarmatians. Like those of many other early modern nations, Polish Lithuanian elites (and the scholars for whom they were patrons) creatively adapted classical philology and geography to trace the alleged historical continuity of their confederate polity back to classical antiquity. Drawing on authorities such as Ptolemy, Tacitus, Strabo, and Pliny, elites embraced an association of their native land with the Sarmatia of classical geographers—a borderland located between the known world of Europe and the unknown realms of Asia. This chapter tracks how the visual practices of charting the Commonwealth’s geographical outline created not only a shared identity for the otherwise diverse nobility of the Polish Lithuanian union but also a sense of the polity’s longstanding connections to other European peoples. Modern historians and archaeologists have identified the Sarmatians as an Iranian people, but this Orientalizing notion was absent from Polish Lithuanian epistemologies. Thus what we might call the Sarmatization of Polish Lithuanian historical geography in fact supported the Europeanization of the polity’s invented tradition: allegedly its past was as old and rich as that of the Latin and Germanic peoples and was recorded by the same venerable classical authorities who confirmed its unchanged location. This chapter explores how this substitution of an early modern heterogenous society for a mysterious, ancient, and—reportedly—foreign and barbaric people came into being.

Education and training are foundational to every sector. The Mindfulness Industry is no different. This chapter examines the uncritical nature of White Mindfulness’ pedagogy framed by the needs of the corporatist state. An insistence on standardisation to produce a one-size-fits-all blueprint in effect distances White Mindfulness from People of the Global Majority. The race-gender profile of White Mindfulness educators is shown to increase the unlikelihood of their engagement in critical pedagogies that embrace difference. Over-emphasis on a research-education tension detracts from Teacher Training Programmes (TTPs) insufficiently concerned with issues of justice and social change. A critical appraisal of TTPs underscores their immersion in invisibilised social norms that generate exclusions. At the same time, they make claims of expertise, universality, and neutrality. Although many of the decision-makers of White Mindfulness TTPs are located in higher education institutions, there is a failure to engage critical thinking in mindfulness’ current purpose and how it might foster social change. Added to this, audit culture is shown to introduce a type of metrification that further shuts down pro-justice concerns and reinforces the status quo. An inquiry into what a critical pedagogy might consider expands the possibilities of engaging difference and stepping outside the comfort zone of whiteness.

This chapter examines the palimpsest of violence that has imprinted Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, for a protracted time period. The palimpsest is used as an investigative tool to unravel the spatiotemporal, interlocking layers of violence. Beirut’s geopolitical position and form of government, along with its history of embedded differences, have resulted in perpetual turmoil, which in 1975 led to the outbreak of the civil war. This fifteen-year long war left tangible and intangible violence markers. On the one hand, the markers manifested at different scales including Greater Beirut, administrative Beirut, but also its districts, sectors, neighbourhoods, streets and buildings. On the other hand, violence scars resurface through collective memory and postmemory, which affect residents’ daily lives while navigating through the city, and making choices of where and how to move. This chapter is an attempt at linking spatiotemporally the violence markers, to investigate their role in Beirut’s history as well as present. It uses chronological mapping of violence events, places and narratives. The violence markers resulted in, or are reflected by, divides and frontiers; urban dynamics including population displacement, destruction and expansion; memories and memorials. The chapter concludes with possibilities for dissociating from violence by emancipating from postmemories, re-establishing links among divided communities through cultural and civic projects, and providing neutral platforms for dialogue. These efforts are crucial in a city where violence remains immanent.

Chapter 6 concludes the book by turning the lens to exiled dissidents to contextualize the impact of emigrants’ departures. Unlike emigrants, who may hold opposing views but depart voluntarily without government involvement, dissidents are often pressured or coerced to leave their countries of origin because of their opposition to the government and its policies. As organizers of democratic movements, they offer a unique perspective about the cumulative effect of people’s emigration over time. Based on two dozen interviews with activists from across the Middle East several years after the Arab uprisings, the chapter tells their stories and demonstrates what their loss has meant to the pro-democratic movements they left behind. Through their narratives, the extent to which their political agendas rely on rank-and-file supporters who are also positioned to emigrate can be discerned. The chapter concludes by considering the political and policy implications of Democratic Drain.

This chapter takes as its starting point the transformation of the contract in modern times – in other words, its hybridisation. As the binding force of the contract disappears in the ‘in-between’ of the contextures, what are the consequences of this fragmentation? Can we still discern some operational, structural or systemic ‘unity’ of the contract that can be a suitable substitute for the exchange between two people? Social differentiation splits the formerly unitary contract into three autonomous concatenations of events in the respective legal, economic and production contexts. This difference is always reproduced as an insurmountable hermeneutic dissonance.

This chapter offers a quantitative analysis of female litigants in courts across three jurisdictions during the seventeenth century. Though the percentage of female litigants in common law courts remained low, an increasing number of women sought legal redress under equity law in England. In those colonies that established courts of chancery based on the English model, such as the Chesapeake Bay colonies and South Carolina, women also had the benefit of an equity jurisdiction that recognised exceptions to the doctrine of coverture. This chapter also presents remarkable evidence that women appeared as plaintiffs and defendants in more than half of the cases heard before the English ecclesiastical law courts, a percentage that far outstrips women’s participation in any court in the colonies.