The evidence presented by the Protests recorded in the Malacca Prothocol Books provides a distinctive perspective on British and other European activities in the East Indies in the last decade of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries. This was an era when sail was a vital means of travel for people, of transportation for goods and of communication, both personal and official. The country traders participated in all these undertakings but their raison d’être was trade, where disruption by misadventure meant delay, and every delay a potential loss of profit.

The misadventures described in the Protests highlight at first hand the ever-present dangers faced by country traders sailing in the Bay of Bengal, the Malay Archipelago and the South China Sea. In addition to the normal hazards that mariners everywhere encountered, it can be argued that sailors in this part of the world had to deal with additional and more intense hazards: they had to sail through the monsoon storms of the Bay of Bengal, navigate the narrow channels of the Malacca Strait and Western Malay Archipelago and they had to prevail against the typhoons of the South China Sea. Not only that, the European sailors had to safely guide their vessels through an alien region far from home where hostility to foreign intervention often prevailed and the norms of some societies encouraged the seizure of foreign vessels. They also had to deal with the political fallout in the East Indies engendered by European wars.

The calamities were mostly met with on voyages between India and Canton or within the seas of the Malay Archipelago itself and were recorded at Malacca because it was a traditional staging post with the appropriate facilities.

The view of the “Orient” as an important and suitable source for the forging of specifically Israeli music began to take shape as early as the arrival of the first Jewish pioneers to the Holy Land in the last decades of the nineteenth century; it gained greater momentum after World War I. The search for the inspiring Orient was animated by aspirations of return to the Hebrew civilization of ancient Israel. To this end, the renaissance of the Hebrew language represented an important dimension, given that its particular intonations might bestow a special character on the new sonorous production. In turn, the idea of supporting this rebirth by recourse to the heritage of Jewish Oriental musical traditions, and, to some extent, the heritage of the neighboring Arabs, became the subject of a basic ideological debate. As a witness to a considerable part of this development, I have observed that the supporters of the ideology of Oriental influence usually referred in their arguments to a kind of multifaceted and amorphous Orient.

Unlike those who defended and exalted the idea of an inspiring Orient, other protagonists in the debate denigrated the linking of art to ideology, maintaining that artists should express their individuality, in the belief that the use of the Hebrew language and of themes related to Judaism within the cultural norms of Western music should be sufficient to create a special Israeli style.

Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), the most easterly city in the Prussian Empire, was a prominent cultural and economic hub in the eighteenth century. Its position as a Hanseatic League port, accessible during the winter from the Baltic Sea, had attracted significant trade and wealth particularly since the early modern period. Königsberg's original multi-ethnic population, consisting of Latvians, Lithuanians/Livonians, Polish, Old Prussians (Prußen), and Jews were joined by Scottish Presbyterians, Dutch Remonstrants, and Huguenots in the seventeenth century, as well as merchants and tradesmen. The plague of 1709–10 in East Prussia decimated the population, particularly Old Prussians. However, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm's drastic repopulation programme of East Prussia settled Swiss, Dutch, French, and Bohemian immigrants, as well as immigrants from the Palatinate, the Rhineland, Franconia, Swabia, and Nassau, making the province ethnically diverse yet disjointed. Magdalena Niedzielska highlights the different facets of patriotism in the period and region, which were divided between allegiance to the Prussian monarchy [Staatspatriotismus], regional patriotism (Warmia, Lithuania Minor), and the historical loyalties of the Old Prussians.

Königsberg was strategically placed between Berlin, St Petersburg, Riga, Reval, and the Duchy of Courland. The home of a prominent Protestant university, the Albertina, founded in 1544, it attracted scholars, students, and, in the eighteenth century, a vibrant publishing industry that produced the works of Kant, Herder Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96). Indeed, as Kant's biographer suggests, Königsberg was much more cosmopolitan than Berlin at the time.

The Aftermath of War

After the conclusion of the war in Europe, ‘subsidiary campaigns’ remained ongoing with ‘new theatres of operation’ in the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas. The collapse of the Russian Empire and widespread fear of Bolshevism meant the navy was called upon to provide support to land troops and ensure the transportation of supplies and weaponry. The First Destroyer Flotilla, consisting of the new V- and W-class destroyers alongside a number of other vessels, was sent to the Baltic, where conditions of service could be very difficult. These difficulties culminated in the crews of HMS Velox, Versatile and Wryneck staging a mutiny in October 1919 after being recalled to the Baltic. During the subsequent court of enquiry, carried out from the 17th to the 21st October, the principal grounds for the mutiny were confirmed as inadequate pay, poor provisions and reduced leave. Several men reported a lack of basic foodstuffs and even tinned food had gone bad. They served lengthy periods at sea and leave had been cut short from 21 days to 16, leading to a clear lack of morale and a distrust of authority.

In mid-February 1804, at Malacca, Thomas Page, second mate of the Fanny (600 tons, belonging to Calcutta), wrote an ‘affidavit’ detailing the stranding of the ship on 26 November 1803 in the South China Sea, lat. 9°44´N, long. 115°51´E, 250 miles from Cochin China. The document was produced at the request of the captain, William Robertson. One would expect the account to be filed as a Protest in the Prothocol Books, but it is not there; nor are any other Protests for 1804, suggesting that for this year they must be located elsewhere, or lost. The following account is taken from the pamphlet published by Thomas Tegg in 1808. It provides evidence that not all maritime misadventures where the next port of call was Malacca were recorded in the Malaccan Prothocol Books as a Protest, even where there is proof that an account was actually written.

The Fanny had left Bombay for China on 8 August 1803, the late departure, with its risk of meeting severe weather, probably explained by the fact that the ship had not left Whampoa for its previous return to Bombay until 20 January that year. The voyage towards China comprised a long series of mishaps, with the loss of rudder a frequent occurrence. First, the ship ran aground in the Malacca Strait, temporarily losing the rudder. Then, on 21 September, it was hit by a typhoon, losing the rudder and foremast. Reaching Hainan on 13 October the crew were able to effect repairs, but the first mate and some of the men became stranded on the island, the ship lost an anchor and cable, and the local inhabitants refused to provide supplies.

Peace Not War: Traditions of Restorative Justice in Imperial Ethiopia, 1769–1960 provides the field of restorative justice with historically validated cases where restorative justice practices were used to resolve conflict and bring peace to Ethiopia. A general problem with restorative justice is that there are few historically documented examples from Africa, Latin America, North America, or for that matter the Hawaiian Islands. The roots of restorative justice are often attributed to a mythical past, religious beliefs, or cultural traditions – all equally undocumented. But Ethiopia is different. With a writing system, emperors as well as pretenders to the throne chronicled their exploits, both wars and peace-building feats. This book provides the literature on restorative justice with historical examples from as early as 1769 during the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes).

Historiographic Critique

As the title Peace Not War suggests, this volume is about efforts to build peace. War has held a dominant position in Ethiopian historiography as tussles between feudal adversaries and a persistent struggle to assume the imperial throne have marked its history. Fighting and bloodshed were described in detail in imperial chronicles and the hagiographic literature with great attention given to who allied with whom. European traveler accounts reiterated the war-theme by either recounting battles or the desecration they observed afterwards; moreover, they also parroted secondhand accounts they were told or, for those who mastered an Ethiopian language, had read about. There was a racist objective to depicting Ethiopians as warlike for it validated Europe's civilizing mission. The secondary literature has also dwelt on Ethiopian warmongering. Richard Reid, in Warfare in African History, draws extensively from Ethiopia's written record to historicize methods of mobilization, military foundations, violence, and destruction.

After having completed the Gesta Normannorum Ducum at Bec c. 1139, Robert of Torigni acquired Sigebert's chronicle via the Beauvais manuscript (Paris, BnF, MS Latin 17545) and produced his own version. Since Robert's working copy (Avranches, Bibliothèque patrimoniale, MS 159) has survived, it is possible to assess in detail his writing practices, their rationale and the overall ambition of the Chronography. Throughout the twelfth century, both before and after Robert's appointment as abbot at Mont-Saint-Michel in 1154, the Chronography circulated in Normandy as the collection of chronicles starting with Eusebius–Jerome. Robert's own liber chronicorum, as transmitted in England and Normandy throughout the twelfth century, reflected an awareness of the longue durée in the representation of the past. As we shall see, this awareness was not merely a byproduct of manuscript transmission but was conceived by Robert as a textual programme, one that inscribed his own updated continuation of Sigebert within the authoritative tradition of Eusebius–Jerome. In this chapter, I will explore how Robert encountered Sigebert's chronicle and how he conceived his Chronography as a new contri¬bution to the tradition of Eusebius–Jerome.

Universal chronicle-writing at Bec before Robert of Torigni

From the second half of the eleventh century, the abbeys of Saint-Wandrille, Jumièges and Saint-Evroul were prolific centres for history-writing, nourishing the work of historians of the calibre of Orderic Vitalis. Within this landscape, the abbey of Bec-Hellouin stands out. Despite its relatively late foundation in c.1030, Bec was one of the most influential schools and intellectual centres of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

At some point between 1534 and its dissolution in 1539, John Leland went to Glastonbury Abbey to record its antiquities. Glastonbury had no major saint's shrine but, according to Leland's notes, its presbytery or high altar area preserved the tombs of King Edmund the Elder on the north, Edmund Ironside on the south and, most spectacularly, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in the middle. Inscriptions on this tomb praised Arthur's character and mentioned Abbot Henry (of Sully) (1189–93), who had presided over the discovery or ‘invention’ of King Arthur's remains in 1191. In various succinct notes preparatory for a fuller description, Leland recorded that the tomb was made of some sort of black marble, and that at its head or west end was a crucifix – an image of Christ crucified – and an image of Arthur at its feet, at the east end. A cross was displayed over or on the tomb's top, most probably on a flat grave cover. A set of four lions, two at the head and two at the feet, supported what was evidently a carved tomb-chest or sarcophagus.

African feminism – a branch of feminism centralized on the different regional experiences of African women – has developed exponentially with the increase in the number of Africanfuturist authors. African feminist literature amplifies the voices of African women experiencing intersectional oppression based on postcolonial influence and culturespecific tradition. The novels Wild Seed and Who Fears Death by Octavia Butler and Nnedi Okorafor respectively showcase these more precise concerns, depicting the inhumane realities of ethnic cleansing, eugenics, and female circumcision. While these themes reflect fictitious events in false realities, they also embody the experiences of real women living in Africa and/or the USA. Both Butler and Okorafor implement marginalized African women as protagonists in their novels Wild Seed and Who Fears Death for the purpose of demonstrating patriarchal control across African society. Through their exploration of traditional gender roles, violence against the female body, and social stigma promoting female purity, Okorafor and Butler meld the genres of fantasy and science fiction with African feminist theory to emphasize the sexual and ethnic suppression of women of color perpetuated by the gender biases influencing African culture.

Octavia Butler's novel Wild Seed centers on the tumultuous relationship between Doro and Anyanwu, two African immortals with two contrasting walks of life – one serves as a bringer of life, and the other a harbinger of death. For centuries Anyanwu has birthed children and consistently outlived them, watching them live fleeting, mortal lives that only emphasize her eternal solitude.

Writing in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Thomond poet, Eóghan Mac Craith (fl. 1620), commented on the linguistic plurality of Ireland. In his political poem Tugadh an t-ár-so ar Éirinn [This destruction has been wrought upon Ireland], he wrote: ‘Ní thuigid teangtha ar-oile/ críoch ilbhéarlach Iúghoine’ [[The people of] Ireland's multilingual land do not understand each other's tongue.]1 Through his assertion that the people did not understand each other, we might infer that bi- or multilingualism, particularly regarding English and Irish, was not necessarily the norm in Early Modern Ireland, and that the overlap between the Irish- and English-speaking worlds was perhaps limited to certain spheres. This book opened with reference to Spenser's well-trodden passage from A View of the Present State of Ireland to show how Spenser was vaguely familiar with bardic poetry and how he had ‘caused divers of them to be translated’, implicitly placing him at the threshold of this overlapping linguistic sphere. While he potentially had cúpla focal (a few words), Palmer, Bourke, and Kane show how his engagement with the ‘críoch ilbhéarlach’ [multilingual land] was clearly antagonistic towards and full of fear of the dominant language in that equation. Due to his colonial mindset, he perceived the literature of Ireland the same way he did the people, as something that needed to be reformed and conform to English perceptions of civility and literary style. Having carried out a biased and overly generalised assessment of the poets and their literary tradition, Spenser still advocated for their eradication, proving Mac Craith's point that Spenser was unable to truly understand an teanga eile [the other language] or see value in a literary tradition outside the paradigms of his own linguistic tradition.