This chapter demonstrates the enduring vitality and importance of the trope of the captive city (urbs capta) for late antique authors. Narratives of captured ancient cities follow a set pattern often modeled on the destruction of Troy but also, in Jewish and Christian contexts, on the sieges of Jerusalem. While these highly formulaic narratives are of little use to modern scholars interested in reconstructing specific acts of siege warfare, they provide historians with invaluable evidence for ways in which late Romans reckoned with the impact of war on civilian populations, which assumed a new urgency in the later empire when the sacked cities were increasingly Roman, and when both victim and aggressor were Christians. By tracing the use of the captive city trope from the late fourth to the sixth century, the chapter explains how Christian authors reframed the urbs capta motif by shifting the focus from the city to the church as the locus of suffering.

Civil Society and Prohibition

While politics at the national and provincial levels converged to produce prohibition as a political idea and demand, thereby influencing its policy features along the way, it was the concurrent development of a vibrant prohibition culture that imbued the policy with moral force as the demand of the Indian people. Prohibition become an ideal as it filtered through society before crystallising in the provinces as a policy. Indeed, civil society activism reinforced the Congress's demand for the policy as it took shape, bringing a distinct casteist and gendered worldview into alignment with teetotalism-as-patriotism.

Reflecting ‘a convergence of modern science with a synthesis of Victorian morality and established merchant/Bania and Brahman pious norms’, social movements across India had surfaced certain elitist values that gradually became cultural norms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. As they often included the threat of social exclusion, movements that originated and developed within caste communities proved remarkably effective in persuading large numbers of people to turn away from drink – more so, arguably, than state-led prohibition subsequently was. However, there was a key difference between earlier movements and the distinct culture of prohibition that took root between 1920 and 1937. Although the latter was overtly political in its orientation and outlook, it was embedded in a discourse that elevated it above the domain of politics. As an influential Tamil newspaper put it, ‘the political issue need not be mixed up with this. Go to your villages and organise compacts so that there may not be any drunkard therein.’

This chapter explores the written and material evidence for civilian quartering of Roman troops in late antiquity. The civic duties to extend hospitium or hospitalitas are reconstructed from the Republic until the late Roman Empire, focusing on the period between the fourth century ce and mid-sixth century ce. By looking at the literary evidence for housing troops in civilian homes penned in the Republic and early Principate, the convention of using moralizing rhetoric to describe soldiers quartered in cities is established. This classicizing rhetoric is then used to reframe later allegations concerning the effects of Constantine’s alleged movement of frontier troops into cities. This reconsideration of the extant evidence for Roman troop quartering questions and amends how we should write the lived experiences of civilians living in late Roman cities.

The First World War generated multiple state and non-state humanitarian replies, encompassing not only material and financial donations, but also different forms of voluntary work. In colonial India, one of these relief activities was the formation and working of the ambulance corps. Staffed with (Indian) volunteers, the corps assisted wounded and sick soldiers of the British Indian Army in Great Britain, Mesopotamia and India. Corps members worked closely with, or as part of, the military. Their duties not only included the transportation of war victims but also comprised other tasks, such as nursing them, dressing their wounds, providing medical care as doctors, and interpreting and cooking for them. The male volunteers came from all over India, and depending on the nature of the corps, their religious, caste, educational and class backgrounds varied substantially.

Sources suggest that at least four Indian volunteer ambulance initiatives existed: the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps (IFATC), the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA), the Bengal Ambulance Corps (BAC) and the Benares Ambulance Transport Corps. In Chapter 1 we have already read about the work of the ISJAA. This chapter sets out to analyse the Indian Field Ambulance Training Corps. Established in Britain in autumn 1914, the unit was, as far as I know, the only relief initiative organised by colonial subjects back in the metropole during the war. This does not mean that it was the only humanitarian endeavour organised by non-Westerners.

This chapter explores the impact of warfare on North African communities and their built environment during Late Antiquity (fourth to sixth century). While the political upheavals, internal conflicts, and the invasions that shaped the region during this period have been extensively studied, the local effects and responses to these challenges remain underexplored. Drawing on selected case studies, this work combines archaeological and textual evidence to examine and compare the actions taken by local communities and their rulers – the Western Roman Empire, the Vandal Kingdom, and the Eastern Roman Empire – in response to ongoing conflict. From the centenaria of Tripolitania and the fortified estates of Byzacena and Proconsularis to the fortifications built under Justinian’s regime and its successors, this chapter highlights the role of warfare and its consequences in reshaping the provincial landscapes of North Africa, offering new insights into the region’s social and physical transformation during this period.

Analysing fascism in India has been rather unnecessarily polarized, both by Marxist approaches overemphasizing economic causality and by non-Marxist approaches overemphasizing ideology, politics, organizational aspects, and social psychology.1 This difference is important in the historical condition and context in which an analysis of the current regime in India is being made. Whereas Antonio Gramsci defined fascism on an international scale as ‘an attempt to resolve problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol shots’, in India, the rise of an authoritarian regime with fascist tendencies is certainly not a result of the nation being caught up in an international war. It could be more significant to examine the social reality that lends consent to the authoritarian model of politics and governance and how the forms in which it surfaces exhibit fascist tendencies (Gramsci 1984).2 The fascist regimes during the Second World War were different from the post-war ones, specifically with reference to the experience of developing nations like India. In this context, the distinction between fascist movements and fascist regimes is important, and there seems to have been a right-wing extremist movement pushing for the rise of a regime in India (Dimitrov 1984; Reich 1980; Koves and Mazumdar 2005). If Narendra Modi's regime cannot be characterized as a fascist regime, it certainly has been an authoritarian one with fascist tendencies, and what needs to be explained is how such a regime manages to manufacture popular consent.

In 1962 the Australian Government deployed Australian military forces in support of the Republic of Vietnam. Before the cessation of combat operations and complete withdrawal in 1972, this commitment would escalate from an initial advisory team, to a battalion group, to a three-battalion task force with supporting armour, cavalry, aviation, artillery and associated logistics elements.After the war in Afghanistan, this would be the Australian Army’s second-longest conflict, lasting almost 11 years and surpassing the previous longest Australian commitment which was to the Malayan Emergency (1955 to 1963).

This article advances four arguments about Constantine’s Roman Arch (315). First, it posits that its imagery and inscription endeavored to please a single viewer: the emperor Constantine. That argument narrows the interpretative possibilities regarding its meaning. From presumed anonymous observers of differing faiths, the field narrows to a single imperial viewer, a recent convert to Christianity and a victor in a civil war. Second, the lens of civil war illuminates previously unrecognized Augustan rhetorical and visual tropes that guided the Arch’s makers in legitimating the monument and Constantine’s victory against Maxentius. Third, the article uncovers Christian connotations in the arch’s inscription. Fourth, the neglected Christian subtext opens the possibility for identifying the Arch and the Colossus next to it as the first openly Christian imperial monuments in Rome. The article therefore demonstrates the syncretism of traditional imperial rhetoric and insignia with Christian ideas long before traditionally assumed.

In Rome, being taken as a prisoner of war had dramatic repercussions for the condition of the individual and their family. Captured citizens became a slave to the enemy, or servus hostium, and were excluded from the body politic. However, they could regain freedom and civil rights through redemption. Initially, that was the responsibility of their family, but over time laws regulated the ransoming of prisoners of war, and other actors became involved. This chapter first reviews the Republican Age and the High Empire before addressing the ransoming of captives in Late Antiquity. It discusses individuals and large groups, with ransom paid by families, the emperor, or by bishops. It shows that social status determined the fate of women. According to Justinian’s Digest, a woman freed by a victorious army was considered free or married, and not a slave. According to Ulpian, that principle also applied when a woman was redeemed (redempta) rather than freed.

Violence – by which I mean an intentional rupture of the physical integrity of a body – is a reminder that a human being is always also a thing. Whatever else late ancient humans may have been, they were always subject to the possibility of physical rupture, perforation, tear, or break, as is the nature of things. War was, and is, a stylized method of maneuvering one group of rupturable things toward the infliction of greater disintegration on another group of rupturable things. “The main purpose and outcome of war,” Elaine Scarry writes, “is injuring.” That the things injured are also people, with their own sensations and experiences, pasts and hoped-for futures, is the point of war; it is how war persuades injured people and other onlookers to accept its outcomes. War confronts persons with their reducibility, their thingness, and asks them to accept conditions imposed by the victors in the light of that bodily thingness. The essays in this volume present us with a variety of ways of thinking about this ugly practice. They describe how different late ancient people made sense of what was happening when bodies were ruptured, or bodies threatened to rupture other bodies, on a large scale. In this Epilogue, I bring some of the ideas in this volume together to consider the problem of ruptured bodies in Late Antiquity as a series of questions about how late ancient people imagined or experienced physical thingness in warfare.