This chapter claims that the language of rights was central to Catholic thought in the long nineteenth century. Rather than rejecting the concept of human rights, Catholic social theorists, theologians, and church leaders embraced it, and utilized it in their effort to update the Church’s teachings to the era of upheavals. The chapter highlights three spheres in which rights proved especially important. First, in response to the French Revolution and the discourse of individual rights, Catholics argued that rights must be understood alongside correlative duties. Theorists like Nicola Spedalieri and Antonio Rosmini claimed that only the Church’s supervision could secure an order in which individual and communal freedoms were secured. Second, Catholics utilized human rights in their evolving struggle against socialism and its challenge to social hierarchies. Influential writers such as Matteo Liberatore claimed that “true” rights required the preservation of “natural” inequality between employers and workers, ideas that were codified in Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Finally, rights were useful for Catholic mobilization against feminism and sex reform movements in the late nineteenth century. Popular experts of sexuality such as Joseph Mausbach and Friedrich Wilhelm Förster maintained that only heterosexual marriage and the wife’s submission to the husband could realize the two sexes’ “true” rights.

The jurisdictional complexity and layered sovereignty of empires converted struggles over rights – their definition, deployment, and distribution – into contests over authority. This chapter examines the close relationship between authority and rights, together with the emergence of variegated rights regimes, in the British, Spanish, and Russian empires. All three empires relied on long-standing routines for assigning different sets of rights to different categories of subjects. This approach to the history of rights is different from the familiar focus on the circulation of ideas about natural or universal rights. The chapter examines the politics of rights in relation to imperial claims of protection over various groups and in coerced labor regimes. It then turns to the question of how conflicts over rights inside empires influenced global stratification. The right to be sovereign – the right to give rights, to order them, and to protect them – emerged in the long nineteenth century as a capacity possessed and decided by European imperial powers.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

After the Vietnam War, unified Vietnam charted a twisty trajectory in search of its place in the world. This course went through five major turning points - in 1977, 1986, 1989, 2003, and 2014 – as the ruling Communist Party responded to fundamental changes in Vietnam’s strategic environment. Reflecting competing worldviews in the elites, these responses resulted from the struggle between two long-term choices: to reject the Western-led world order and oppose Western influence, or to accept the Western-led world order and adapt Western influence. At a deeper level and from a long historical perspective, this struggle was complicated primarily by Vietnam’s location vis-à-vis China and the major transoceanic routes. If the Vietnam War ended with the triumph of the anti-Western choice, the post-war period has seen Vietnam alternate between anti-Westernism and international integration. Decades of zig-zagging eventually turned Vietnam from an “outpost of socialism” and “spearhead of the world national liberation movement” to an “engaged and responsible member of the international community” and from a fierce opponent to a discreet ally of the United States, while not fundamentally shaking its commitment to denying Chinese regional dominance.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

Based on Vietnamese sources, some located in the archive of the Communist Party of Vietnam, this chapter depicts the landscape and environment of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965–73). It analyzes the policies of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) to build a North Vietnamese homefront. This chapter argues that, inspired by patriotism, and thanks to sacrifice of millions of people, North Vietnam could simultaneously successfully carry out two interrelated strategic tasks: building socialism in the North and supplying the South. Without building up socialism, there would nothing to supply the South with. And without supplying South, the construction of socialism would be impossible. In short, Vietnam came out of the war victorious thanks to the policy of turning the North into a strong and reliable homefront that served as a material as well as a spiritual mainstay for a long and brutal war.

Situating Enlightenment theories of rights in a broader arc extending back to the Scientific Revolution, this chapter focuses on the Italian jurists and philosophers who incorporated these theories into constitutional thought. Drawing on the works of Montesquieu and Rousseau, in particular, Gaetano Filangieri sought to reformulate arguments about natural rights in terms of a legislative “science.” This science, which would be eagerly received across Europe and Spanish America, sought to incorporate rights and popular sovereignty into constitutional law. Filangieri also drew on Italian intellectual traditions, which (in the case of Antonio Genovesi) insisted on social, alongside individual, rights. Following the influential example of Cesare Beccaria, Filangieri also paid particular attention to rights in penal matters. His constitutional principles were poignantly, if briefly, embodied in the 1799 Constitution of the Neapolitan Republic, drafted by Francesco Pagano.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

This chapter addresses the relationship between rights and property and the role of each in determining the form of government. It begins by challenging J. G. A. Pocock’s division of the history of political thought into liberal and republican traditions, with the first based on a juridical conception of politics and the second focused on political participation to the exclusion of a concern with rights. David Hume, whose skepticism led him to deny that justice was a natural virtue, traced property rights to an appreciation of their social utility. In addition, like Montesquieu, Hume denied any necessary relation between the degree of political participation in government and the security of rights. Edmund Burke accepted that fundamental rights were ultimately derived from nature, but objected to how the French revolutionaries ignored the role of prescription in stabilizing justice. Ultimately, Hegel broke down the distinction between rights and welfare, drawing on Rousseau and Kant’s emphasis on freedom as the true source of justice and humanity.

The declarations of rights issued during the American and French revolutions are the most important outcomes of the eighteenth-century’s debates about natural rights. Concise and clear in their language, these declarations distilled decades of theorizing into easily understood axioms meant to make citizens aware of their rights and of their entitlement to participate in the making of the laws under which they lived. The eighteenth-century declarations on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn up by legislators determined to protect the institution of slavery that so flagrantly contradicted their sweeping statements about natural rights, and they were not intended to grant women equal rights with men. Their expansive language, however, provided a basis for excluded groups to formulate demands that rights be extended to them, even if the authors of the declarations had not intended to do so. The most influential of these documents, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, used sweeping, universal language. Intended as temporary, it was swiftly canonized as the embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution. The more radical French Declaration of 1793 incorporated social rights to welfare, work, and education. Napoleon rejected the idea of including a declaration of rights in the constitution he imposed in France 1799, but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights showed the lasting power of the tradition inaugurated with the Virginia Declaration of 1776.

This chapter focuses on the Pan-Asian, Pan-African, and Pan-Islamic notions of rights from the 1870s to the 1920s to explore why and how Asian and African intellectuals substantiated their appeals to equal rights through pan-nationalistic language about the civility of their race, religion, and culture in relation to the white and Christian populations of the European metropoles. It argues that mobilization among Pan-Islamists, Pan-Asianists, and Pan-Africanists in the immediate aftermath of World War I, in which rights claims played a central role, represented the culmination of longer intellectual developments centered on the foundational claims of racial equality and civilizational capacity during the previous half a century. Pan-nationalist formulation of counternarratives of race and civilization to substantiate their demands for rights either within the European empires that ruled over them, or in international law on behalf of all the non-European empires and kingdoms, started as apologetic attempts of many non-European intellectuals to raise the level of civilization in their societies through self-strengthening reforms in order to claim an equal and dignified place in the globalizing imperial world. Gradually, however, pan-nationalist claims began to include a more confident assertion that Asian and African societies had their own innate civilizational capacities that needs to be revived and they have a right to equality irrespective of their racial, civilizational, and religious differences. The chapter suggests that pan-nationalist intellectual efforts greatly contributed to the foundations of the nationalist claims to the right to self-determination in Asia and Africa that culminated in the post–World War II period decolonization.

This chapter explores political developments in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) from the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 to the consolidation of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s power as president in late 1968. The dominant feature of politics in the RVN during this time was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. But noncommunist civilian groups challenged military rule in the form of street protests, armed rebellion, and constitutional assemblies, forcing the military to accede to elections and the return to constitutional government in 1967. These changes created limited opportunities for competitive politics but also granted a veneer of legitimacy to military rule as Nguyễn Văn Thiệu won election and outmaneuvered his rivals within the armed forces. The chapter addresses the powerful influence that the United States, as well as historic faultlines in Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism such as religion, regionl and differing experiences of colonialism and communism, exercised on RVN politics. The chapter contends that the RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The American War in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietamese people, a fundamentally political conflict in which “pacification,” the push to uproot the adversarys hold on the villages, became a primary mechanism in fighting the war. This chapter opens with an inquiry into the meaning of the terms of art, not just pacification but “counterinsurgency,” “civic action,” “nation-building,” and others. It observes this schema applies to an essential problem, the degree of South Vietnamese commitment to pacification, which remained problematic. To show this I start with a description of how pacification evolved under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors. On the American side we see presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took a conventional view, to John F. Kennedy, who applied counterinsurgency, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the “other war,” one that privileged economic and social development. LBJ became the first to create an organizational structure to conduct pacification programs. The late-war innovations to these efforts, including measures of village loyalty, the Phoenix program attacking the National Liberation Fronts infrastructure, and the emphasis on elections from national to village level, were products of the Johnson administration. From the beginning, American pacification policy oscillated between emphasizing security versus social development before settling on security.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The East India Company conquest of Bengal opened a field of intellectual contestation centered on questions of rights. At issue were competing conceptions of the place of rights in the history of India. Rights as such could be regarded as having held little significance in light of an underlying history of despotism. On the other hand, the claims of subjects on donative largesse, state patronage, or public infrastructure could be understood as the exercise of a kind of right. Cutting across these positions and their variations was an engagement with the administrative idiom and historical example of the Mughal empire (ca. 1526–1857). Indeed, this rights discourse included contributions from figures who posed themselves as direct interlocutors as much with the Mughal old regime as with the evolving order of the Company. In their works, critiques of the Company could be made by recasting the old regime in new molds to challenge the practice and conceptual underpinnings of Company rule. In order to situate this field of contestation in the intellectual history of rights, this chapter analyzes the views of some singular figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The rights of man and the citizen were in conflict in West African abolitionism because the universalism of the rights of man was not enforceable without encroaching on the sovereignty of African states. This chapter will explore the development of ideas of rights in the engagements between West Africa and the abolitionists and imperialists who intervened there across the nineteenth century. The three sections explore the forms of civil, political, and ‘universal’ rights that existed in West Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the ideas of rights that abolitionists developed in their antislavery interventions against the slave trade in West Africa; and the ideas of rights that emerged in debates over imperial citizenship in these colonies towards the end of the century. A multiplicity of rights regimes existed in overlapping and competing spaces as West Africa became a site for differentiating the civilizing mission and citizenship; duties and rights; and the boundaries of universal privileges and assertive versus paternalistic rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen may have laid out the theory for citizenship, law, and universal rights, but it was through the attempt to implement those ideas as universal that differentiation between basic rights and citizenship rights began to be articulated. That differentiation emerged through negotiations over the power to implement universal ideals in places like West Africa, which were undergoing their own revolutions in ideas of universal legal regimes and notions of citizenship, while maintaining political privileges for a subset of the population. In the process, European colonial governments came into conflict with each other and with African governments’ ideas of the universal moral values that conferred rights on their members.

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.