‘Black Athena/Black Athenians’? At the dawning of the Age of ‘European supremacy’, intellectuals preceding Martin Bernal engaged in the reclamation of Africa and its role in the world. This argument takes up these concerns in four sections. Section 14.2 considers Bernal and the work of his predecessors who engaged questions of a diverse and inclusive antiquity that included peoples of African descent. Section 14.3 focuses on Phillis Wheatley and her genius in harnessing classical allusion as a poetic device and revolutionary speech. Section 14.4 focuses on the redefinition and reframing of Egypt and Egyptians, and Ethiopia and Ethiopians in relation to classical discourses and their employment in Black revolutionary conceptualisations from the beginnings of the American Republic through the post-Reconstruction period. In Section 14.5, the overlooked scholarship on antiquity of historically Black colleges and universities is engaged as a marker of the long history of challenges to White supremacy.

This chapter discusses the history and evolution of international intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection, focusing on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. It examines the justifications for and debates surrounding the extension of developed country-style IPRs to developing nations, as well as the TRIPS provisions themselves. The chapter also addresses the conflicts between TRIPS and other international regimes, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the significant public health concerns raised by TRIPS, particularly regarding access to essential medicines. Finally, it concludes by analysing the distributive impact of TRIPS and the challenges posed by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

This chapter uses the theoretical frameworks of racial formations, racecraft, and intersectionality to analyse the racial dimensions of the two accounts of the massacre of the Pelasgian men of Lemnos and their enslaved Thracian concubines by the Pelasgian women of Lemnos in Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter argues that the epic presents the Lemnian women’s actions as driven by their sense that the Pelasgian men had overturned the racial hierarchy of the island that had previously benefitted them. The Lemnian women’s violent resistance to their change of status is presented by the narrator as an overreaction prompted by sexual jealousy new sentence. But it is presented by Hypsipyle as the restoration of the ‘proper’ racial order. Intersectionality helps to tease out the different racial destinies of the two groups of non-Greek women on Lemnos. The free Pelasgian women are to be the mothers of racially superior sons, whereas the Thracian girls, as mothers of the racially inferior sons of the Pelasgians, are to be exterminated with them so that that Lemnos can fulfil its destiny to become the source of the Greek founders of Cyrene.

Current thinking views the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean as highly interconnected. This contrasts with late twentieth-century ideas of either geographically separate regions or more developed centers that dominated less complex peripheral societies. A major inspiration for the present approach is a post-processual understanding of the complex dimensions of consumption. Elite burial goods at Lefkandi ca. 1100–825 BCE illustrate how imports were used in status strategies. In the eighth century BCE, there is a decrease in valuable grave goods as dedications of imported luxury items in public sanctuaries became the preferred means of elite display. Current views also reflect postcolonial understanding of non-indigenous settlements as sites of hybridity and inbetweenness, not the imposition of a colonizing ethnicity on local identities but new cultural syntheses. Examples include a large number of the early so-called Greek colonies. A recently excavated example is L’Amastuola in Apulia, an indigenous settlement of the late eighth century where Greeks came to live in the early seventh century.

Based on an in-depth analysis of a few selected cases of commercial dispute and litigation, this chapter illuminates the functioning of the complex and competing legal systems and the mechanisms of dispute resolution among merchants in Surat in western India and Zanzibar in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the dynamics of this legal space, the endurance of legal plurality and qualitative changes in it over the period under review. It critically examines the perceived binary between the legal plurality of the pre-colonial period and the legal uniformity and centralization of the colonial period. The chapter argues that merchants usually sought to resolve their commercial disputes through informal negotiations, petitions, arbitration and legal proceedings in courts of law. The analysis of commercial disputes show that despite the emergence of the European (English) colonial legal system across the Indian Ocean arena in the nineteenth century and the colonial state’s push to make the law uniform and implement a single legal system, the normative and customary mechanisms of adjudicating commercial disputes endured in the colonial period.

The revisionist school has asserted that pre-colonial indigenous polities were fluid shadow entities and that pre-British South Asian regimes had no law. This line of argument claims that unique conditions of India prevented the emergence of states with well-defined contiguous territories possessing centralised governments. Ironically this view is reminiscent of colonial British scholars’ argument about pre-colonial India. The argument that pre-British India had no laws and that the ruler’s will was the ultimate authority is incorrect. Rulers of pre-British indigenous polities did not operate in a vacuum, but had to take into account long-established practices, existing procedures and the presence of local powerbrokers. Arabic discourse for the Delhi Sultanate and Turko-Mongol conventions for the Mughals, along with local custom, shaped the legal history of medieval India’s militaries. Overall, the political theorists of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and the ‘Hindu’ dynasties accepted the pivotal role of the monarchy and the army in shaping the structure of interpolity relationships.

This chapter starts from the premise that the Homeric epics are essentially products of the time in which they are conventionally supposed to have been created – very roughly sometime in the late eighth century BCE. The extent to which they might be recognizable as the Iliad and Odyssey we have inherited, having passed through processes like the Pisistratid "recension" and the hands of Alexandrian editors, is certainly debatable, but there is enough evidence of both a relatively direct and more circumstantial nature to suggest that cycles of epic song, including elements that we can associate with the specifically Homeric epics, were already in circulation in Greece in the decades around 700 BCE. The wider historical and ideological contexts in which this development took place are of particular interest for the questions of why it took place when it did and what its purpose might have been. The archaeological record of the later eighth century can shed light on other important developments in various parts of the Greek world, which together may have some bearing on these questions. At the same time, the epics themselves contain various elements which may provide clues to the ideological context which informed them.

This chapter provides a survey of iconographic themes found in the pottery, figurines, fibulas, terracotta, metalwork, jewelry, and seals produced across Greek-speaking communities. Rejecting a traditional assumption of close ties with the Homeric epics, the study combines two approaches to offer a more socially embedded understanding of image-making in early Greece. Examining the iconography within multiple contexts, from the types of objects on which imagery appears to their archaeological contexts and the material behavior associated with their use, reveals that not just politics but also social reproduction lay behind artistic development. Second, it demonstrates how expanding the discussion to the larger world of representations adds further dimensions to the ways in which the Greeks projected an imagined ideal society. Themes discussed include mourning, warriors and weapons, battle, hunting, horse culture, dance, abduction, divinities and religious iconography, animals, hybrid monsters, and mythic narrative. The developments of Geometric art can be understood as responses to the new complexities of social hierarchy and gender, access to the wider world, the growing integration of religious institutions into community life, and political alliances that constituted the experience of the city-state.

The beginning of iron technology in Greece represents the earliest known phase of iron production and use in Europe. Traditionally, scholars have attributed the emergence of iron technology in Greece to the diffusion of knowledge from the eastern Mediterranean. Over the past twenty years, numerous excavations have brought to light objects and industrial waste that allow us to reconsider how iron working started, how it developed, and its broader impact on the sociocultural changes in ancient Greece. This chapter proposes an alternative interpretation based on a novel interdisciplinary methodology that combines the archaeological examination of style and context with metallographic and chemical analysis to fingerprint the local characteristics of iron technology. The chapter concludes that iron technology appeared as a local, most probably accidental, innovation and was not the result of diffusion. It further argues that the localized technological traditions in both smelting and manufacturing that emerged in Iron Age Greece continued and solidified in the following periods.

The end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–1050 BCE) on Crete is known in ceramic terms as the Late Minoan (LM) IIIC period. The LM IIIC period is often considered to represent the start of the Early Iron Age as iron was present, though objects of that material were extremely rare on the island before the eleventh century. The period was characterized by a dramatic shift in settlement patterns and in many aspects of material culture, including settlement organization and architecture, burial and cult practices, and sociopolitical structures. Although these changes mark a clear break from the previous period of Mycenaean influence, there are also elements of continuity. In addition, the island was defined by a high degree of regionalism in LM IIIC (and throughout the EIA), perhaps most visible in variations in settlement patterns, cult activity, burial practices, and ceramic styles. This regionalism was probably influenced by geography, previous traditions, sociopolitical organization, population size, and cultural identity.

This chapter offers a survey of the jus gentium in South East Aasia between the fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It starts by providing an overview of the region and elucidating the challenges inherent in its study. Subsequently, the examination follows three lines of enquiry: first, it explores basic values and principles governing inter-ruler and interpolity relations on the eve of European colonialism around 1450–1500 by discussing and problematising tributary relations. Second, it examines the uniqueness of these relations when juxtaposed with Europe, highlighting key facets such as hierarchy, the prioritisation of people over land, and the forging of alliances with communities of the sea and land. Finally, the chapter plots the transformative impact of European colonial policies and practices, such as the militarisation of maritime spaces, the use of sea passes and the introduction of written agreements and commercial treaties.

In 1988, Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe called for a study of the influence of Graeco-Roman literature on the European invention of Africa. Whether or not Graeco-Roman literature presents a coherent picture of Africa as a geography and ethnography of alterity, early modern European writings made use of these descriptions to justify European superiority and colonial expansion into African territories. While the aims and contexts of the ancient texts differed widely from their later instrumentalisations, this chapter asks whether Roman representations of African territories and people already show traces of dehumanisation and cultural hierarchies that can be productively analysed with the tools of race and critical race theories.

This introduction to The Cambridge Companion to World Trade Law introduces the book’s purpose and structure. The volume is intended to be an authoritative and accessible guide to the field, appealing to both legal specialists and those with no specialist knowledge of trade law. It is written by experts and provides a compact discussion of the perspectives, enduring issues, and emergent challenges in the field. The introduction also discusses the current context of world trade, highlighting the divisions in the world following decades of growth and the challenges posed by globalisation. It sets the stage for the chapters that follow.

This chapter explores how labour issues are addressed in international trade agreements. It examines the reasons for including labour provisions, the history of their inclusion in trade agreements, and their effects on workers. Labour provisions are often included in trade agreements in response to the disruptions caused by international trade, to address the effects of trade agreements on workers, and to strengthen weak domestic labour protections. Despite the proliferation of labour provisions in trade agreements, their effects on workers’ lives are limited. The chapter concludes that labour provisions that directly target sites of production may be more effective in improving working conditions.

Interstate diplomacy in early modern Asia involved a framework of a common set of practices shared among Islamic, South East Asian and East Asian polities. This chapter outlines this common framework and then explores the unique articulations of it to be found in the Manchu Qing imperial formation. Qing diplomatic ritual drew from the rich tradition of imperial China, the practices of the Mongol Muslim and Buddhist Chinggisid khanates, the Buddhist notion of chakravartin kingship, and the diplomatic practices of the dominant sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Ritual diplomacy not only presented claims of supremacy among a multitude of Asian rulers, but negotiated military and marriage alliances, established the rules and practices of commercial exchange, moved the unique human and animal products of one kingdom to another, and addressed competing declarations over territory and resources.