‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

The twelfth–eleventh centuries BCE mark the transition between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) of Cyprus and the very different social world of the Early Iron Age. The end of the LBA is marked by violent destructions, the abandonment of urban centers and rural communities, and a subsequent dramatic shift in settlement pattern. There is a clear break in material production on the island – especially in pottery production – and significant changes in funerary and ritual practice. Within the wider East Mediterranean, international maritime trade broke down, major palace economies and overarching empire states disappeared, and populations relocated. The direct effect on Cyprus is debated, particularly the presence of Mycenaean colonizing communities. The island’s copper trade apparently persisted, at a reduced scale from the LBA, and cultural and trading links continued with Crete and Philistine communities of the southern Levant. Using settlement and cemetery archaeology, this chapter explores the establishment of new communities on Cyprus ancestral to the Iron Age city kingdoms, the changing material world of the new settlements, contacts beyond the island, the earliest Phoenician activity on Cyprus, and the degree to which the island was a part of the emerging world of Iron Age Greece.

Did classical antiquity connect ethnicity, moral worth, and skin colour? The conventional answer is ‘no’, but then conventional Classics tends to stop, chronologically, before things get interesting. This chapter explores a set of texts from the Roman period and late antiquity that point towards an emergent if elusive epidermal racism. The drivers of this seem to be both empire, with its systematically reductive approach towards human diversity, and Christianity, with its theologisation of white light and black darkness. Late antique texts are, however, inconsistent: Some (e.g. Heliodorus) portray Blackness as noble and idealised, but others (e.g. Nonnus) certainly connect it with defilement and the infernal. Even in late antiquity, then, there is no coherent, thoroughgoing epidermal racism; but we undoubtedly find what Cord Whittaker has called a ‘shimmer’.

This chapter situates sovereignty at the heart of the relationship between international law and empire. I examine the ways in which the concept was defined to exclude non-European peoples while remaining alert to the complexities posed to such exclusionary definitions by the variety of polities that existed during the heyday of European imperialism. Colonial South Asia, with its melange of political units, provides an excellent illustration of this complicated relationship. I explore the diverse articulations of sovereignty in this region along two axes: temporal and categorical. At least three sets of constituents – British officials, rulers and bureaucrats of semi-sovereign entities such as princely states, and anticolonial nationalists in British India – used the language of sovereignty to debate and resolve political problems. I trace their definitions over time. By examining these actors and their legal arguments, we can understand how sovereignty in colonial South Asia transitioned from notions of layered sovereignty to more territorial forms, although pluralist ideas continue to have long afterlives in postcolonial South Asia.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

The chapter is concerned with non-archaeological evidence pertaining to the Early Iron Age in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Since this was the only period in Greek history that completely lacked literacy, we are left with oral tradition as the only means of transmitting information between ca. 1200 and ca. 750 BCE. However, numerous anachronisms found in the Homeric poems show that not everything Homer says about the past should be taken at face value. Much more reliable is the evidence of the dialects, another kind of nonarchaeological evidence that throws light on this period. The regional distribution of the historical Greek dialects fits in well with the destruction levels and depopulation attested at many Mycenaean sites, in that both suggest a sharp break in cultural continuity at the end of the Bronze Age. Nothing of this can be found in Homer. Instead, the epics convey an impressive demonstration of cultural continuity and of religious, social, and military uniformity in polities sharing a common identity. It was this picture of an imagined past that became canonical, and the memory of the collapse of Mycenaean Greece and of the period that immediately followed it was effectively wiped out.

This chapter provides an overview of the entangled history between the discipline of Classics and the biological concept of race. Section I.1 outlines the emergence of problematic claims about the alleged White nature of Graeco-Roman antiquity from the modern era to the present day that have helped substantiate biological conceptions of race. Section I.2 examines scholarly work in critical race theory and early modern studies that offer more nuanced definitions of race beyond the biological. Section I.3 summarises work on the study of race in Classics, and Section I.4 discusses the contents of this Companion.

This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.

From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, the Qing dynasty was the dominant power in East Asia. It waged numerous wars with its neighbours, both within the orbit of its tributary system and without. Coming from Manchuria and with their past tribal war tradition, the Manchus did not have an inherent expansion agenda when they conquered China. Use of force by the Qing dynasty in dealing with frontier crises was often case-specific. The Qing state constantly adjusted and revised its underpinning in justifying its decision to wage war or keep peace on or beyond its borders. In chronological order, this chapter delineates the evolution of Qing China’s normative system. It starts with the Manchus’ formative era in Manchuria, then focuses on the Qing dynasty’s empire-building endeavours and subsequent retreat from frontier activism in the early nineteenth century, and ends with a brief discussion of its last decades, during which the Qing dynasty’s doctrine and practice in managing its international affairs changed radically owing to intensified interactions with Western countries and the introduction of the Western international law.

This chapter analyses how trade law conceptualises data and AI. It shows that trade law applies long-established concepts to these novel phenomena while experimenting with new categories in preferential agreements. For data, these categories include data as a good, as a service, as a digital product, intellectual property, electronic transmissions, and as a regulatory object. For AI, the chapter distinguishes between the trade regulation of AI components, AI products, and AI governance. It concludes by suggesting that trade law can be understood as a form of AI/data law, which may help in recognising and addressing the challenges that the digital economy poses for trade law.

This chapter starts by providing an overview of the radical social and spatial shifts which seem to have occurred within Cretan societies between the period of state collapse ca. 1200 and the early Archaic period from ca. 700 BC onward, including changes in settlement, subsistence, and ritual practice. It then presents three case study regions, possessing contrasts and similarities in patterns of change apparent from substantial detailed research data – the north Lasithi mountains in north central Crete, the Kavousi–Azoria region of east Crete, and the Phaistos–west Mesara region in the south of the island – in order to illustrate the points argued.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

As a field, Classics relies heavily on translation. Many classicists believe that their translations are objective and neutral. However, translations, whether of ancient or modern texts, reflect the positionality of the translator. Therefore, translations cannot be neutral or objective. The translator must be transparent about their social location and positionality. If not, the epistemic injustice of colonialist, imperialistic discourse remains intact. Case studies drawn from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Pliny illustrate this.

Classical linguistics and racecraft have an intertwined history, in that Indo-European linguistics arose concurrently with scientific racism, and shares many of the same metaphors and conceptual frameworks. This chapter touches on this shared history, before exploring some aspects of the metalinguistics and sociolinguistics of race in the ancient world. In particular, the concept of ‘linguistic racism’ will be used to look at how ancient texts use lack of (shared) language to imply a lack of humanity, and how non-Greek speakers are compared to animals. It will also look at depictions of foreign-language speakers as the linguistic ‘other’, particularly in depictions of enslaved people.