In this chapter, the ties between the nation, racial identity, and the role of classicism are traced as an identity marker. Alt-right – or identitarian – movements and the nation are coterminous in their racialization, an association that their redeployment of antiquity reifies. Analysis of the nation, Whiteness, and antiquity draws examples from the West, particularly the United States, in terms of the wayward identitarian movements that have been proliferating. Although the nation controls the apparatus of the state, identitarian movements benefit from new means of communication, namely, the Internet, and social media. I imagine a way out of the paradox of identitarianism through alternative uses of classicism. This way out is also an end of nation, as opposed to Fukuyama’s end of history, which depends on the strength of nations and states.

Corinth is often associated with the emergence of Greek monumental architecture. The long absence of worked stone in post-Mycenaean architecture cannot be explained by the loss of the necessary tools and techniques. Worked stone slabs were used in pit and cist graves in the northeastern Peloponnese from the Mycenaean through the Geometric periods, and large monolithic sarcophagi appeared at Corinth ca. 900 BCE. Such burials, sometimes containing valuable grave goods, apparently belonged to high-status individuals. By contrast, until the early seventh century BCE at Corinth and elsewhere, buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and thatched roofs; isolated worked stones occurred rarely, e.g., as beddings for wooden thresholds. In the second half of the eighth century, grave goods disappeared from Corinthian burials, and the elite displayed their status with rich dedications in sanctuaries. During these years, Corinth became increasingly wealthy, first under the oligarchic Bacchiads and later in the tyranny of Kypselos. The first Greek temples with single-skin walls of cuboid stone blocks and roofs of terracotta tiles, built ca. 680–650 at Corinth and Isthmia, represent elite dedications. As with the worked stone in elite Corinthian burials, the quarried stone blocks used in these temples enhanced their display of wealth.

The jiao (brokerage cartel) was a merchant organisation constituted by sea merchants who spoke Fujianese dialects or other related vernaculars. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was first established in Taiwan Fucheng (Tainan), and then its activities gradually expanded: north to Japan and south to Siam (Thailand) and Myanmar.1 The members of a jiao were called jiao merchants. Most of them ran businesses in important port cities. The small ones opened ‘ninety-eight firms’ (jiuba hang 九八行); this type of firm accepted commissioned sales and took a 2 per cent commission. The large ones owned ships and became ‘bow firms’ (chuantou hang 船頭行). They were mainly engaged in import and export trade.2

How does Asia feature in the history of international law? Very sparingly, according to multiple reviews of the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law.1 Published in 2012, the Oxford Handbook was set up as a project to break new ground by ‘departing from the “well-worn paths” of how the history of international law has been written so far’.2 The aims included challenging the Eurocentricism of international legal history, and bringing within the frame things generally excluded from it – such as the ‘many other experiences and forms of legal relations between autonomous [extra-European] communities developed in the course of history’, including those ‘which were discontinued as a result of domination and colonization by European Powers’.3 Proceeding from this promising beginning, the Handbook included specific chapters on ‘China’, ‘Japan’ and ‘India’, as well as chapters on the ‘encounters’ with Europe of each.4 Without doubt, these proved to be interesting and revealing outings. Not least, they underlined how much remained to be studied and written of the very polities that European scholars from Mill to Hegel had declared to have ‘no history’ (to the productive irritation of generations of historians from these polities).5 Yet, as the reviews that followed publication of the Handbook perceptively noted, having had the run of six chapters in the sixty-six-chapter volume (about a dozen chapters across all non-European regions), these polities did not infiltrate other parts of the volume. That is, they did not leave the ‘regional’ section of the volume. Barring exceptions, the Handbook chapters on key international legal actors and themes did not draw upon non-European engagements, debates, concepts, practices or sources.6 Of ‘the 21 individuals presented in portrait, 19 [were] white European men’ (and one a white European woman).7 While Christianity was ‘all over’ the chapters, Islamic international law had ‘only a compartmentalized, isolated role … presented as largely ahistorical and static’.8 Encounters were had with Europe, but Asian polities did not meet each other, nor other non-European polities.9 The footnotes, tables of treaties and cases, and bibliographies also told a largely European story.10 And all this was perhaps unavoidable, explained one reviewer, given that volume had not opened up the logically prior question of what to look at, in identifying the history of international law.11 It had not distanced itself from the ‘discipline’s orthodox approach to sources’, which ‘direct[ed] scholars of “pre-modern” international law towards the writings of the “fathers of international law” [all European men], and … scholars of international law’s “modern” history to state consent’.12 These sources were European: they represented particular European innovations, responding to particular European experiences. Yet they were cast into universal categories into which non-Europeans did not fit – or rarely fit. Seen through the prism of these sources, non-Europeans, having few representatives either in the pantheon of fathers or in the club of possible consent givers, did not qualify as contributors to the history of international law. Clearly, then, some recalibration of what it meant to do the history of international law was needed. Only by engaging the question of ‘the history of what’, as Anne Orford has put it,13 could we begin to build a history of international law that engages with ‘extra-European experiences and forms’, as the Handbook had set out to do.

This chapter explores the legacies of indenture for international law in Asia through a survey of the existing scholarship and points to new directions for research. Focusing on indentured labor from India, which comprised the majority of labourers recruited under this system in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it shows how indenture shifted definitions of emigrants and foreigners, shaped discourses on welfare in migration, and left its mark on international relations as they emerged in the aftermath of the two world wars. The chapter also discusses how questions of nationality and citizenship in the postcolonial period often overlooked the plight of the descendents of indenture in Asia, and concludes with speculations on what the new form of indenture is and the limits of drawing these historical analogies.

The story of the Iron Age Greeks in the western Mediterranean is currently under revision. The still dominant story is that Greeks migrated there in search of better land and greater economic opportunities unavailable in their homeland and encountered peoples who were backward in terms of their cultural, social, political, economic, and technological development. Through this interaction, the region’s cultural development was brought into line with these more sophisticated Greek newcomers. In the last fifteen years, however, a new picture challenging this traditional story has emerged, thanks to growing and better-interpreted archaeological data particularly from Etruria and Sardinia in Italy. This new picture has included significant changes to absolute chronologies, which have established that Italian developments are earlier than previously thought and are hardly describable as backward. Scholarship remains polarized between these two competing narratives. This chapter seeks to bridge these polarized divides and to take a more nuanced approach to the current block thinking. It argues that Etruria and Sardinia were indeed important regions in the Early Iron Age, capable of attracting Greeks westwards, and that Greeks had the greatest impact on those areas of Italy where they founded city-states.

This chapter explores Egypt’s interactions with Greeks and Greek culture during the Iron Age, particularly from 1000 to the early sixth century BCE. These interactions stemmed from Egypt’s integration (or lack thereof) into broader Mediterranean and Near Eastern trade and political networks. While evidence of Greek presence in Egypt before the seventh century BCE is limited, Egyptian or Egyptianizing goods were widely circulated in the Aegean, suggesting indirect contact through intermediaries like Phoenician traders. The Third Intermediate Period (1069–664 BCE) was marked by political fragmentation and foreign dynasties, leading to an internal focus and limited engagement with Greek material culture. However, by the early Saite Period (664–332 BCE), foreign mercenaries and traders began settling in Egypt, culminating in the Greek emporion at Naukratis under Psamtik I. Archaeological evidence, including imported Greek pottery and Egyptian bronzes found in Greek sanctuaries, underscores the shifting dynamics of these interactions. The Saite rulers embraced foreign goods and influences as strategic tools for consolidating power, in stark contrast to their predecessors. This study emphasizes the role of archaeological data over Greek literary sources, offering insights into the evolving relationship between Egypt and Greece and the broader implications for Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange.

This chapter discusses the relationship between WTO law and other public international law (PIL), focusing on the interpretation of WTO law through the lens of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). It examines how WTO dispute settlement bodies have approached non-WTO law, particularly in the context of treaty interpretation and potential conflicts between legal regimes. The chapter argues that while the VCLT provides a framework for interpretation, it has limitations in addressing conflicts between different agreements, as illustrated by the interaction between the Paris Agreement and the WTO. The authors contend that legislative solutions within the WTO are necessary to address these conflicts and ensure the WTO’s continued relevance in the face of global challenges like climate change.

This chapter argues how Ignatius Sancho’s oeuvre, his reception in the literary world, and his enduring legacy in the arts generate an important set of counter-representations to imperial representations of Black life. While providing an overview of the volume’s essays and its organization, this chapter argues how Sancho’s epistolary writing speaks to Black life-worlds beyond the British political terms of debates on equality and abolition. Although Sancho’s writings and presence in the public sphere have been absorbed into broader narratives of imperial power and prestige, his oeuvre and documentations of his influence (past and present) exhibit rare representations of Black life across a variety of social spaces, beyond the terms of servitude and enslavement. While many early public representations of Black life in England were translated for the racializing gaze of a predominantly white readership, Sancho’s self-representation through the arts (alongside subsequent critical and creative reception of his work) reveal complex patterns and particularities in African diasporic experiences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

How did the songs of Pindar solicit the language of Greek polytheism? How could their words generate ritual knowledge and provoke experience? Pindar was long recognised as a master of piety and an authority on divine matters, and his poems remained privileged points of reference for thinking ritual occasions like festivals, the sanctuaries where they were held, and ritual types like sacrifice. Focusing on sacrifice, this chapter looks at the ritual language produced by Pindaric poetry, rather than the one it reflects, and its inscription in the ritual archive of Greek culture. It is concerned with the poet’s enduring role as an agent in the dynamic system of Greek polytheism. After a brief survey of the prominence of sacrifice in the Pindaric biographical tradition, different aspects of the sacrifices found in the poems of Pindar are reviewed and illustrated through case studies, most notably passages from Pythian 5, Isthmian 4, and Olympian 10.

What emerges from a study of the Pindaric odes is a fascinating, and possibly surprising, panorama of creative responses by translators, ranging from freestyle ‘pindarizing’ to deeply philological modes of translation that are at the same time rigorous and adventurous. The rewards of translating this challenging author are therefore considerable. The chapter concludes by outlining some perspectives for future Pindar translations: as an integral part of philology and commentary; a landmark case study within a ‘topography of translation’ in the field of classics more generally; a ‘play space’ for creative exploration (including in the classroom); and an opportunity to reach beyond mere textual translation towards broader forms of (performative) re-mediation.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.