When the Mongols invaded China in the thirteenth century, China already had a long and sophisticated tradition of historical and bureaucratic writing; moreover, a large population of literate elites produced written records in great numbers and multiple genres. Chinese records, together with those in Persian, provide the largest trove of sources available for the Mongol Empire. These consist of transmitted sources, often reprinted in later centuries; stone inscriptions surviving from the Mongol era; and newly excavated sources. Genres include official histories, unofficial histories, bureaucratic documents, legal records, travelogues, contracts, miscellaneous notes, gazetteers, genealogies, encyclopedias, and other assorted literary output. Furthermore, Mongolian texts such as the Secret History of the Mongols are preserved in Chinese characters, used phonetically to represent Mongolian words. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of these varied sources, organized roughly by genre.

Constitutionally, the twenty-first century begins in 1997 with the election of the New Labour government, a government committed to constitutional reform. Most of the New Labour reforms will probably prove to be irreversible. Indeed, the Labour government of 1997–2010 may well be more remembered for these constitutional reforms than for anything it did in the social and economic sphere. And the reforms did not end with Labour’s defeat in 2010. They were continued by David Cameron’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government (the first peacetime coalition since 1931), which ruled Britain between 2010 and 2015.

Whereas textiles, cloth, garments, and dress are seen as anthropological, supra-historical terms for concrete material covers of the human body, the more abstract term ‘fashion’ is defined in economic terms through its central place within the capitalist mode of production. This definition emerges from a historically and geographically particular nexus within Western industrialization and expands to fashion’s constituent role in capitalist socio-economic systems wherein social relations are based on commodities for exchange, private ownership of the means of production, and the exploitation of wage labour. Enshrined in bourgeois ideologies, capitalism has been flaunted, at least since the eighteenth century in the globalized North, as the dominant socio-economic form of production, established within a monetary system, and exported through colonialism and imperialism across the world.1

This chapter provides a bibliographical overview of the most important Tibetan-language sources from the time of the Mongol overlordship in Tibet. They range from official documents such as imperial decrees to historical and biographical works and letters that Tibetan clergy, among others, wrote to Mongol rulers. The Tibetan sources constitute a valuable resource for the study of imperial diplomacy and political relations of the period. Furthermore, they provide important information about religious and administrative matters in the Tibetan areas of the Mongol empire, including details like corvée duties, rights to pasture lands, and the issue of abuse of power by local authorities. Highlighting the importance of the Tibetan sources, particular emphasis is placed on the concrete contributions that the individual sources make to the study of the Mongol Empire.

Before the Glorious Revolution attitudes towards religion’s position in the state had already helped to define the groupings coming to be known as Tories and Whigs that emerged from pro- and anti-court positions during the 1679–1681 exclusion crisis. Both groups had, however, felt threatened by James VII and II’s circumvention of Parliament and the apparent threat to the Anglican monopoly on power represented by his attempts at religious toleration. The overthrow of the monarch in 1688 made plain the power these elites now wielded through the instrument of Parliament.

This chapter outlines the history of Mongol Central Asia, known as the Chaghadaid Khanate, the least documented but most enduring of the Mongol successor states. Squeezed between the Chinggisid polities, lacking a strong sedentary basis, and home to two competing uluses, the Middle Mongolian Ulus, as the Mongols in Central Asia called themselves, was often plagued by warfare and suffered from “brain drain.” Yet it not only played a leading role in the dissolution of the Mongol Empire, but also introduced a political culture that impacted Central Asia up to the nineteenth century; contributed to the Islamization of eastern Central Asia; was the root of two of the most influential early modern empires, the Timurids and Mughals; and gave its name, Chaghatay, to the Eastern Turkic language. The chapter discusses its political history during the Mongol moment, and briefly reviews its postimperial history and aspects of economy, administration, and culture.

Although Mongol authority built its empire through military might and administration, the cultural construction of empire happened through artistic exchange. Visions of desire, beauty, and power – as well as the materials that made creativity possible – were essential to the ideological projects of Mongol imperial reach. As governors of a Eurasian-wide commercial empire, Mongol rulers required effective visual representations of their power that could easily be understood by diverse audiences. This could be achieved through widespread dissemination and integration of material culture. Reliance on already recognizable symbols of authority that could be adapted and repurposed for contemporary political goals was both expedient and effective.

Arabic sources written in the Mamluk Sultanate, in the territories controlled by the Mongols, and elsewhere play an important role in reconstructing the history of the Mongol world empire and its successor states and of their relations with nearby countries. While some of these sources have been known and used since the early nineteenth century, Arabic-language works have became more significant in the study of Mongol history in the last half-century or so, and especially in the last generation, with the proliferation of proper editions of many of these texts. This article surveys the large – but perhaps not fully appreciated – corpus of Arabic works related to Mongolian studies, in the following order: works written before the establishment of the Ilkhanate (c. 1260), those composed in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, books originating in Arabic-speaking countries beyond the Mamluk Sultanate, and finally compositions from Mongol-controlled regions, mostly in the western Ilkhanate.

The rough chronological boundaries of this chapter will be 1800 and 1921. These are defined by the structure of the United Kingdom, which itself defined the key questions in constitutional history that were discussed in this period. In 1800 the island of Ireland, all thirty-two counties, joined Great Britain, which had been formed in 1707 by the Union between Scotland and England. This was the period of the maximum extent of the United Kingdom. In 1921, following the negotiations at the end of the Irish War of Independence, the island of Ireland was partitioned, twenty-six counties forming the Irish Free State and the six remaining counties in the north-east constituting Northern Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland was subject to a scheme of devolution under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. This had provided for both northern and southern parliaments, only the former was established.1 It remained in place until the imposition of direct rule in 1972. The nineteenth century, therefore, was an age of two unions and this had huge significance for constitutional developments.2 Not only were the Unions themselves matters of great controversy but the three kingdoms, four nations, posed immense problems in relation to questions of church and state, local government, the land and the issue of the extension of the franchise. The constitutional development of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland was complex. The Union state incorporated several constitutional traditions and understandings of the constitution, and a range of challenges to its integrity. The British constitution, most often seen in terms of an English constitutional tradition, was thought of by contemporaries implicitly and explicitly in a comparative context.

This chapter is an overview of the extant Middle Mongolian historical sources of the Mongol Empire, its documents arranged here according to their places of origin, the writing systems used, and their content and genres. They are described and evaluated in the following sections: extant and lost chronicles, Uighur script epigraphic monuments (edicts, epitaphs and other memorial inscriptions, graffiti, seal and coin inscriptions), Uighur script letters of Mongol rulers to foreigners, monuments from Qara-Qoto, Uighur script documents from the lands of the Ilkhans and their vassals and from the Turfan area and the Dunhuang Mogao caves, square-script monuments, and badges and xylograph fragments in square script or in Uighur letters. The notes also offer new interpretations of some passages of the monuments discussed.

It is almost the definition of a State that it has control over territory, control which has to be exercised through the application, or the threat of application, of physical force. The United Kingdom is no different from other States where, over time, the institutionalisation of this physical force has taken the form of an everyday service – the police – and a service which can be called in aid at times when unusual dangers have to be confronted – the armed forces. As the principle of the rule of law has evolved, so has the way in which the police and army have come to be regulated. Rather than being the enforcers of the law they are now viewed as its servants.

The continuous history of the Irish parliament runs from 1692 until that institution’s dissolution at midnight on 31 December 1800. Of course, many parliaments had been held in Ireland before the 1690s – the first was held in 1264 at Castledermot in county Kildare – and in subsequent centuries there were many others summoned: to assent to taxation or vote supply for the monarch’s government or their wars, to enact the key statutes of the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s, to transform the Lordship of Ireland (1171) into the Kingdom of Ireland (1541), to confirm the plantations of the early seventeenth century, and to approve various land settlements in the 1660s. Over the years, these parliaments had taken on a recognisably modern appearance. That summoned in 1264 may in fact have been merely a Great Council with little or no representative function, being made up of barons or magnates of the Irish lordship, but in the parliament summoned in 1297 there were two knights elected from each shire and liberty of the ‘Englishry’ (=English colony in Ireland) and they had full power to bind their communities to whatever was enacted in parliament. Irish parliaments met frequently during the fourteenth century, and by the end of that century it is clear that the commons – as those elected to serve were termed – had established a right to be present at any assembly that called itself a parliament.2 However, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, Irish parliaments, by now comprising both a House of Commons and a House of Lords, were summoned infrequently, usually for a specific purpose and with lengthy gaps between them. Thus, during the reigns of the Tudor monarchs (116 years) there were just 14 parliaments summoned in Ireland, three of which were of very short duration, and Charles II’s Irish parliament, 1661–66, was the last until 1692.3

This chapter provides an overview of the copious material production that occurred during the centuries when the Mongols dominated much of Asia. Co-authored, the essay offers a fully integrated study that focuses on common themes rather than regional differences. It begins by assessing the sources available for study in order to underscore some of the problems in using them. It then shows that the process of commodity and exchange across the Mongol domains resulted in a shared material culture and in the emergence of a new visual language marked by three features: an interest in perspective and the opening up of space, the cultivation of monumental size in which importance was demonstrated through scale, and a concern for allover surface patterning, often with raised, pierced, or multilevel carving.