The statute known as the Act of Settlement1 was enacted in 1701. As its name suggests, it amended or ‘settled’ the royal succession – the second such amendment in little over a decade. In 1689 the Bill of Rights2 had not only declared Prince William of Orange and his wife Princess Mary to be King William III and Queen Mary II of England, it had also vested the royal succession firstly in the survivor of them, then in Mary’s descendants, next in her younger sister Princess Anne and her descendants, and finally in the descendants of William. At the time this had seemed adequate, but circumstances had proven otherwise. William and Mary were childless, he remained a widower after her death in 1694, and none of Princess Anne’s children thrived. When the last of these died in July 1700 at the age of eleven, it appeared that the childless William III would be succeeded by the childless Anne. The Act of Settlement therefore determined that following the deaths of William and Anne, respectively, and in the absence of descendants, the Crown would pass to Princess Sophia, a granddaughter of King James I of England through her mother, Princess Elizabeth Stuart.

The fashion industry went through profound transformations during the post-war era. Fashion was from the onset a global industry, and yet with the last globalization post-1970, fashion increasingly catered for the masses and production transformed from local or semi-local clusters to global supply chains. The decoupling of two major operations of fashion firms, manufacturing and retail, is central to the economic and social geographies of post-war fashion. Manufacturing increasingly relocated overseas from Western nations. This had important consequences, as former manufacturing centres in the West aimed to rebrand themselves as creative and commercial centres, often with the help of government subventions. The West remained central in producing value in the design, branding, and retail of fashion. The Global South is offering ever new reservoirs of workforce to garment manufacturing, but it remains uncertain whether the manufacturing countries may gain leadership in other areas of value production, notably branding and design.

Until fairly recently, fashion was viewed as of little relevance to Chinese history. It was not until the late 1990s that scholars began to challenge the assumption, demonstrated to have originated with eighteenth-century reports from Western observers, that China lacked the phenomenon of fashion until it was introduced by the West in the early twentieth century.1 As BuYun Chen’s chapter in this volume discusses, these new studies of fashion in historical China were part of a wider trend to contest the association between fashion, Western modernity, and capitalism. This scholarship spanned cultural history, literature studies, and museum exhibitions, but it shared a desire to look to new sources, rather than echo the court-issued and official texts that charted regulation and control.2 Scholars began to discuss vernacular and commercial texts that revealed histories of women and merchants, of entertainment and trade.3 Most of all, historians began to look beyond regulated court dress objects like rank badges and dragon robes, which had long fascinated Western collectors, to diverse objects including photographs, vernacular paintings, and prints, thus moving the field away from twentieth-century connoisseurship accounts.4

The legislature has been one of the central institutions in the UK’s constitutional history, a forum in which major political events occurred and decisions were taken. The legislature projects constitutional values: its practice is based on the significance of representation, accountability, transparency, deliberation, contestation, and collective action. Moreover, the UK Parliament is the focus of the fundamental norm around which the constitution is structured.

In his pioneering studies on the longue durée in the Indian Ocean world, K. N. Chaudhuri stressed the dynamism of dress in this vast region, finding in some instances ‘all the ingredients for high fashion’.1 He forcefully argued for revising Fernand Braudel’s earlier conclusions, based on studies of the greater Mediterranean, that fashion originated in (and was exclusive to) Europe.2 Although not immediately ‘intelligible or accessible to outsiders’, wrote Chaudhuri, the ‘dress habits of the people of the Indian Ocean changed’.3 The basic garment shape or silhouette might endure over time, but those-in-the-know gauged fashionability in subtle modifications of cut, length, pleating, and, above all, in details of fibre, fabric, and ornamentation. Sumptuary laws and cultural norms strongly guided garment choice in many times and places, but even so, dress was continually modified as a powerful signifier of status and allegiance, further open to ‘expressions of individual tastes and preferences’.4

Over the twentieth century, multi-disciplinary academic studies addressed dress practice and bodily adornment from a variety of perspectives, assessing the question of fashion, though few communities outside the West were awarded this term until the past generation. Anthropologists took an ethnographic stance, with works that from the late 1980s became more attentive to the lived significance of clothing that reflected ‘agency, practice and performance’ with local and global impact.

In the 1580s Japan began to extricate itself from a barely imaginable 100-year civil war. Fighting had not been continuous, nor everywhere, but bloodshed had been prevalent enough to form what has been called a ‘culture of civil war’.1 The capital, Kyoto (kyōto means ‘capital’) was reduced to ruins. Its historic grid had been wiped away. The sovereign, ancestor of today’s emperor of Japan, had long since ceased to enjoy his ancient titles, and was known metonymically merely as ‘the palace’, though in truth, he was as likely to be lodging in a warlord’s mansion. People at the time defined their world as gekokujō, ‘those below overthrowing those above’ – the literal meaning of revolution.

It may be argued that simply by wearing clothing and adorning our bodies every day, each of us participates in a kind of display. Dress is a means by which humans present themselves in society, and for centuries, those at the top of society used dress in ways that displayed their power, status, and leisure. As social structures evolved and changed in the nineteenth century, the display of dress took on a different character. After the French Revolution and with the long-term rise of the middle class, more and more people could participate in the pleasure of conspicuous consumption. The venues for this display were no longer the fixtures of political power – palace and church – but instead, the much more democratic street and store. In addition, fashion became understood as a phenomenon that defined modernity itself.

Although the Mongols constantly threatened South Asia, and despite the fact that Changhadaid raids led to a brief occupation of Delhi, much of the subcontinent remained free from Mongol subjugation. The region’s engagement with the Mongol world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was multilayered and complicated. It involved military skirmishes and diplomatic exchanges with multiple Mongol khanates; the circulation of people, knowledge, and technologies; extensive commercial exchanges; and cultural exchanges associated with Buddhism and Islam. This chapter focuses on several facets of these encounters and interactions in order to demonstrate the intricate links between South Asia and the various Mongol khanates that significantly contributed to transforming Eurasian connections through both overland and maritime routes.

This chapter surveys the extant examples of Islamic literature in Turkic produced in the western parts of the Mongol-ruled world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as evidence for the process of Islamization and cultural assimilation occurring under Mongol rule. A brief note on the production, in the Mongol era, of most of the surviving manuscripts of pre-Mongol Islamic Turkic works is followed by discussion of the questions of authorship, content, and patronage for the major Turkic literary products from the ulus of Jochi – the Muʿīn al-murīd, the Khusraw va Shīrīn of Quṭb, the Maḥabbat-nāma of Khwārazmī, and the Nahj al-farādīs of Maḥmūd b. ʻAlī – and for those from the Chaghadaid realm – Rabghūzī’s Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā and the work of Isḥāq Khwāja b. Ismāʻīl Ata.

The chapter covers the main aspects of the relations between the Mongol Empire and European powers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It first discusses the main events and assumed motivations of the Mongol invasion of Europe, which set the stage for the later development of political, diplomatic, and commercial relations. It summarizes the European efforts to gain information on the Mongols by sending missionaries to the heart of the Mongol Empire. Mutual knowledge and formal contacts led to several attempts to establish diplomatic relations between European powers (such as the Pope and the kings of France and England) and the Mongol khans. Furthermore, the chapter examines the commercial relations between European traders and Mongol rulers that flourished in the late thirteenth century and the fourteenth from the Black Sea to China. Finally, material and cultural influences in art, manufacturing, geographical knowledge, and technology are illustrated.

Sources that contain testimonies regarding the part of the Mongol Empire known to the Rus′ can be divided into three broad genre categories: chronicles, tales and saints’ lives, and documents. Rus′ sources from the first encounter of the Rus′ with the Mongols in 1223 through the seventeenth century concerning the Ulus of Jochi and its successor khanates can be divided into three chronological phases: 1223−1252, 1252−1448, and post-1448. Those written during the first phase, 1223−1252, initially express bewilderment about who the Mongols are and simply explain their presence as God’s punishment for the sins of the Rus′. Soon, however, they begin to disparage the Mongols and their Tatar subjects. Between 1252 and 1448, the Tatars are presented in neutral (non-disparaging) terms. After 1448, church writings revert to the pre-1252 pejorative terminology about the Mongol–Tatars and expand on the slurs and denigrations. State documents, in contrast, maintain neutral verbiage.