The whole idea of ‘modern’ fashion cannot be understood without the interruptions, interventions, and innovations of diasporas. In this chapter, we focus on case studies of Jewish and African diasporas to illustrate the importance of bridging concepts of fashion and diaspora. Together, these concepts point to the interdependencies between changes in time and place. On the surface, fashion is more about changes over time, and diaspora is more about changes in place. Yet joint consideration reveals how migration, whether forced or voluntary, has fostered transformations in modern, global fashion history, based upon not only class and labour dynamics, but also cultural and aesthetic hybridization.

The discovery and excavation in 1939 of the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, brought to light an object which was immediately recognised as a piece of early seventh-century regalia – a sceptre, or symbol of its owner’s power from the kingdom of the East Angles.1 The power is presumed to be that of a king, buried with his regalia in his ship, amidst other objects symbolic of his exalted status, and indicative of his great wealth and extended connections. The further interpretation of such a magnificently mysterious object leads in many directions and remains a matter of informed speculation. It is enough that the object itself remains symbolic of whatever it had once been known to symbolise, and thereby of all that cannot be known about the earliest stages in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

In 1936, the writer J. R. R. Tolkien lamented in a lecture on the Anglo-Saxon work Beowulf that the ‘fairy godmother’ most visibly presiding over the poem’s interpretative fortunes was not, as one might have expected, Poesis but, rather, those honorable, but less directly to-the-point ministering spirits, Historia, Mythologia, and Philologia.1 Of course, these and other noble ladies had long guided the fortunes of a host of similar texts and disciplines. Particularly tenacious at the time Tolkien was writing – and it is worth remembering that he was born in South Africa in 1892 – was the grip maintained by that exacting mistress Teleologia on the field of English constitutional history.2 Stubb’s Select Charters was first published in 1870 and his Constitutional History in 1873; his influential writings traced the origins of representative government in England back to liberty-loving Teutons in the forests of ancient Germania. As late as the 1950s, the righteous – and implicitly racialized – inevitability of this line of descent was still being taught as history to English school children.3 Stubbs’s own works remained part of the Oxford curriculum through the 1970s. In like manner, historians working in the pre- and post-war periods, often from the lofty academic common rooms of All Souls College Oxford, charted the progress of colonial cultures from darkest ignorance to the light of self-governance under the benevolent guidance of Mother England. Westminster became in their works a model for human society as a whole, the telos of a new world order grounded in justice and fair play.4

The British constitution has always been an imperial constitution. To deny this is a common, if mistaken, position in the civil war over its true nature. The institutional structure and ideological discourse of the British constitution always extended beyond the pale of England and the English people. For nearly a millennium the British imperial constitution has expanded and contracted across the globe to govern millions of disparate peoples as subjects of a common Crown. The Norman reconstitution of the English nation began by fusing the multiplicity of local laws into a single common law for English people. Over the seventeenth century the rise, demise and then compromise of the Crown against Parliament was played out in a long civil war fought across the Atlantic and fuelled by novel political arguments drawing on new colonial knowledge about Indigenous peoples. A second civil war in the following century saw most American colonists break free from the imperial constitution, which was then reconstituted to satisfy some remaining subjects and to suppress others. In the nineteenth century a third civil war of sorts erupted across the empire as Hindu and Muslim, Métis and Māori, and Black men and women from Jamaica to the Gold Coast rose up in armed resistance to British imperial governance. Each rebellion drew on a global discourse on the British imperial constitution that justified or rejected competing political visions of collective life.

The Atlantic Basin was the centre of vibrant commerce that included vast quantities of essential commodities such as textiles and clothing that influenced dress and consumer goods consumption throughout the region. The dress customs of the Atlantic world were characterized by enormous variety and complexities born out of commingling and migration of diverse groups of people. This blending was also part of a globalizing world in which capitalism and transformation in consumer culture gave rise to new identities and styles. Atlantic dress depicted differentiation and overlapping cultural influences that were by-products of local and global trade systems connecting people across several colonial empires. In the Atlantic Basin, for instance, many colonies relied on large imports of Indian cottons that were also traded in West and Central Africa in exchange for slaves needed to provide labour in plantation zones of the Americas. Consequently, the Atlantic world was influenced by wider intercontinental patterns and a burgeoning global economy.

Seeking to rule the vast domain they had annexed, the Mongols under Ögödei Qa’an established a capital in Qaraqorum in Mongolia. But Qaraqorum did not have the resources or water supply for a large city. After the war (1260–1264) between Qubilai Qa’an, based in China, and Arigh Böke, centered in the steppes, the victors shifted the capital to Dadu, around modern Beijing. Although Qaraqorum and Mongolia may have lost their significance with the transfer of the capital, they remained vital as the Mongols’ homeland, and various Mongol leaders (and their enemies) sought to control these regions. The Yuan court sought to govern Mongolia as a typical Chinese province but was stymied by its inability to control mobile herders. Yet when it was forced out of China by the Ming dynasty, it retreated to Mongolia as the Northern Yuan dynasty and lasted for several centuries.

The Epilogue discusses the impact of the Mongol Empire on world history, stressing the role of the Mongols’ nomadic culture and its main features: mobility and redistribution. It refers to the devastation caused by the empire – its reasons, scope, and outcome; the Mongols’ active role in promoting cross-cultural, economic, and religious exchanges; and the geopolitical, ethnic, and institutional transformation it instigated in the different realms (notably China, Iran, Russia, and Central Asia). It concludes with the Mongol contribution to the Age of Exploration, the transition from the medieval to the early modern world, and the eventual decline of nomadic political power.

Scottish constitutional history has become a subject of much interest in recent decades. Since the Union came into force in May 1707, Scotland has been one component of a complex and dynamic state. The Union itself has been described as an ‘enigma’ that defies easy or conventional definitions.1 Britain is simultaneously ‘unitary’, in the sense that sovereign power, to this day, rests with the ‘crown-in-parliament’ at Westminster, and ‘pluralistic’, because the Treaty continues to guarantee Scotland (more than Wales and Northern Ireland) considerable autonomy in civil affairs.2 In this respect, the establishment of a Scottish parliament in 1999 is simply the belated democratisation of what has always been a distinct ‘national’ politics. It has also (re)kindled debates on Scotland’s possible constitutional futures and this has included reflection on Scotland’s pre-Union heritage. These debates were aided by the creation of an accessible online edition of the records of the Scottish parliament to 1707.3 The renewed interest in Scottish parliamentary history has complemented endeavours in the field of political thought, where attention has focused on the centrality of kingship to Renaissance and early modern discourses. Certain questions have been thrown into sharper relief as a consequence of these inter-related developments. How did abstracted conceptualisations of the political community inform the ways in which people engaged with its governing and representative institutions? How were the boundaries of legitimate political action negotiated and renegotiated over time? To what principles were political actors expected to conform and what happened when those principles were challenged?

The Mongol military centered on armies of decimally organized mobile horse archers. This system provided the Mongols with both a rationally organized military and a means of incorporating defeated enemies, as soldiers now belonged to units of a thousand rather than retaining old tribal identities. As the Mongol Empire expanded, new groups joined their ranks and the Mongols found new ways of accommodating them into their war machine without fundamentally disrupting their own ways of war. The Mongols also realized that regional needs sometimes dictated the use of other forces. Siege engineers, infantry, heavy cavalry, and naval forces all found use within the Mongol military. The Mongols showed flexibility not only in using personnel and military units, but also in adopting technologies, including gunpowder. After the dissolution of the United Mongol Empire, Mongol armies primarily fought each other in internecine wars. It became increasingly difficult to share training, technology, and personnel.

The Mongols facilitated a great deal of Sino-Islamic scientific exchange. Though scholars patronized by the Mongols learned a great deal about developments on the other side of the Mongol realms, science from China did not affect the theoretical foundations of science in Iran, nor vice versa. Rather, materia medica and co-operation in observational astronomy endured. The western Mongol realms also greeted scholars from Europe and from the Islamic west. The Mongols were principally interested in specific benefits accruing to them from scientific exchanges. Thus they welcomed information about medicine, mapmaking, astronomy, and astrology, and supported exchanges in these fields.

These are the opening lines of a popular French song that has its roots in the Caribbean islands that were colonized by France.2 It is written from the perspective of a Creole woman who is expressing her grief as she realizes that her lover – presumably a white French sailor – has left the island. In the song there is a deliberate deployment of textile artefacts (foulard and Madras) as symbols of the loss that the woman experiences. She is not only sorry that her lover is leaving, but also lamenting that she will no longer have access to fine things like textiles and gold jewellery (collier choux), which were fashionable in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires are the focus of this chapter, which between them covered a stretch of Eurasia between Budapest and Murshidabad in Bengal (India). Royal magnificence is the lens through which I will assess the fashion dynamics of these imperial dynasties. The Ottoman realm included Southeastern Europe, with the capital city of Istanbul straddling the border between Europe and Asia. From 1516 to 1517, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria – in the broad and historical sense of the latter term – were part of the territory controlled by the sultans as well. Apart from the brief timespans during which the Safavids held Iraq, their realm corresponded roughly to present-day Iran and sections of Afghanistan. Other regions that today are part of Afghanistan, including Kabul, were part of the Mughal Empire, which had expanded first over the territories covered by today’s Pakistan and northern India. In the second half of the sixteenth century, moreover, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) added the highly productive territories of Bengal and Gujarat to his realm. About a hundred years later, Aurangzeb (r.

In early fourteenth-century Egypt a new fashion spread: women began wearing qamīş (loose robes) with sleeves up to three ells wide that could cost as much as several months of a worker’s salary. In 1350–1 the vizier ordered that such sleeves should be cut and that these garments should no longer be produced. It is said that images of women who had been executed for wearing the forbidden garment were posted on the ramparts of Cairo as a warning. Yet a generation later, in the 1390s, wide sleeves were back in fashion and the new vizier forbade them once again as visible signs of decadence.

Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, materials, and shapes of costume, as well as the social order and the map of the world – societies, that is, which were ready to break with their traditions? There is a connection.1

Mongol rule in Rus′ was profound, especially in the administration of taxes and tribute, which were adapted to the traditions of Rus′ian princely governance. The thirteenth century was a “dark age” when Rus′ was subjected to severe Mongol attacks and tribute was imposed under the supervision of basqaqs. The Rus′ian church, however, was exempted from paying tribute. Through the bestowal of a yarligh, the Mongols designated the rulers of Rus′ian principalities, including the grand prince of Vladimir, titular head of the Rus′. The fourteenth century saw the rise of Moscow, as its princes gradually monopolized the collection of the tribute. By the first quarter of the fifteenth century, Mongol rule had weakened as the effects of plague, civil wars within the Golden Horde, Tamerlane’s attacks, and the fracturing of the Golden Horde into separate khanates took their toll. By 1480 and the Battle of the Ugra River, Mongol rule was effectively over.