By the early twentieth century, democracy was in the ascendant. Not all observers and practitioners were enthusiastic about this development. But, whether favourable towards it or not, they came to accept the predominance of the concept that the people were the ultimate source of political authority.1 An example of a grudging acknowledgement that confirms the strength of the conceptual transition that had occurred came from the constitutional historian, William Sharp McKechnie. He observed in his 1912 work of contemporary analysis The New Democracy and the Constitution that the public pronouncements of politicians suggested ‘the triumph of Democracy in Great Britain is now assured’ McKechnie noted a tendency as common to ‘Conservatives and Liberals as’ as it was among ‘Socialists and Labour leaders’ to display ‘[a] fervent and almost servile eagerness to interpret and to execute “the people’s will”’.2

The chapter reviews the components of Mongol imperial ideology, notably the Heavenly Mandate and charisma, as well as their development, dissemination, uses, and legacies, in both steppe and sown.

This chapter focuses on the three phenomena of socialist fashion – socialist official fashion, everyday fashion, and alternative fashion – and argues that they were embedded in different spheres of socialist societies and served by different concepts of time. The initial Bolshevik attempts at utopia in the early 1920s had rejected fashion. It belonged to the past, and not to the new, rationalized and ordered world that the early Bolsheviks were attempting to build. But fashion received official approval in the Stalinist Soviet Union from the mid-1930s on. Born in the central dress institution, House of Prototypes in Moscow, the socialist fashion developed within a highly centralized system and its Five-Year Plans. These were introduced as a part of the Stalinist industrialization drive, designed to raise technical and organizational levels of the backward Russian textile and clothing industries. As the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the countries in the region nationalized their textile and clothing industries, and central dress institutions were set up to coordinate the activities of those industries and to design new clothing.

The significant and enduring interrelationship between fashion and film is ‘a force as old as film itself’; it remains an enduring truism that cinema reflects the fashions of its age but also that it has dictated and inspired fashion. The story of this relationship invariably starts with and centres on Hollywood, a globally dominant force since cinema’s earliest days, and although this chapter will look beyond Hollywood (especially when it comes to more recent decades), it will follow suit for, as surrealist fashion (and occasional costume) designer Elsa Schiaparelli once declared: ‘what Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow’. From early examinations of clothes in film (such as Elizabeth Leese’s Costume Design in the Movies from 1976, a fabulous anecdotal compilation of random facts about costume and fashion in film) the rich but fragmented and at times elusive story of fashion and the fiction film has overwhelmingly prioritized Hollywood productions.

The main questions concerning English governance addressed by medieval theorists were: (a) the division of authority between the Church, headed by the Pope, and the king; (b) the extent to which the king was bound by law and custom; (c) whether he was bound to act with the counsel and consent of his magnates; and (d) whether he could legitimately be resisted or even deposed for violating moral, religious, customary or legal constraints.

The archaeological study of Chaghadaid material culture began in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the annexation of Central Asia to the Russian Empire. The main archaeological sites on the territory of the Chaghadaid Ulus consisted of settlements. Judging by the numismatic data, the largest cities of the ulus were Almaliq (China), Pulad (China), Samarqand (Uzbekistan), Bukhara (Uzbekistan), Otrar (Kazakhstan), Shash (Uzbekistan), Taraz or Talas (Kazakhstan), Khujand (Tajikistan), Andijan (Uzbekistan), and Tirmidh or Termez (Uzbekistan). Archaeologists have studied the nomadic burials of the Chaghadaid period in Kazakhstan. Features of the funeral rites indicate the preservation of pagan traditions in the nomadic environment (for instance the ritual of burning corpses, sepulchral mounds, the remains of funeral food, horse harnesses). The erection of mausoleums reflects the Islamization process of the Chaghadaid Ulus. Among the Chaghadaid-period epigraphic monuments, Christian tombstones are the most apparent.

‘[O]ur whole constitutional law seems at times to be but an appendix to the law of real property.’1 At no time in English history was this aphorism truer than in the aftermath of 1066; indeed, it became uniquely so as a consequence of the kingdom’s conquest. England’s legal tradition was already distinctive prior to that point. The circumstances of the Conquest, and the rapid substitution of a new aristocracy of foreign settlers, rendered it doubly so. The importance of the Conquest and its implementation in the development of English law, and especially the law of real property, can scarcely be overstated.

Most of the Old Uighur text materials retrieved from East Turkestan and the Gansu region of northeastern China are contemporaneous with the Mongol Empire and deserve analysis for the historical reconstruction of Uighur society in eastern Central Asia, as an example of subjects of Mongol dominion. Old Uighur sources also offer significant information on the kernels of Mongol rule, since the Uighur Turks became indispensable collaborators with Mongol rulers all over Eurasia, establishing and influencing the Mongol system of domination as well as literacy and religious cultures. This chapter introduces the results of scholarly works on the Old Uighur sources, which supplement or improve the knowledge of the history of the Mongol Empire.

After a destructive war of nearly three decades (1231–1259), in 1274 the Koryŏ royal family formed a marriage alliance with the imperial Chinggisid throne that lasted a century. At the same time as Koryŏ–Mongol relations influenced Koryŏ’s political, social, cultural, and economic history, Korean personnel also provided agricultural labor and produced essential goods for the Mongols, campaigned in Chinggisid armies, acted as political advisers, offered religious sustenance, served as intimate attendants in the imperial palace, and married into the empire’s elite families, including the ruling Chinggisid line. This chapter comprises three parts: first, a brief political narrative of Koryŏ’s experience of the Mongol empire; second, thematic discussions of the military, personnel, and cultural exchange; and finally, some concluding comments, including the ambiguous legacy of the Mongol period for Korea.

The Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was one of the founders of the Jesuit mission in China. When in China, Ricci discovered that if he presented himself dressed as a priest he was not afforded social legitimacy in elite and court society.1 So he decided to dress as a Confucian scholar, thus ‘translating’ his social position into Chinese. This reference to dress is of a piece with Ricci’s work as the first translator of the Confucian classics into Latin and of Western classics, such as Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 bce), into Chinese in collaboration with the writer, mathematician, and politician Xu Guangqi (1562–1633). As a ‘Western Confucian’, Ricci embodied a hybrid identity where dress acted as the material mediator of cultures, locations, and geographies (Figures 8.1 and 8.2).

In a bold cultural move, some style-conscious American activists of the twenty-first century have engaged with the material history of the civil rights movement (1954–68) to make a powerful statement about clothing, class, and community. Whether commemorating historic 1960s marches or fighting for racial justice as part of Black Lives Matter (BLM), activists have taken to the streets in their ‘Sunday best’: sharply tailored suits for the men, and fancy party dresses for the women. Casting aside the oversized t-shirts, gym shorts, and baseball caps that have become synonymous with street style, elegant protesters have looked back to the 1960s when the dapper Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968), the future US Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020), and countless other American activists proudly embraced the dress code of respectability that earmarked white middle-class culture of the modern era.

The twelfth–thirteenth centuries formed one of the richest periods in Armenian historiography. Armenian sources of that period can be classified as general histories, chronicles, hagiographic sources, colophons, epigraphic sources or inscriptions, and poetry. They are essential for understanding the patterns of thought of medieval Armenians as well as of the Mongols. The Armenian sources differ in their attitudes toward the Mongols, expressing both neutral and personal views, and depending on where they were written, in Greater Armenia or in Cilician Armenia. The information of these historians varies according to their views of certain historical events, which are based on their culture, locality, and time and style of writing, as well as the character of the sources, whether chronicles or historical compilations.

The early modern era (c. 1500–1800) is characterized by the movement of goods and movement of people at an unprecedented scale, interactions described as ‘codependent’.1 The use of ‘early modern’ is argued to be a useful term by James Grehan, reflecting a shared material transformation that defined this age, with goods like tobacco, once known only in the Americas, sweeping the globe by 1600.2 Material innovations of many sorts took hold, manifested in the multiplication of old and new commodities and their wider social manipulation in world communities – shifts in fashion by another name. Diffusion of new material culture did not mean the simple transplanting of goods or the standardization of meanings attached to objects and object systems. Neither colonial nor imperial authorities could wholly impose such values. Indeed, Indigenous scholar Sherry Farrell Racette emphasizes that goods offered by European fur traders to Indigenous North Americans had to conform to existing priorities, with colour and ‘improved function’ equally vital. In this context, ‘[Indigenous] Women literally stitched new goods into daily and ceremonial life.’3 Translation and incorporation are terms applied to the growing complex of materials, a mixing facilitated by new and expanded exchange systems.4

Koryŏ (918–1392) encountered the Mongols in the early thirteenth century. A horrific war, political intervention, and relentless pillaging traumatized Koryŏ immensely. However, in the latter half of that century, diplomatic protocols and a marital relationship between Koryŏ and Yuan were established. Later on, Koryŏ people met new individuals and cultures, took advantage of certain political opportunities generated by the empire, and enlarged their range of trade operations through the Mongol-induced global network. Their view of the outside grew more and more open, while they gained a new appreciation of their traditional way of life. Overall, the Koryŏ case shows us how Mongol imperial policies were implemented in initially conquered regions, how the people there coped with such experiences, what kind of Yuan legacy was reflected in their society, and what kind of merging between cultures occurred.

‘Show me the clothes of a country and I can write its history.’1