Although most of Catholic Christendom escaped conquest by the Mongols, the West yields a comparatively broad and varied range of sources concerning the invaders and their empire. These include not only contemporary accounts of the onslaught of 1241–1242 on Hungary, but also narratives composed by Westerners who visited the Mongol world; geographical surveys, like Marco Polo’s description of Yuan China, reflecting the West’s considerably extended horizons; mercantile handbooks; and documents relating to trade with the Mongols. Admittedly, the earliest material is often characterized by apocalyptic speculation and misleading preconceptions. But at the opposite extreme, despite retaining some detail of a fantastic nature, the reports of members of the newly founded mendicant orders – the Franciscans and Dominicans – who traveled in Mongol Asia as either envoys or missionaries are unmatched for keen observation and penetrating analysis; they form an indispensable accessory and backcloth to the narrative accounts produced within non-European societies.

NOTE TO TYPESETTER: Please add an unnumbered first footnote to this opening page as follows

Readers of this chapter might be left with doubts whether England had a constitution in the fifteenth century and whether, if there was one, it underwent any significant change over the century. Difficulties in governing the realm, ambiguities about power and authority, and a fundamental lack of consensus about what constituted and who had a legitimate right to rule persisted from the opening years of the period through to its end. The only notable progress recounted here was in procedures and practices in parliament. This difficult century left England with a hunger for new assertions of power and authority in the succeeding one.1

‘For Wales – see England’. For much of the period since the Annexation of 1284, the constitutional history of Wales might be summed up neatly in this oft-quoted, and rather dismissive, line from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.1 Edward I’s settlement set the parameters within which Wales was to operate in terms of government, the administration of the law and the role of the Church, for 250 years; and the so-called ‘Act of Union’ (1536 and 1543) carried the process further, assimilating governmental and legal practice in Wales further to the English model. Yet, as this chapter will suggest, ‘For Wales – see England’ does not tell the full story of Wales’s constitutional history. During the nineteenth century, as a viable strain of political nationalism grew up in the principality, its proponents looked to the example of Ireland as a pattern on which to model their demands. During the twentieth, it was Scotland that provided the inspiration for politicians now anxious for a greater measure of devolution – something finally achieved in 1997. If the first five centuries after annexation saw Wales sublimated to English constitutional imperatives, the nineteenth and the twentieth saw Wales define its own nationhood by active engagement with the other smaller nations within the United Kingdom. In this chapter these three phases of Welsh constitutional development will be examined in turn, and it will be suggested that the Wales which received a degree of institutional independence in 1997 was a very British creation.

Specialized clothing and accessories play various roles in many religious communities. Religious leaders wear liturgical vestments in order to be easily identified as a representative of God on earth. Ordinary practitioners wear religious clothing during ceremonies as a way to sanctify the body by sartorially orienting it to the divine. Other items are meant for everyday use to communicate religious identity, create a specific social space, or work to cultivate an individual’s character.

The Mongol regime established a common unit of account denominated in silver for long-distance exchanges across the Eurasian landmass. The transfer of a significant quantity of silver ingots from appanages in China to the western Khanates catalyzed a widespread convergence. The unprecedented monetary transformations originated especially in the lower Yangzi, in which Yuan paper money displaced silver westward and copper coins to Japan and Java. The emergence of new marketplaces in Holland and Japan seems to have been almost perfectly synchronous. Yet the common unit of account in silver was not accompanied by a popular circulation of silver items and did not seriously affect the methods of exchange at ground level. The substantial contraction in distant trade after the collapse of the Mongol regime, however, paved the way for the global silver march starting from South America and reaching China and India in the late sixteenth century.

Ottoman fashion communicated through two sets of sartorial standards. The first traced out official attitudes encapsulated in the laws and regulations put forward by the state. Though some of this thinking was ‘Islamic’, insofar as it sought to promote norms and values prescribed by Islamic law, it really represented an ‘imperial’ mentality that thought in hierarchical terms and aimed at policing clothing in the name of social order. The second set of standards paid little heed to this official perspective. It spoke on behalf of regional styles, which were most pronounced among the poor in both town and village. These more mundane fashions reflected the immense cultural diversity of the empire, of which clothing was merely one of the most obvious artefacts. Measured against this local customary landscape spanning three continents, from the Balkans to the Middle East and North Africa, one can hardly talk about a single ‘Ottoman’ fashion at all.

Casualness has perhaps always been present in clothing. Maybe even Julius Caesar’s loose-hung toga, sometimes read as a form of dandyism, was a move familiar in casualwear, changing the vocabulary of the sartorial norm to appear more relaxed, with something of an old-money swagger to it, to enact generational distinction, and to visually challenge the formality of a previous order. Casualness is not the same as informality or the unformed, indeed it is often as consciously put-together and structurally considered as formalwear, but it uses a vocabulary of relaxation of clothing rules, or total disregard for them to symbolize a change in values and generation. While acknowledging that this fashion move has been available and used throughout all clothing history and perhaps across all cultures, this chapter focuses on casualwear becoming a global industry and one of the dominating fashion meta-styles from the 1960s.

This chapter explores the nature and consequences of the previously unprecedented possibility of religious exchange across Eurasia made possible by the Mongol Empire.

Europe of the nineteenth century was a continent wracked by numerous wars, revolutions, and other political upheavals. From the continent-wide Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the countless battles and skirmishes that took place on local or regional scales, the nineteenth century was a period not only of political and social upheaval, but also one of industrialization, increased urbanization, and cross-cultural exchange. It was during this century that earlier ideas of nation were cemented, helped in no small part by, and in many cases responsible for, the many conflicts that played out across the continent. While ideas of national or ethnic difference were by no means novel, they were consolidated during this century.

The concept of nation in the United Kingdom is famously ambiguous. It has no juridical value but is a central element in constitutional debates. It can refer to either the whole state or to one of its component parts, England, Scotland, Wales and a part of Ireland. The name of the state, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lacks a corresponding adjective; as Richard Rose remarks, ‘No one speaks of the “Ukes” as a nation’.1

The Yuan Dynasty was defined by Qubilai Qa’an’s adoption of many elements of Chinese administration and his successful conquest of south China; however, the qa’an’s later decades were spent in efforts at further conquests that strained even his immense wealth and delayed the integration of the newly conquered territories. Under his successor and grandson, Temür, the empire turned to a more sustainable style of laissez-faire rule. From Temür’s death in 1307 on, however, the regime was roiled by succession conflicts, often pitting steppe-based candidates against those with more experience in the south. In these conflicts, the legacy of Qubilai Qa’an became a useful tool for those opposed to further adoption of Chinese-style methods. These conflicts exhausted the regime’s coffers and left it vulnerable to severe climate change in the mid-fourteenth century; the resulting unrest toppled the dynasty. Still, the Yuan left a legacy of unification for China’s succeeding Ming dynasty.