Georgian narrative and documentary materials represent a significant source for the analysis of the relations between Mongolians and Georgians and for a thorough study of the history of the Mongols. This chapter mainly considers the voluminous work called The Centennial Chronicle compiled by an anonymous fourteenth-century author known as the Chronicler. It is important not only for the history of Georgia and Mongolia, but also for the history of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Central Asia, and Asia Minor, conveying the history of their development from the 1220s to the 1320s. The material provided in The Centennial Chronicle is a reliable source for studying the socioeconomic history of the Near and Middle East in the period of Mongol domination. The chapter also discusses other Georgian narrative and documentary materials providing, information on some issues concerning the relations between the Mongolians and Georgians (taxes and other obligations).

In a portrait painted by Joseph Merrett in the mid-1840s, an unnamed Māori woman wears a distinctive blend of local and imported garb. This young Indigenous woman from Aotearoa (New Zealand) draped her korawai-ngore, a cloak decorated in red woollen pompoms and black string tags, over a cotton scarlet-and-navy print dress (Figure 20.1). In addition to her kauae moko (female facial tattoo), she wears a greenstone and blue ribbon ornament in one ear, and in the other what is probably a shark’s tooth carved in bone.

The emergence of a Mongol state in succession to the Kereyit khanate led to the creation of the largest land-based empire in history and a new people. The Mongols and their partners deployed and elaborated shared steppe political traditions that valued trade and customized the resources of both steppe and sedentary worlds. Under Chinggis Khan’s successor Ögödei, the mission of sacred world conquest and the ideology, governing mechanisms, and fiscal policies that enabled the attainment of this mission achieved sturdy articulation. Chinggisid priorities engendered massive demographic dislocation and transfers of peoples, and new patterns of commerce to support a robust imperial culture of consumption, patronage, and display. Early qa’ans’ ideological prerogatives and attempts to assert tighter control over resources inevitably clashed with their kinfolk’s customary claims. Tensions erupted into open civil war in 1260, but the new Chinggisid communicative space across Eurasia survived the breakup of the United Empire.

The British constitution’s global historical resonance is in no small part due to the extent and might of the British Empire, which touched the lives of more of humanity than any other in history. The imperial factor compelled the wide international importance of the British constitution and its history, which would otherwise be disproportionate to the clouded hills of an archipelago in the north Atlantic. In fact, Britain’s constitution, history, law and politics were analysed by all manner of people abroad in far greater numbers than those at ‘home’. Different lessons were learned. Gandhi, for example, who was admitted to London’s Inner Temple in 1888, in his early political career, looked back at Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation as ‘the Magna Charta of the Indians’1 and, till the end of his life, retained a certain ‘romantic veneration’ towards the British constitution and what it might do for India.2 On the other hand, his close follower Subhas Chandra Bose, who had also spent time in Britain as a student, in his 1938 presidential address to the Indian National Congress, warned, as in Ireland and Palestine, that ‘British ingenuity’ would ‘ruthlessly’ find a ‘constitutional device’, which he foretold would lead to the partitioning of India, ‘thereby neutralising the transference of power to the Indian people’.3 These two divergent reactions give some sense of the diversity of ideas the British constitution and history generated even among two familiar colleagues in the same country, both wanting freedom.

The design, production, selling, and wearing of men’s clothing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a significant impact on the visual culture and social experience of the modern world. It has also determined many of the underlying influences that have contributed to the development and expansion of fashion more generally, not just in terms of the shaping of men’s bodies, but also in relation to the dress of women and children. Yet its examination has been relatively neglected for most of the period we might associate with the rise of dress and fashion history as a serious focus of scholarship. It is only over the course of the past two decades that we have seen a flowering of journals, exhibitions, and monographs addressing the role played by the male wardrobe in the fashioning of social relations, taste, and the experience of modernity. My own doctoral work in the 1990s and related publications at the time drew on the ‘cultural turn’ and a re-focusing of the history of gender to consider the formation of masculinities in relation to patriarchy in a more nuanced way, revealing overlooked patterns of masculine consumption.

All constitutions rely on history. Without constitutional history the political affairs of the United Kingdom would be unintelligible. As J. R. Seeley aphorised in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1885: ‘History without Political Science has no fruit; Political Science without History has no root.’

No account of the ‘rise of the modern British state’ would be complete without an appreciation of the ways in which local institutions, constitutional principles and precedents, laws – and ultimately governance – evolved. Prior to the twentieth century, locality defined the overwhelming majority of British subjects’ lived constitutional experience: the shire rule of Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, medieval corporations and county corporates, fourteenth-century Quarter Sessions, the empowered Elizabethan parish, and then the explosion of ‘ratepayer democracy’ in the nineteenth century featuring municipal corporations and county councils, Poor Law unions, and ad hoc statutory bodies (including school boards, public health authorities, and improvement committees) of all kinds.

This chapter is concerned with the constitutional position of trade unions in the United Kingdom. Modern trade unionism emerged from the industrial revolution to protect the interests of workers, and from the late eighteenth century increased in membership and influence, both of which peaked in the 1970s. There were then about 13 million trade unionists, representing some 60 per cent of the working population. But trade union influence extended more widely, touching the lives of almost every worker in the country, either through the coverage of collective agreements negotiated with employers or employers’ associations, or through legislation on a wide range of matters that trade unions had persuaded governments to introduce.

The conviction that England’s legal and constitutional histories were substantially different than those of other European countries is relatively widespread. To substantiate this claim, many turn their attention to the seventeenth century, which they identify as a pivotal moment in this parting of ways. According to this portrait, it was during this period that a particular English understanding of law, a ‘common-law mind’, emerged, greatly enabling, among other things, important constitutional developments.1

It is time to put God back into readings of the British constitution. Writings about that constitution since 1945 have often focused on technicalities and processes of the constitutional order – whether the law, Parliament, or territorial politics – rather than the constitution as a lived idea. Yet states, beneath the daily reality of their role as legal entities claiming monopolies of violence over the territories they purportedly control, are fundamentally ideas.

The March 2020 issue of Vogue Italia was titled ‘The Real Issue’ and portrayed on the cover Ida, a digitally-created model photographed by Mert and Marcus in collaboration with Vogue art director Ferdinando Verderi. As the editor-in-chief Emanuele Farneti explains, the idea was to reflect on the current meshing between virtual and real as condition of existence – the ‘osmosis of these two worlds’ especially at the time of the coronavirus when citizens’ freedom to move has been drastically limited. The fake model Ida, suggests Farnesi, is evidence of the ways digital life is overcoming physical life in practices of representation and, on the other hand, is an evocation of an absence of corporeality and carnality in this digital world.

This chapter explores the climatic and environmental conditions in the regions that were invaded by the Mongols during the first decades of their conquest. Its main goal is to trace possible connections between environmental conditions and economic, military, or political aspects of the Mongol conquest. Four separate regions are considered: Mongolia, northern China and Manchuria, arid Central Asia, and Russia and Eastern Europe. For each region, the chapter presents a survey, based on current scientific literature, of the prevailing paleoclimatic conditions pertaining chiefly to temperature and precipitation, thus attempting to assess possible connections between environmental and historical factors. The most relevant findings are to be registered in relation to environmental conditions that may have supported or hindered large-scale Mongol military operations. It should be noted that climatic reconstructions contain a high level of uncertainty and are based on different types of proxy data that are difficult to interpret.

The thirteenth-century kingdom of England was a political, jurisdictional and administrative unit consisting of thirty-nine contiguous counties which the Norman and Angevin kings of England had in large part inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors – although two of those counties (Cheshire and Durham) had by the thirteenth century come to enjoy an enhanced degree of autonomy, which for many, if not all, purposes placed them outside direct royal control. The kings of England also possessed a limited degree of control over the marcher lordships of Wales which had been conquered from native Welsh rulers by ‘English’ lords and constituted a barrier between England and the kingdoms of Wales. The rest of Wales remained under the control of native Welsh rulers until Edward I in successive campaigns in the 1270s and 1280s destroyed the last remaining native princes and their independence. He did not annex the conquered Welsh lands to the kingdom of England or dispossess all the conquered Welsh, but he established a separate principality of Wales in the north and west of Wales under English control and in 1301 the king’s eldest son became ‘prince’ of Wales. Edward also imposed a version of English law and of the English local administrative system on this area through the Statute of Wales of 1284.1