In the first half of the thirteenth century, Mongol forces launched raids into areas that are now parts of Iraq and Syria. Raids turned into conquest with Hülegü’s movement into the region in the mid-1250s. Baghdad was taken in 1258, and by spring 1260, much of Syria was overrun by Mongol forces. A small Mongol army, however, was defeated by the Mamluks from Egypt in northern Palestine later that year. After a clear border was established along the Euphrates, for sixty years the Mamluks and Ilkhanids struggled for regional supremacy in major battles, frontier warfare, and diplomatic démarches. Around 1320, this conflict ended after negotiations, with peace agreements in place until the breakup of the Ilkhanate after 1335. Although ultimately unsuccessful in conquering lands beyond Iraq, the impact of the Mongols on greater Syria, Egypt, and Arabia was significant, not only militarily, but in the realm of demography, culture, and economy.

In recent years, archaeology has become increasingly important in the study of the Mongol Empire in East Asia. Historically, the remains in China, Korea, and Siberia have been investigated, but when archaeological research on the Mongolian plateau began at the end of the twentieth century, many significant materials were found. Those have provided useful information on the formation process of the Mongol Empire. Notable sites are the Avraga ruins, where an iron workshop that supported Chinggis Khan’s military power and his mausoleum were found; and Qaraqorum, capital of the United Empire. Newly acquired archaeological materials have been analyzed in collaboration with natural scientists, illuminating aspects of daily life such as clothing, food, and housing, as well as climate change and its impact on the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire.

Gender relations on the Mongolian steppe were crucial to Mongol military successes and the rise of the world empire. Women’s labor within nomadic camps freed up men for wartime mobilization. Elite women were directly involved in policy decisions at the highest levels, and, like elite men, might control large armies and estates. Some were Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, and served as patrons of these religions for their nomadic followers and for conquered people. Royal women also influenced public affairs through their marriage ties, and could thereby empower their male and female relatives for generations. The first section of this chapter discusses women and gender relations during the expansion of the United Empire, including marriage practices, women’s work, women’s participation in politics, and examples of powerful women in Mongol history. The second section covers women in the western khanates, and the third looks at women and gender in China during the Mongol Yuan dynasty.

‘Societies, all societies, are constituted in a certain way, and this way is their constitution.’1 So observed Philip Bobbitt in 2003, and the connection between the life of a society and its constitution has only become more pronounced during the years since. Constitutions frame and regulate the political; and this in turn both reflects, and makes possible, the social. The constitutional order – a nexus of institutions, laws, values, and practices – is an integral component of the self-image of a people.

How might we reimagine fashion as a regenerative force, one that can help to fundamentally reshape our relationships to each other, the environment, and the future of the world we share? If fashion is broken, can we fix it? Attitudes are shifting, but more radical systemic changes to the global fashion system are urgently needed. Fashion is a significant contributor to the impact we are having on the earth’s planetary boundaries. Fashion also fails to provide the social and economic foundations needed to support human flourishing to many of the 300 million workers in global garment supply chains. This crisis affects us all.

Filipino politicians are expected to participate in a fashion parade each year. Since about the end of the 1990s the annual President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) in the Philippines has been preceded by an event in which the parliamentarians of both houses of the senate and congress and their partners or spouses are expected to walk down a red carpet attired in couture versions of the national dress especially tailor-made for this occasion. In 2014 the television channel ABS-CBNnews.com ran a People’s Fashion Choice contest on Facebook for the best-dressed attendee. The shortlist of ten contestants were all women composed of both politicians and those linked to male politicians as spouses, mothers, or sisters and therefore very influential, as in the Philippines power is held by kinship alliance groups.

The ‘visuality’ of fashion conjures up thoughts of directional garments, spectacular catwalks, and the fashion image. The term ‘visuality’ was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s to capture his conservative view of British imperial history as a series of ‘vivid pictures’ exceeding archival facts. It took on a very different resonance within late twentieth-century post-modernism when it came to mean ways of seeing, ‘sight as a social fact’, and the ‘politics of representation in transnational and transcultural form’.1 Fashion studies has been dominated by this discursive mode of analysing the fashion image via the insistence of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard on ‘written fashion’ within twentieth-century media: printed page, photograph, simulation, and copy. This approach tends to obscure the different work and connotation of fashion before modernism, although early modern prints and drawings of dress often resorted to words to convey the colours, textures, and materialities of dress.

The Mongol advance is described from an unusual viewpoint in the Hebrew sources. The writers either witnessed Mongol activity, as in the Jewish communities of Iraq and Armenia, or heard of it from afar, as in Sicily, Provence, Spain, and Morocco. The texts, scant in number yet diverse in nature, are traced according to genre – letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, eschatology and Kabbalah, exegesis, and sermons. They touch the early Mongol raids in Iraq and the vast invasion of Eastern Europe, the conquest of Baghdad and the advance into Syria, and the activity of the Ilkhanate and its conflict with the Mamluk Sultanate. Since the Jews had neither state nor army, they were not considered a target or a threat, and their texts therefore provide a sort of neutral, and often positive, description of the Mongols as a raiding force, a conquering army, and a state.

The desire to end privilege and exploitation and to reconstitute society as a community of equals runs through Britain’s history, from the Peasants’ Revolt (and with little doubt from earlier than that) to modern times. The uprising which for a few weeks in the summer of 1381 set the south-east of England ablaze was a direct challenge to a system which was now piling upon feudal rents the taxes – above all the poll tax – demanded by an increasingly centralised state. The rebels’ immediate political objectives were limited.

The chapter reviews the Mongols’ political, administrative, and economic relations with the forest peoples of Siberia and the Mongol impact on the region. It stresses the inclusion of Siberia’s northern products in the Eurasian east–west trade network and the transformations – linguistic, ethnic, and religious – caused by Mongol rule, as well as providing a panoramic view of forest–steppe relations before and after the Mongol period.

In the year 2020, a pandemic traceable to a virus-rich species of horseshoe bat brought fashion weeks around the world to a halt. China was ground zero. With Hubei province in lockdown from late January and international borders soon closed to flights from anywhere in the country, few Chinese designers were able to attend the autumn/winter fashion weeks of February 2020. In Milan, hub of a Chinese regional cluster specializing in fashion, the Italian Fashion Chamber launched a ‘China we are with you’ campaign and compensated for the absence of Chinese designers with a virtual display of their works. In Paris a week later, the only show from China was a gallery display by Uma Wang. Facemasks were the accessory of the day. Soon fashion workshops all over the world would be churning them out.

Even before the century had ended, battle was commenced over how its momentous events would be remembered. During the years 1698–1700 a series of Roundhead memoirs and treatises – the ‘Whig canon’ – were printed. They were devoted to ‘attacking the maintenance of standing armies by the state, inveighing against priestcraft, and asserting the primacy of the ancient constitution’.1 The publisher responsible for the project was John Danby, working closely with the radical intellectual John Toland. For Danby and Toland, these works demonstrated that the revolutionary events of the century had been validated by and were a vindication of England’s ancient constitution (which now needed protection against the encroachments of William III). Fire was quickly returned by the Tory press, which began publishing Royalist memoirs and the like. It was in the midst of this that the first publication of Clarendon’s great History of the Rebellion commenced, with the first volume appearing in 1702. Clarendon’s son, Laurence Hyde, commended his father’s role ‘in preserving the constitution of our government entire’. English government repudiated political violence: ‘the nature of our excellent government hath provided, in the constitution of it, other remedies, in a Parliamentary way’ to preserve the Crown’s prerogative and the liberties of the people. In particular – and this was a topical subject given the rise of politics out of doors in the later Stuart period – the Whig habit of ‘appealing to the people out of Parliament as it were to a fourth estate of the realm’ was shown to be ‘just another way of undermining the ancient and true constitution’.2

This chapter considers the major cultural and productive changes that occurred in the global fashion system after the Second World War, beginning with an emphasis on the West after 1945 and moving to the analysis of East Asian nations from the 1980s. In the thirty years after the end of the war, new players in Europe (especially of the new Italian prêt-à-porter) and North America (casualwear from the United States) came to challenge a system still dominated by Parisian fashion. A generation later, in the 1980s, the rise of Japanese fashion signalled the decline of a prevailing Western-centred system and the rise of a radical and experimental fashion centre. In the twenty-first century, the transformation of the Chinese economy and the development of digital technologies has led to new collaborations around what are called ‘national made ins’. A fluctuating global geography of fashion is based not just on one country succeeding another, but on the emergence of new cultural and production models.

Among the first historical writers to reflect on the long sixteenth century (1485–1603), Sir Francis Bacon marvelled at the dynastic fortunes of the Tudor monarchs. Henry VII had ridden from distant exile to win his throne at Bosworth Field (1485) yet his son Henry VIII was a king ‘absolute in the sovereignty’. Then came the reigns of ‘a king in minority; of a queen married to a foreigner; and lastly of a queen that hath governed without the help either of a marriage, or of any mighty man of her blood’.1 These circumstances – a bloody usurpation, the rule of a minor and then by females – seemed perilous to contemporary observers. Contested successions and vulnerable rulers had led to the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485). Even the death of the childless Elizabeth I raised fears about civil war. Consequently, James VI and I’s peaceful accession to the English throne in 1603 signalled a remarkable achievement. After the tumults of the fifteenth century the Tudors had successfully defended their dynastic claims and reconstituted royal authority.

Judiciaries in England emerged from four interacting historical sources. At the foundation lay the authority of monarchs empowered to judge their subjects’ rights, duties and status by virtue of the regal office. The second form of judiciary arose by royal delegation of decisional power to dedicated judges sitting in permanent courts of common law, or to executive courts with a more political mandate. A third source of judicial power was local and widely distributed, whereby groups or associations or sub-units of government solved disputes and allocated rights and duties as a process of self-direction, taking place for example in manors, boroughs, guilds, and church assemblies.

The year 2015 witnessed celebrations around the world of an event that took place 800 years earlier in a meadow west of the city of London near what is now Heathrow Airport. Then, the main participants were King John on the one side, and leading barons and prelates on the other. They had gathered to sign up formally to a document (which came to be known as Magna Carta) with the aim of forestalling violent rebellion against the monarchy. Eight centuries later, four provisions of the 1297 re-issue of Magna Carta still decorate the United Kingdom’s statute book even though the document was not a ‘statute’ (or, for that matter, a ‘law’) in the modern sense and the surviving provisions are of no practical significance.

The UK is an ‘evolved’ state1 that has become a devolved state. It was created by a series of bilateral arrangements to become a ‘state of unions’.2 The centre is key to how any state develops, extending its authority over a wider geography, whether by enforcing uniformity or permitting diversity. The rationale for each union has changed over time, reflecting the changing views on how the UK should stay together as a multi-national state.