Over the course of their histories, a range of polities and communities have reached into higher latitudes to control and benefit from polar spaces and resources, enrolling what they thought of as peripheral regions into global geopolitical, legal, and economic systems. In the process they have taken to the poles certain ideas of resource use, value, and humanity’s relationship with nature and the environment. With these ideas came practices that disrupted polar ecologies, eviscerated animal populations, polluted landscapes, and undermined Indigenous societies and cultures. From the mid-twentieth century, more extensive national and international frameworks of environmental governance have emerged, including through legislation, treaties, and other conservation practices, to attenuate human impacts and foster some level of ecological productivity and resilience.

In 2012, Britain’s National Environmental Research Council (NERC) proposed a 25 per cent budget cut for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the organization responsible for science and administration in the British Antarctic. When BAS Director Nicholas Owens learned of these proposed cuts, he ignited a political maelstrom by taking the matter straight to the Foreign Office, sidestepping NERC Director Duncan Wingham. In response, Prime Minister David Cameron pledged support for BAS and ordered the funding dispute resolved. Then the crisis worsened when Owens was suspended and temporarily replaced by Ed Hill, the director of the National Oceanographic Centre.

This chapter provides a snapshot of the recent history of Indigenous political movements in the circumpolar north. Over the past six decades or so, Indigenous peoples across the Arctic have pushed forward with political action and initiatives that have aimed to secure national and international recognition of their rights, land claims, the granting of autonomy, and participation in many of the decision-making processes and institutions of governance that affect their lives and homelands.1 Indigenous peoples’ organizations have also become major actors in Arctic environmentalism and international circumpolar affairs.

From songs of liberation (Exodus 15) to prescriptions for genocidal violence (Deuteronomy 7:1), the biblical views on war are diverse and complicated. Ritualized preparations and borrowed Near Eastern mythological paradigms for battle have been argued to serve Israelite identity formation rather than to report actual history, but also to support fantasies of violent end-times, moments of therapeutic repose in the face of oppression, and hope for the eventual restoration of righteousness.

This chapter considers the historical development of how Greenlanders acquired political participation in their own affairs. As of 2021, most political parties in Greenland see independence as the ultimate goal. The Self-Government Act of 2009 grants the inhabitants of Greenland the right to this independence.1 My argument here is that a historical view reveals that independence can be seen as the logical next step from the current self-government. This has been attained through continual negotiations between Greenlanders and Danes since the middle of the nineteenth century, and through decolonization and independence processes as seen elsewhere in the world.

There is a wealth of literature on Antarctic research. Many overviews on the nature of Antarctica, cartography, its geology and glaciation, inhabitants and visitors, and cultural perspectives have been published recently.1 The first history of polar exploration of Europeans was published in 1756.2 Since then, many more Western historical overviews have been published, and we also have a chronological list of expeditions to Antarctica as well as good coverage in encyclopedias.3 In addition to these publications, there are several studies of the significance of ice and the development of natural sciences in the understanding of the physical nature of Antarctica. There are also some important recents works on the history of science which have not been fully integrated with the histories of exploration and discovery.

At first appearance, asking individuals from and connected to Nunavut, an eastern Arctic jurisdiction of Canada, to contribute to a collection of polar history would seem to be a practical and straightforward request, both for the reader and for the contributors themselves. Yet, as is often the case, the reality of things is not as simple as it first appears.

As most readers are probably aware, many scholars and self-identified experts of polar history do not necessarily live in the polar regions. This is the case for Nunavut. While the contributors to this chapter are well-aware of the extensive expertise, knowledge, skills, generosity of spirit, and critical thinking that exists year-round in the communities that populate Nunavut, this knowledge has not yet found a home in the broader discipline of polar history.

This chapter explores key concepts of justice in war in the main strands of Hindu literature on politics: the dharma literature, the Arthashastra (or statecraft) and the animal fables known as the Pancatantra. The chapter ends with a section about the uses of classical Hindu concepts of justice and war in the struggle for independence from British colonial power.

Postclassical Muslim just war developments focused upon dealing with the twin challenges of the Crusades and the Mongols, both of which occupied substantial sections of the Muslim world as well as constituting religious challenges to Islam. These challenges were overcome by moving away from the earlier heroic manner of Muslim sacral warfare and adopting a more professional, technology-based military that at least attempted to assimilate standard Sunni Muslim norms (in terms of personal morality) into the military methodology. The expansion of Islam from the 13th to the 17th centuries demonstrated that this formula was a success.

Writing in 1916, shortly after his appointment as ‘Geologist in Charge of Explorations’, the celebrated Canadian geologist and explorer Charles Camsell reflected on the prospects for development in Canada’s ‘unexplored’ Arctic: ‘It is to the mining industry more than any other that we must look for co-operation and assistance in the exploration of our northern regions.’1 Camsell hailed the prospects for mining to launch the transformation of remote, sparsely populated Arctic and Northern regions into prosperous, modern Euro-Canadian settlement frontiers. Nearly forty years later, reflecting on his geological career and the surge in mineral development activity in Canada’s north in the decades around World War II, Camsell confidently concluded, ‘To my mind the whole future of the North country depends primarily upon its mineral wealth.’2 Camsell’s visions of mining’s capacity for transforming the Arctic both echoes and anticipates the ideology of ‘frontierism’ characteristic of industry boosters and state agencies around the circumpolar Arctic.

At a global level, the perception of Antarctica has been largely determined by the hegemony of English-speaking accounts and visions, and of central and northern European countries – despite being on the opposite side of the planet – as has been the case with other large regions colonized during the rise of imperialism. Paradoxically, the relationship with Antarctica of the region that is closest to it, and whose main Antarctic countries have the largest and oldest permanent presence on that continent – as well as the strongest sense of belonging – is often ignored or simply interpreted as a simple case of ‘territorial nationalism’1 or even ‘Latin Lebensraum’.

The Spitsbergen/Svalbard Treaty of 1920 recognizes Norway as the ‘full and unqualified’ sovereign of the previously terra nullius Spitsbergen archipelago, including Bear Island, an area twice the size of Belgium, although with a much smaller population (currently 2,500 people) and no Indigenous residents.1 Despite Norway’s sovereignty, the Treaty gives the citizens of the signatory powers the same economic rights and right of access to the resources of the archipelago. Furthermore, the Treaty guards the users of Spitsbergen’s resources against heavy tax burdens, as it confines the tax levels to cover the costs of ruling it.

All aspects of war in China were surrounded by religious activities, ranging from rituals to predict the future and guarantee success in war and the safety of its participants to rituals dealing with the bloody aftermath of war.

In the twenty-first century, scientists and the media track the health of the planet in the polar regions. Shrinking sea ice in the Arctic and Southern oceans, melting ice shelves in Nunavut, Greenland, and West Antarctica, and thawing permafrost in Alaska and Siberia are signals of global warming. This has led people to refer to these regions as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ or the ‘ground zero’ and ‘epicentre’ of climate change.1 Such metaphors impart an abstract quality to the polar regions, with rising temperatures and loss of ice serving merely as numbers on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth. This view of the polar regions as integral yet neutral – transparent indicators of a global system – has an intellectual and political history. Created by the scientific context of the Cold War, it provides a powerful, panoptic perspective of the planet while obscuring the heterogeneity and pluralism of beings and places.

No era of polar history has received more attention than the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Its three most famous explorers – Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and Ernest Shackleton – have been the subjects not only of academic research, but also of novels, plays, films, television programmes, and exhibitions at major museums. Rather than retelling in detail a familiar story, this chapter will trace how the history of the Heroic Age has evolved over the past century or so. Its core argument is that the very features which made it so compelling in the first decades of the twentieth century have made its place in recent European and American culture more problematic. It will conclude by suggesting a new way of thinking about the Heroic Age.

During the Cold War, at about the time Ian Fleming was penning From Russia with Love (1957), the Soviet Union stunned the world with a successful launch of an artificial satellite, Sputnik. While Western and Soviet spies, real and fictional, were hatching plans to acquire field and signals intelligence, the world’s scientific community helped to create their own daring initiative. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 was audacious in scope and scale – scientists around the world were going to explore and interrogate outer space, the polar regions, and the oceans, and share the ensuing data for the sake of global knowledge generation.