Is there anything in the ancient world that deserves to be called a “right” in the subjective sense? The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stated quite apodictically that “there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400,” concluding from this that even if there were such rights, “no one could have known that there were.” Until relatively recently, historians would have agreed with MacIntyre. The prevailing view was that in antiquity we look in vain for what has come to be called subjective rights – that neither the concept of rights nor the word “right” could be encountered in the ancient world in its subjective sense.

Kerri Woods surveys how, when it comes to the environment, the anthropocentrism of most of the history of human rights politics meant that its incorporation of claims on behalf of nature and those most affected by its degradation have waited a long time. Nonetheless, in recent decades they have exploded. At stake is not just the recognition of who in particular among human beings environmental degradation hurts, or recognition of the moral significance of future generations, but potentially turning rights language into a tool for non-human protection as an intrinsic good, just as Davies suggests when it comes to artificial intelligence. At the same time, Woods shows, the intersection of environmental concern and rights history opens up new quandaries about assigning responsibility for harm and regulating supraterritorially.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?

If rights are at stake in the health of the body, it is now increasingly second nature to think they are in the aftermath of violence conflict or immense wrongdoing. Memory of violence is one way rights politics have been made meaningful. Bonny Ibhawoh observes that memory – including a right to memory – has been a focal point of rights mobilizations around the world. At the same time as recasting collective understanding of the past is itself an object of contemporary politics, competition over memory – including who is entitled to narrative privileging and why – has followed suit.

As Kamari Maxine Clarke likewise explores in her chapter, the intersection of rights and “transitional justice” in diverse situations has become one of the defining features of our time. Narrating the classic role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid, Clarke dramatizes the struggle over the meaning of transition, distinguishing between the “moralistic” goal of forgiveness and the more confrontational demand for accountability. For Clarke, the performativity of justice – it is always rendered by someone – means the history of human rights needs to be equally attentive to when it is not provided or when crimes are perpetrated or mistakes made in its name. What we see is that particular transitional justice speech acts enable the reproduction of particular types of power.

Where Clarke examined examples from Rwanda and the 2013 intervention in Libya in order to protect civilians, Boyd van Dijk reminds us that the means of war have long been regulated by humanitarian aspirations quite apart from the humanitarian ends cited for launching it. And, as van Dijk reveals, there have been persistent attempts to “fuse” such humanitarian concern with the concept of human rights or with the legal framework or mobilizational strategies associated with it. Like Clarke, van Dijk does not want to tell an uplifting story, for the fusion of human rights and war could equally produce what he calls “human rights warriors.”

Taking up different traditions, although also starting out with the 1940s UNESCO survey of philosophical ideas, Jessica Whyte provides a panorama of more skeptical voices about either the idea of human rights or the movements around it or both. One question for anyone reading these chapters in order is whether historians have accumulated more information about or richer interpretations of forms of human rights politics between past and present than either philosophical or critical commentators have grasped.

Yet Michael Cotey Morgan cautions that it was not a seamless alignment. The three ideological agendas orienting the Cold War international politics of human rights were those promoted by state representatives of liberal democracies, communists, and postcolonial nationalists. Alliances between these three approaches to rights were malleable, especially in the non-aligned “Third World.” While socialist and postcolonial states emphasized socioeconomic over individual political and civil rights, many developing states shared the American view that international human rights must not task the state with economic responsibilities toward its citizens. In the Cold War context, the principle on which all states could agree was the protection of state sovereignty, although, beyond the principle of non-interference so problematic to rights protections, no consensus existed on how to measure sovereignty.

Northern Europe is often undervalued in surveys of the historical development of cities. The reasons have been the relatively small size of most urban settlements; the peripheral location of Scandinavian and most Hanseatic cities, when viewed from Western Europe; and the complexity underlying the concept of the Hanse, which connected many of the settlements. The importance of the towns and cities in the area lay in their multiple functions – be they economic, commercial, political, religious, cultural or military – and in the fact that they were nodes in larger networks. These connections meant that the Scandinavian towns and towns in the Hanse were fully integrated into urban Europe. The Hanse, a unique premodern urban organisation, illustrates how rich this urban history was.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter highlights changes in the relationship between humans and the urban environment by revealing the negotiations and tensions regarding the sealing and unsealing of urban soils and surfaces; organic waste removal and recycling; the use of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ soils; spontaneous plant growth and plant cultivation; as well as urbanisation, biodiversity and nature conservation. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrialisation both reinforced and blurred the separation and distinction between urban and rural, city and landscape, centre and periphery. It also produced novel hybrid ecologies which might be called nature-cultures; ecologies in which cities were naturalised and nature was urbanised.

The years leading up to Periyar's break from the Indian National Congress and the founding of the Self-Respect Movement (SRM) were marked by two significant events. The first was the controversy over discrimination in the Cheranmadevi Gurukulam, a nationalist school, of which the centenary history of The Hindu says: ‘The controversy was one of the contributing factors for E. V. Ramaswami Naicker drifting away from Congress and later forming an organisation of his own whose avowed objective was to eliminate Brahmins and Brahmin influence in Tamil Nad which it wanted to secede from India’ (Parthasarathy, 1978, p. 337).

The bitterness caused by the Cheranmadevi Gurukulam controversy was accentuated by the Vaikom Satyagraha, which Periyar for the most part led during 1924–1925. If the nationalist gurukulam in Cheranmadevi provided separate seating for Brahmins and non-Brahmins in the dining hall, in the temple town of Vaikom in Kerala, Ezhavas and other Depressed Classes were not even permitted entry into the streets surrounding the Mahadeva (Siva) Temple, not to speak of entry into the temple precincts. The Vaikom experience gave Periyar a fuller understanding of nationalist politics and left an indelible imprint on his future career. Periyar returned to these experiences in his speeches and writings all through his life.

These two struggles and the campaign for communal representation (equitable share of seats for non-Brahmins in representative political bodies and in employment and education) were what led Periyar to leave the Congress, of which he had been a part from around the time of the First World War.