Of the eleven kings under discussion in this volume, only two were married at their accession. Four of the others were still children, but those who had reached adulthood were expected to marry as soon as possible. There were practical reasons for this – the need for an heir to guarantee stability and the opportunity to create a diplomatic alliance that would strengthen a new regime. There were also ideological reasons. Medieval literature, chronicles and reports of gossip all demonstrate that a queen was an integral part of the medieval ideal of stable, mature kingship. This sense of a need for a feminine element in sovereignty was similarly apparent in the elevated position of the Virgin Mary who had been celebrated as queen of heaven from at least the sixth century. Just as medieval kings were Christ’s representatives, so the ideology of late medieval queenship drew inspiration from His idealised mother.

The topic of ‘consumption and entrepreneurship in the city’ needs an ‘intra-city’ approach, which concentrates on the changes in the urban environment and the mutual effects of city governance and business actors. The chapter thematises the past 150 years using three time periods and three cities: first presenting the main characteristics of the era and then connecting it with the history of the city and its entrepreneurship. The period before the First World War was the age of industrialisation and the spread of factory production; the relationship between city and business is presented via Budapest, a newly born national capital, and the steam-mill industry. The inter-war period was a short but economically diverse and turbulent era, which was permeated by the influence of politics. In the case of Łódź, which rapidly grew earlier thanks to its textile industry, this was the era when the effects of the industry in the city came under the control of the city government. Finally, after the Second World War came the age of consumer society, with de-industrialisation. Sheffield’s centuries-old industrial history was no longer enough security for the future, but thanks to the city administration and urban entrepreneurship, there was no question of decline.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar has been jointly edited by two researchers belonging to two different generations. When the first editor began his writing career in the mid-1980s, Periyar's was not a name that could be taken in genteel, academic circles. By the time the second editor began his doctoral work at a British university in 2011, the topic was a study in political theory, comparing Periyar with a major international thinker (Frantz Fanon). In the intervening generation, much had changed in the fortunes of academic writing on Periyar. After decades of being ignored or consigned to the margins by Indian sociologists and historians, we can say that Periyar has arrived in global scholarship. This volume exemplifies this turn.

Paralleling Periyar's rising influence during these intervening decades, there has been vigorous academic interest in studying the Dravidian movement. Newer and newer editions of Periyar's writings—covering the spectrum from multivolume sets to popular paperbacks—are being published every year. Any visitor to the annual Chennai Book Fair would be amazed by the piles of books by and on Periyar. The transformation of the Periyar Library and Research Centre housed in the Chennai headquarters of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) from a sweltering hall roofed by an asbestos sheet in 1981, when the first editor first consulted it, to a comfortable air-conditioned hall with expanded print resources indexes the growing academic interest in Periyar. Social media is also abuzz with young readers discussing animatedly the ideas of Periyar.

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.

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.

A little over a hundred years after the non-Brahmin manifesto put forth by the South Indian Liberal Federation, better known as the Justice Party, in 1916 that advocated for adequate representation for non-Brahmin groups, Tamil Nadu's legislative assembly is India's most diverse in terms of caste representation (Verniers et al., 2021).

This legislative assembly's diverseness has been often attributed to the capacious Dravidian– Tamil1 identity and its ethos, which continue to inform the politics of the Dravidian parties that have governed the state since 1967. The capaciousness of the ethos that defines the Dravidian– Tamil identity, which has allowed for horizontal solidarities across caste groups that otherwise share a hierarchical relationship, stems from the socio-economic and cultural aspirations of these groups. These horizontal solidarities and aspirations continue to derive both their legitimacy and sustainability from the ever incremental and yet radical, anti-caste episteme and activism of Periyar. This chapter is an attempt to engage with him and the way his ideas may be located or traversed both within and outside the literature of other academics, intellectuals, and scholars not just of the subcontinent but across the world. His anti-caste episteme and the vocabulary of his activism are informed by a demand for adequate representation of non-Brahmins—grounded either in their demographic weight or in a historically embedded sense of tension with Brahminical hegemony.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 marked a fundamental change in both the scope and systematic nature of Nazi mass violence. Over the course of the next three years, German warfare and rule in the occupied Soviet territories caused death and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is particularly the death toll among civilians and other non-combatants that stands out here. The majority of Soviet war dead comprised civilians and unarmed, captured soldiers. In deliberate policies of mass murder, German forces killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2.6 million Jews, more than 2 million residents of Soviet cities, 30,000 Roma, at least 17,000 psychiatric patients, and up to 600,000 rural-dwelling civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations. The military operations of the German-Soviet War cannot be addressed independently of mass murder in this theatre, where 10 million Wehrmacht soldiers were stationed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944. The number of Wehrmacht divisions deployed on the Eastern Front in which no war crimes were committed was low, and members of the Wehrmacht may indeed have made up the majority of those responsible for large-scale crimes committed here by the German Reich.

Mass rather than skill formed the basis of the Red Army’s victory primarily because inadequate training, weak motivation, and low morale plagued the army for the duration of the war, though after the Battle of Kursk, soldier motivation and morale improved. Often poorly led, inadequately fed, ill-trained, and under-supplied, Red Army soldiers faced daunting prospects just to survive. The dire need to replace losses led to abbreviated training; troops were thrown into battle with little preparation, leading combat effectiveness to suffer; fearful and feeling unprepared, soldiers deserted, shirked, straggled, and showed cowardice and committed many acts of indiscipline, crimes, and violations of regulations on a wide scale. When given the right equipment and weaponry, and properly trained to use it, and led by competent leaders, most soldiers fought well and with determination. These conditions, however, did not present themselves very often. Officers were often in positions for which they were unprepared. The ability of the Red Army to fight well improved in 1943 with defense production at full capacity and American Lend-Lease delivering vital supplies.