This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

Thes chapter argues that both Britons and South Asians made use of instruments such as treaties and a broader world of diplomatic paperwork to construct a framework for interstate legality in the eighteenth century. South Asian efforts to make and remake arrangements with British traders and government agencies constituted a source of inter-imperial legal forms. Inter-imperial treaties were not blunt instruments of European imperialism, but legal documents co-produced by South Asian bureaucrats. By emphasising the activism and political thought of South Asian actors in their pursuit of a new inter-imperial order, this chapter rethinks the focus on European actors as the architects of international law. Of course, multilingual and multipolar claim making did not impose a stable legal order in South Asia. Treaties were regularly abrogated and renegotiated. Nevertheless, such efforts to negotiate relationships among states and enshrine them punctuated and shaped the upheavals of the eighteenth century as well as the explosion of new projects of state building. Inter-imperial lawmaking emerged as a vital site for politics in the eighteenth century.

Indian history from 500 BC to AD 1000 is characterized by kingdoms and confederacies consolidating and expanding. This political landscape was theorized by ancient scholars as mandala, or ‘circles’ of kingdoms. Two areas brought these polities into contact: diplomacy and war. Indian legal tradition made rules of engagement for these areas. Diplomacy also required rules whereby diplomats were protected as they travelled to different kingdoms as representatives of their rulers. Economic imperatives necessitated long-distance trade not only between Indian polities, but also between India and other regions. Such trade required safe routes and a set of agreed laws governing such trade and traders. Early examples are set forth both in Kauṭilya’s treatise on governance called Arthaśāstra and in Indian treatises of the Dharmaśāstra genre. We set these normative works alongside some literary sources as well as documents preserved in inscriptional form. Beginning with a discussion of Dharmaśāstra as a form of transpolity legal ordering, the chapter proceeds to treat diplomacy, war, and trade as three areas of international law addressed in ancient India.

This chapter argues that the influence of Carpentier on Cuban literature of his time and after is not clear, given that there was some animosity towards him. It cites as reasons the fact of Carpentier’s absence from Cuba in the 1970s. It also acknowledges that the teachers who taught the Novísimo generation of Cuban writers with whom the author identifies most closely all emphasized the mastery of Carpentier’s prose and admired what they called Carpentier’s carnivalization of language or baroque language. The chapter concludes that understanding how Carpentier’s lifelong journalism had served as a foundation of his literary writing was an important lesson for him and others, and he ends by calling Carpentier a classic.

This chapter is about the concept of religion in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the pitfalls of multiculturalist approaches, and the potential of alternative approaches centring genealogical care. It illustrates this through close conceptual readings of central figures such as Daniel Philpott, Jürgen Habermas, William Connolly, and Iza Hussin. It argues that such conceptual analysis is necessary in order to understand the endemic ideological and cognitive bias built into the dominant multiculturalist framework on religion in IR, as well as the importance for alternatives to it. This is significant because these biases continue to structure both scholarship and political practice of religious freedom, the regulation and governance of religious minorities, the identification and evaluation of ‘religious’ conflict and conflict parties, as well as the initiatives for reworking the relationship between religion and politics within international practices and theory.

This chapter examines the complex relationship between international trade law and public health. While trade liberalisation can lower the cost of medical supplies and raise global standards of living, trade rules also constrain national public health measures and can facilitate trade in harmful products. The chapter analyses how the World Trade Organization (WTO) has addressed health-related trade restrictions, including disputes over tobacco, alcohol, and asbestos. It also explores the tension between intellectual property rights and access to essential medicines, as well as the impact of trade on healthcare supply chains, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapter concludes by critiquing the WTO’s ‘exceptionalism’ framework for evaluating public health measures and arguing for a more integrated approach that prioritises both health and economic resilience.

‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

The Epilogue traces the legacy of urban collectivization in the rest of the Mao era and its reinterpretation after 1978.

The twelfth–eleventh centuries BCE mark the transition between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) of Cyprus and the very different social world of the Early Iron Age. The end of the LBA is marked by violent destructions, the abandonment of urban centers and rural communities, and a subsequent dramatic shift in settlement pattern. There is a clear break in material production on the island – especially in pottery production – and significant changes in funerary and ritual practice. Within the wider East Mediterranean, international maritime trade broke down, major palace economies and overarching empire states disappeared, and populations relocated. The direct effect on Cyprus is debated, particularly the presence of Mycenaean colonizing communities. The island’s copper trade apparently persisted, at a reduced scale from the LBA, and cultural and trading links continued with Crete and Philistine communities of the southern Levant. Using settlement and cemetery archaeology, this chapter explores the establishment of new communities on Cyprus ancestral to the Iron Age city kingdoms, the changing material world of the new settlements, contacts beyond the island, the earliest Phoenician activity on Cyprus, and the degree to which the island was a part of the emerging world of Iron Age Greece.

Neandertals evolved in the larger environmental context of the cold climates of Middle Pleistocene western Eurasia, and therefore display specific morphological and metabolic adaptations, alongside cultural strategies, to thermoregulate and maintain body heat in the face of cold stress. These adaptations align with Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules, indicating that Neandertals had greater body masses and shorter limbs, traits conducive to minimizing heat loss. After the migration of Homo erectus into more temperate zones 1.8 million years ago, Neandertals developed cold adapted claviculo-humeral, brachial, and crural indices but also show regional variation in cold adaptation strategies among Neandertal populations across Europe and West Asia. Although evidence points toward these thermoregulatory adaptations in Neandertals, interpreting these traits as direct outcomes of climatic selection is complex due to the minimal impact of limb proportions on surface area and demonstrated influences of population history on patterns of body form.