The final two weeks of ‘Alamgir’s life is the focus of this chapter. It highlights various themes and characters (some important, others minor) to illustrate daily life at court at the end of his long reign while reflecting back on ‘Alamgir, his reign, and the Mughal Empire. There are sections devoted to the relationship between ‘Alamgir and his three surviving sons, the tensions between his sons and grandsons, the impoverishment of the Mughal nobility, biographies of some of his favorite nobles and last surviving wife (Udaipuri Mahal), conversion to Islam, and the ill-fated Mughal struggle against the Marathas. Other sections highlight ‘Alamgir’s physical and mental frailties, his extraordinary work ethic, his attentiveness to intelligence gathering, and the deep sense of personal failure and self-recrimination at the end of his life. Together these stories offer insights on ‘Alamgir, the court, and the empire on the cusp of a new era that everyone feared might be even less settled than the one drawing to a close.

This chapter is devoted to the imperial eunuchate and begins by looking at the place of eunuchs in the life of the empire prior to 1658. This is followed by an examination of the rising presence of eunuchs in Aurangzeb’s princely household and the central role eunuch loyalists played in helping ‘Alamgir consolidate his power post-1658. Despite ‘Alamgir’s concerns about the existence and trafficking of eunuchs, he also appreciated the strength and usefulness of the imperial eunuchate, and contributed to its growing power. This chapter also evaluates Khidmatgar Khan III, the most powerful eunuch in Mughal history and the head of the imperial eunuchate from the early 1690s to his death in 1704. Such power did not come without resistance from uncastrated men who were jealous of the eunuchate’s wealth and power. This included ‘Alamgir himself, who, despite heavy dependence on imperial eunuchs, tried to maintain some checks on them, even if these weakened toward the end of his life.

This chapter considers the evolution of English policy towards Ireland from the sixteenth century onwards. It argues how, at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the important reign of James VI and I, there was a renewed emphasis on religion, specifically Protestant evangelisation, as a key part of colonial projects, with Ireland part of wider trends in developing English imperialism. This resulted in policies of ‘converting and civilising’, with concepts of civility becoming inextricable with the Protestant religion. This was made visible in the planning and requirements of plantation schemes such as Ulster, which is contrasted with earlier schemes’ more lax religious requirements. The stress on religion, in turn, generated Irish Catholic resistance, which also drew on religious arguments, justifications and imagery in resisting the dispossession, displacement and loss of power that plantations represented. The Catholic clergy were crucial actors in articulating this religiously inflected opposition. The effect of both plantation and challenges to it was the increasing voicing of grievances, across a range of issues, in religious terms and through religious categories.

This chapter examines ideas of belonging, the self and identity through the prism of ethnic and religious categories. It explores the complexities of seventeenth-century Irish identities, especially surrounding changing confessional and national markers, together with evolving concepts of race, and how these could generate violence and conflict. It uses a number of case studies. One is the attempt to convert a large number of Protestants to Catholicism, and the violence surrounding it that showcases the knotty nature of religious and ethnic groups, as both those who refused and those who conformed were subject to bloodshed. Irish Protestants are also considered, as a group who straddled these two categories, with evidence that they were subjected to particular pressure to convert, as being ‘in keeping’ with their Irishness. Finally, the expulsion of the Irish from several Munster towns and cities in 1644 is addressed, with Lord Inchiquin’s status as an Irish Protestant of particular interest in his justification for the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish violence that was central to this episode.

In Chapter 5 we started our consideration of the trespass torts, examining the nature of those torts and focusing on the three forms of trespass to the person: battery, assault and false imprisonment. In this chapter we conclude our examination of the trespass torts, focusing on the torts of trespass to land and trespass to goods. We also consider two closely related torts that involve an interference with personal property: conversion and detinue.

These complicated and technical areas of tort law have a special relationship with the law of property, so before you study these four torts (and before you read the cases in the area) you need to become familiar with some new concepts (discussed in section 6.1). This area of the law also contains special and sometimes highly technical definitions, some of which can go beyond the ordinary everyday meanings of words (eg ‘land’) and others that you may never have heard of before (eg ‘bailment’). This chapter provides definitions of these and associated terms.

A person’s interest in real or personal property is protected by the law of trespass. Trespass is one of the oldest of the common law actions, and most of the core principles arise from common law. Trespass was used for various claims, the common element of which was that the interference was direct – where the interference was indirect the ‘action on the case’ was more appropriate, and this action evolved into the modern law of negligence. Trespass is actionable per se – that is, there is no need for the plaintiff to prove that they suffered damage. Trespass can also be a crime; however, the principles should be kept distinct.As we saw in Chapter 6, the trespass action is also used to protect the plaintiff’s interest in their bodily integrity – trespass to the person can be assault, battery or false imprisonment. In this chapter we are dealing with trespass to land and to personal property. Land is defined in the same way as it is in the general law of property, and personal property is, in essence, any property other than land. ‘Personal property’ as a term is often used interchangeably with the terms ‘goods’ or ‘chattels’.

Chapter Two examines the notions of “becoming” and “being” Qizilbash, contextualizing the Ottoman Qizilbash within the broader literature on belonging while revealing the multitude of factors influencing this choice of adherence, as perceived by both the ruler and the ruled. More specifically it examines the motivations behind Qizilbash belonging in Ottoman lands through a framework that scrutinizes their lived experience under two major modes: belonging rooted in spiritual conviction and belonging driven by social, economic, and political compulsion. Within this framework, the chapter aims to illustrate that belonging took on diverse forms and that a shift in sectarian affiliation did not always entail the complete abandonment of previously held beliefs; instead, it often occurred within a larger interplay of politics and morality, as well as personal and material needs.

Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

Chapter 4 examines how Augustine’s theology of the righteousness of faith also becomes more Christological, that is, uniquely shaped by having Christ as its object. This chapter begins with the fundamental contrast between pride and humility. Augustine sees pride as the love of the delusional thought that one is the center of reality, and faith in Christ as the healing remedy which restores the soul’s relationship to God, the true center. Returning to confessiones (Confessions), Augustine understands faith in Christ as more than just an ascent to God. Instead, it initiates a double movement in which the soul is first humbled by its recognition in faith of Christ’s humble humanity and then exalted by its reception of his divinity. Finally, the chapter turns to de trinitate (The Trinity), in which Augustine explains how, because sacraments present eternal realities through temporal signs, Christ as sacrament makes the humility of God accessible to faith.

This chapter explores Augustine’s intellectual formation and conversion to Christianity in the context of late antiquity’s philosophical, religious, and political transformations. Tracing his journey through Manichaean dualism, Neoplatonism, and finally Pauline Christianity, the chapter highlights Augustine’s struggles with the nature of evil, the limits of human will, and the role of divine grace. Drawing on the Confessions, it examines Augustine’s dialogue with Platonism, particularly Plotinus, whose hierarchy of being and emphasis on inner ascent deeply influenced him – but could not resolve the question of the incarnation. Augustine’s embrace of Christ as both divine and human offered a radically new model of wisdom grounded in humility and love (caritas), unavailable in pagan philosophical traditions. The chapter contextualizes Augustine’s thought within Roman imperial history, the codification of Christian scripture, and the evolving notion of philosophy as a way of life. Ultimately, it shows how Augustine’s life and writings forged a new intellectual synthesis, in which classical reason and biblical faith coalesced into a powerful vision of human transformation, one that would shape Christian anthropology, literary practice, and theological reflection for centuries.

Historians of early twentieth-century British and American literary modernism have often portrayed the public sphere as a space that facilitates mass deception. Indeed, the Freudian psychoanalytic model upon which such arguments depend dominates accounts of modernist responses to advertising, propaganda, and mass media. Such representations overlook the significance of William James as a theorizer of a pluralistic public sphere. Based on an understanding of the self as a distributed aggregate of competing “selves” and private and public allegiances, James and an American modernist cohort saw the public sphere as likewise composed of plural, distributed entities. Confronted by a culture of group-think, crowd contagion, and global fascism, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Walter Lippmann, and Katherine Anne Porter deployed a Jamesian variety of civic modernism based upon an ethics of estrangement, in which the internally conflicted “sick soul” is the means of both psychic and civic regeneration.