This chapter enlightens the papal martial power through three different questions. It first focuses on the military geography of the Pontifical States (Central Italy, Comtat Venaissin, Avignon). Strongholds were key in the affirmation of pontifical political authority. Their locations and features testify to the great care taken in their construction and management. The chapter then investigates the structure of the troops involved in both offensive and defensive enterprises. Cardinals acting as legates or vicars as well as papal officers were expected to exert strong control over companies led by potentially troublesome condottieri and local warlords. At sea, the popes relied mostly on private and foreign contractors. Finally, this chapter describes the socio-cultural composition of armies, intended as micro-societies defined by rules they adopted or developed themselves. Since they served the papacy just like lay principalities, they kept up with commonly shared knightly aspirations and military practices found across Europe.

This chapter offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, it discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. It argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the chapter also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.

This chapter centres around a structural equivalency between certain outside entities (e.g., anthropologists, tourists, and some organisations) and shamanic spirits (e.g., master-owners and spirit allies) in Surama Village. This equivalency is explored in connexion with the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) and means (particularly hospitality) through which Makushi people form and manage strategic engagements with human and non-human others. This chapter articulates themes from previous chapters to clarify how Makushi shamanism reveals the status of contemporary visitors (particularly tourists) as akin to spirit allies and the Iwokrama International Centre as a magnified master-owner. Makushi shamanic relations with spirits, past missionaries, tourists, and organisations resonate and overlap. Makushi people seek esoteric knowledge and material goods from such outside entities. The chapter also discusses the spatial centralisation of alterity in Surama Village. The author’s status as a visitor and potential ally is highlighted to reflexively position the author within these relations.

This chapter briefly surveys the history of research into human settlement in the Caucasus region and outlines the book’s theses. In doing so, it acknowledges the long-standing interest in the unique languages and topography of the Caucasus region. It also surveys Caucasus research before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. It further charts the impact of anthropological genetics on our understanding of human evolutionary history; and introduces the unanswered questions about Caucasus population history.

This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

This chapter analyzes the regional and sectoral differences in how cities and municipalities engage in climate change networks. Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of cities, regions, companies, investors, and other non-state and subnational actors have voluntarily committed to reducing their GHG emissions. Such actions could help reduce the implementation gap. Along with the increase in commitments and the growing number of venues through which non-state actors can cooperate in order to govern climate change, it is necessary to track and evaluate such efforts. This chapter assesses the voluntary commitments made by Swedish municipalities, regions and multistakeholder partnerships to decarbonize by reducing GHG emissions. It finds large differences in which cities and municipalities that engage in networks. Large and urban municipalities in the south and along the eastern coast are well represented, whereas more rural municipalities along the Norwegian border are less represented in the data. The findings are discussed in terms of climate justice, highlighting the importance of having everyone onboard to create acceptance and reduce inequality in the transformation toward decarbonization.

This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

Swift wrote the most widely reprinted and profound fictional travel account in all literature. This chapter suggests that Swift’s Anglo-Irish status, and repeated travel between England and Ireland, shaped his perspective on travel. The first section of the chapter focuses on Swift’s own travels across the Irish Sea and on Irish roads. The second section looks into the Grand Tour and Swift’s reading of travel narratives. The third section shows how Swift’s reading of first-hand travelogues shaped the larger structure of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift is typical of his period in regarding travel writing as equally enlightening and suspect. He is atypical in being uncertain about his own place in the world, both geographically and professionally. However, it is that very uncertainty that grants Swift the ironic distance necessary to transform the popular form of the travel narrative into a timeless commentary on the human condition.

The chapter explores Lowell’s awareness of Boston’s complex class-marked topography. The Beacon Hill has become only a shorthand term for an anachronistically elite neighborhood, and we have become oblivious to the significance of its specific addresses. The Hill, however, was always intricately zoned and stratified, riven with class and ethnic conflict. Lowell’s story of his family moving from house to house within the Beacon Hill and then further and further east down the Back Bay is a dramatic story of social decline. The chapter also looks, in Lowell’s poetry and prose, for traces of the analogous class conflict over the downtown Boston’s public green spaces. The Lowells found themselves first “on the wrong side” of the Beacon Hill, then in the less prestigious section of the Back Bay impinged upon by the lesser castes. They enjoyed their leisure in the manicured Public Garden whose serenity was threatened by the messy, plebeian, enclosure-resisting Common.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.