This chapter explores the impact of warfare on North African communities and their built environment during Late Antiquity (fourth to sixth century). While the political upheavals, internal conflicts, and the invasions that shaped the region during this period have been extensively studied, the local effects and responses to these challenges remain underexplored. Drawing on selected case studies, this work combines archaeological and textual evidence to examine and compare the actions taken by local communities and their rulers – the Western Roman Empire, the Vandal Kingdom, and the Eastern Roman Empire – in response to ongoing conflict. From the centenaria of Tripolitania and the fortified estates of Byzacena and Proconsularis to the fortifications built under Justinian’s regime and its successors, this chapter highlights the role of warfare and its consequences in reshaping the provincial landscapes of North Africa, offering new insights into the region’s social and physical transformation during this period.

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.”

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.

In addition to Homeric phrasing, Herodotus also adapts Homeric episodes and narrative themes in ways that invite the reader to ponder the relationship between the heroic past, the recent past of Greco-Persian conflict, and the postwar experiences of Herodotus’ contemporary audience. Episodes manifesting such intertextuality include the fall of Sardis, where the rapprochement between Cyrus and Croesus recalls that between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24; the speech delivered by the Corinthian Soclees before Spartan allies, which prevents the re-institution of tyranny in Athens; and above all the narrative of Xerxes’ Greek expedition, which includes his propagandistic visit to Troy and battles with varying degrees of Homeric stylization. Most conspicuous among these is Herodotus’ staging of the fighting at Thermopylae, where Leonidas sacrifices his life to secure kleos for Sparta alone – a goal that evokes both the world of Homeric heroism and a post-Homeric world characterized by fierce inter-polis competition.

This chapter analyzes how the War for Independence affected Caribbean colonies and how they, in turn, shaped the revolution. It organizes the impact into two moments: before and after the 1778 Franco-American alliance. In the first phase, Patriots turned to the French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean for war materiel and, more generally, to fill the economic gap resulting from the break with Britain. Meanwhile, British Caribbean colonies weathered the shocks of North American independence to trade and to preserve their precarious slave societies. After 1778, with the official entrance of European powers into the war, the Caribbean became an active theater of conflict, as all empires looked to protect and to add to West Indian claims. Pressed for more soldiers in this region, some militaries armed Black men, who, through their actions, undercut patriots’ racist basis of freedom – a challenge that reached even fuller fruition during the Haitian Revolution.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

The emergence of a systematic literature around land-surveying in the late first century AD affords an ideal opportunity to study the development of an ars within the scientific culture of specialized knowledge in the early Roman Empire. The variegated methods that belonged to the historical inheritance of surveying practice challenged the construction of a discrete and coherent disciplinary identity. The surveying writings of Frontinus and Hyginus evince several strategies intended to produce a systematic and explanatory conception of the ars. These include rationalizing explanations of key surveying terminology and practice with a view to natural first principles and an accounting of surveying methods in interdisciplinary perspective with astronomy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. While these earliest surveying works pose several unique challenges, they ultimately provide a precious window onto the challenges and opportunities that greeted the emergence of an ars in the fervid scientific culture of the period.

While no Latin ars of warfare survives from the early Empire, its development can be reconstructed with the help of Frontinus’ Stratagemata (Domitianic), a collection of military stratagems composed as a pendant to his (now lost) treatise on the scientia rei militaris, and with Onasander’s Stratêgikos (c. AD 49–58), a Greek theoretical treatment of generalship dedicated to a Roman general. Onasander’s treatise embodies a paradigm of specialized knowledge that puts precepts into an explanatory relationship with universal (natural) first principles, much in the spirit of the artes. This approach to the art of war was popular but seems also to have been fiercely criticized at Rome. Frontinus’ Strategemata responds to this criticism by eschewing generalized precepts and offering instead exemplary historical anecdotes for contemplation and imitation. The Roman art of war thus reveals significant generic diversification in reaction to pressures internal and external to the scientific culture of the artes.

This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

This introduction explains how constitutions first developed in the context of inter-imperial rivalry in the eighteenth century. In this setting, constitutions formed effective military contracts between rulers and subjects, allowing the extraction of military force in return for certain constitutional rights. It discusses how this process shaped national and imperial societies, and how it instilled propensities for violence in constitutional ordered polities.

The standard trope is that evolution and religion are at war. Bishop Wilberforce against science professor Thomas Henry Huxley. John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching that humans evolved from apes. Many, however, welcomed evolution, bringing it into their religious world picture. This was particularly the case for those drawn to organicism, Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin in France, and Alfred North Whitehead, founder of process theology/philosophy in America. Evolution, Darwinism in particular, was now seen as a stimulating challenge rather than as a dire threat.