The chapter examines the Yangzi as the only inland river system that played a consistent major role in strategy during World War II. It was only in China, where protracted war was waged without a nationwide network of railways, that riverine operations emerged as the pivot of military decision-making. As China’s principal waterway, the Yangtze was not only key to the projection of military power into the hinterland, but also – and more importantly – a vital channel for transporting grain to both Chinese and Japanese armies as they endured prolonged conflict. The chapter begins at the Japanese-occupied Yangzi Delta, demonstrating how the delta became central to the China Expeditionary Army’s efforts to live off the land. It then moves upriver to highlight the understudied Battle of Yichang of mid-1940 as a turning point in the war because of its repercussions for provisioning. The Nationalist loss of Yichang severed their Sichuan base from the traditional grain-producing regions of central and east China and forced a rewriting of military provisioning policies.

Chapter 4 explores the intricacies of the legal principle of standing, its role in climate litigation, and how it impacts the ability of parties to bring climate change-related lawsuits to trial. The author discusses interpretations of standing across different jurisdictions, such as the United States, New Zealand, and countries in Europe, and explains how these interpretations can either impede or facilitate climate litigation. He distils emerging best practice from this analysis, providing an insightful guide for future climate lawsuits. The author then identifies emerging best practice in interpreting standing rules in a flexible manner, thus allowing a broader range of actors to bring climate-related lawsuits and enhancing access to justice.

Conservatives make five claims about why taxes in America should be cut, especially for corporations and the rich. They claim that taxes are too high, hurt the economy, encourage government waste, are unfair, and threaten Americans’ freedom. Their arguments are based on a set of economic ideas called neoliberalism that are much more a matter of fiction than fact. Yet these ideas have become taken-for-granted truths – myths – among conservatives. This chapter reviews the rise of neoliberalism, how it provided conservatives the intellectual foundation for their mythical claims about the benefits of tax cuts, how these myths affected tax policy in the United States, and how politicians have used these myths to justify cutting taxes. Popular as these ideas may have been among conservatives, they are often not supported by cross-national, historical, or public opinion poll data.

This chapter considers examples of State enforcement of international law, including in cases of war crimes and genocide. It then assesses collective enforcement under mechanisms provided for in the UN Charter, giving particular consideration to UN sanctions, including Australian law and policy approaches giving effect to sanctions, and peacekeeping.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.

This chapter discusses the development of Jewish synagogue architecture in Late Antiquity, tracing its evolution from the early centuries to the more monumental structures of the fourth to sixth centuries. Drawing on a range of sources, it explores how synagogue architecture varied across regions, reflecting local styles, communal preferences and interactions with surrounding Christian and pagan cultures. While early synagogues primarily functioned as spaces for Torah readings, later structures became more elaborate, incorporating decorative elements such as Jewish symbols (e.g. the menorah, Torah shrine and ritual objects) and even figural representations – challenging traditional assumptions about aniconism in Judaism. The chapter also addresses debates over synagogue chronology, arguing that established typologies, such as Galilean-type and Byzantine-type synagogues, require re-evaluation in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. It emphasises that synagogue architecture was shaped not only by religious traditions but also by broader social and political factors. The presence of monumental synagogues in Late Antiquity suggests that Jewish communities remained active and resilient even under Christian rule.

The conclusion operates around four questions. First, the appropriate extent and limitations of networks and who should set the boundaries. Self-evidently, the less well-known networks created by the most marginalized, particularly lower-class women of color and Indigenous people at the outer edges of empires and religious traditions, are still the most under-researched and the least understood. Second, how to critically evaluate the relationship between Christianity and empire in the early modern and modern world. Christian expansion and the rise of the European empires are inextricably linked; they are not always in synchronicity regarding objectives or consequences. Third, how did the various revolutions in communications, from the print to the digital revolutions, shape the content of nuclei, the nature and location of nodes that became most important, and the ways networks expanded? Finally, how helpful is it to think of religious traditions capable of transnational mobility in terms of a religious nucleus with a particular DNA core? What inner cores of ideas and practices enabled these disparate religious traditions to grow and thrive thousands of miles from their origins?