Byzantine travel accounts written in Greek belong to a wide variety of literary genres and are contained in texts that cross such boundaries as may have existed, given that the concept of genre for the Byzantines was not coherent. The narratives falling within the orbit of Byzantine travel literature vary significantly in goals and approaches; taking the form of – or, in some cases, being incorporated in – pilgrims’ accounts, saints’ lives, memoirs, correspondence, reports of official missions, poetry, chronicles, and prose romances. However, travel writing cannot be said to have been a genre flourishing in Byzantium during the middle and the late Byzantine periods. The travellers’ accounts that came down to us were written by clergymen, male officials, and secular literati. Female-authored ones do not survive; the sole exception being the Alexiad written by Anna Comnena which includes passages describing journeys and expeditions that took place during her father’s Alexios reign.

The TV series Orange Is the New Black(2013–2019), created by Jenji Kohan, became a site through which to contest and explore Black gender nonconformity in ways rarely seen on popular television. In its first season, the show’s depictions of Black gender-nonconforming characters – Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) and Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) – produce variable results. This chapter argues that the middle-class back story of Burset as a firefighter produces a plea for relatability, distancing her from the common experiences of transwomen of color who might typically be imprisoned in the US. By contrast, the character of Warren is depicted as anti-assimilationist and threatening to the prison system, even as her characterization draws on racial and gender prison stereotypes. The exploration of Black gender nonconformity complicates historical tropes of Black women in prison with varied results, providing insight into ideologies of criminal behavior, queerness, and blackness.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the development of the International Council on Archives and its role mediating custodial disputes over colonial archives. This chapter, admittedly, interrupts the book’s narrative. Chronologically, it covers the late 1940s through the 1970s and largely examines the council’s main conferences during the period in order to trace the emergence of the notion of the “migrated archives” and debates over their custody. Like the role of international organizations themselves, this chapter is significant but somewhat detached from the realm of everyday activity surrounding Kenya’s “migrated archives.” However, as is demonstrated by the chapter, it provided important resources with which former colonies advocated the return of political documents as a matter of postcolonial sovereignty. These advocacy efforts were stalled by the reconfiguration of imperial hegemony upon which the International Council on Archives was based.

This chapter will examine the ways travellers passing through Southeast Asia experienced, perceived, and presented these interconnected littoral, maritime and insular regions. Travellers’ observations and records in this period indicate a rich variety of concerns. Marco Polo’s account surveys myriad islands rich in spices and other sources of wealth but ‘sauvage’ in cultural and social norms while Franciscan envoy Giovanni de’ Marignolli’s identifies the wealthy island of ‘Saba’ (probably Java) as Biblical Sheba. Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti places the islands of Indonesia at the very extreme edge of the world, while his contemporary Fra Mauro’s identifies Java as a crucial ‘hinge’ in a global spice trade, from which these precious commodities are exported to the three parts of the world. The chapter will examine the geographical, ethnographic, economic and other observations and concerns that link and divide these accounts. It will consider what the surviving accounts can and cannot tell us about their writers’ and audiences’ preconceptions of these furthest reaches of their known world, and how these preconceptions interacted with experience and perception.

A decisive event not only for Polish and Lithuanian history, but also for the history of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was the Union of Kreva in 1385. This not only decided upon the marriage of the Grand Duke Jogaila to Queen Hedwig of Anjou in Poland. Furthermore, the Union of Kreva – in addition to the establishment of a new dynasty, that of the Jagiellons – also formed the cornerstone for the increasingly interwoven history of Poland and Lithuania until the end of the eighteenth century, since it heralded an era of successive Polish-Lithuanian personal unions which favoured the political, economic, and also cultural entwinement of both countries. This chapter is devoted to the geographic horizon of knowledge in general, and travel reports in particular, in these two countries, which were so politically and culturally intertwined from the fourteenth century onwards. Discussing the earliest beginnings of chorographic writing from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance humanist period, I would like to end this overview with the aforementioned, caesura-like Union of Lublin, providing only a brief glimpse of subsequent pre-modern era Polish-Lithuanian travel accounts.

Incarnation and Atonement are two aspects of the work of Christ addressed in Christology. In the IIncarnation, God the Son assumes a human nature in order to bring about human salvation; and in Atonement he achieves this. Various accounts of atonement have developed over the centuries. This chapter considers the major historic views in the context of a broadly Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation.

Chapter 4 widens the view on those interested in controlling Kenya’s colonial-era documents at the time leading up to and directly following political independence to include British and US-American academics and the formation of area studies. It historicizes the formation of archival collections in Nairobi, Oxford, Syracuse, and London as the result of entangled interests held by Oxford and Syracuse Universities, the British colonial government in Kenya, the Department of Technical Co-operation, and the Colonial Office, namely, its Intelligence and Security Department. By claiming colonial-era documentation as archival rather than as a political record with current relevance for incoming African ministers, these institutions scrambled to collate and control colonial-era documents for different purposes but all through the exclusion of African partners.

The Finnish pulp sector is the key actor responsible for the preference for a homogenous clearcut forest economy. This chapter examines the historic roots and global connections related to Finland’s post-2015 so-called bioeconomy boom. This boom prompted the construction of large “bioproduct” mills, which in practice produce export-oriented pulp that will be turned into cardboard and tissue. Finland is transforming from being the core of global paper production to being a semi-commodity producer. Fiber mass production and its accompanying energy production are key in delineating how forests are used, what kind of trees are grown, where, for how long, and based on what logic. The reasons why the pulp-driven forestry strategy and clearcutting model have continued against all logic are explored. This chapter uncovers how the pulp sector became dominant and the effects of the new contentious forest politics in the context of the “bioeconomy” and European Union (EU) legislation.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.

Whether it took the form of plantations in the South, penitentiaries in the North, or military camps in the West, the purpose of prison in early America was to contain the freed slave, the sinner, the indigenous, and the outlaw. Prison did not just incapacitate them but also constituted them as other. As Caleb Smith puts it, prison is “one of the primary sites through which the very idea of modern humanity is imagined and contested” in America.1 Stephen Hartnett elaborates that “debates about crime, violence, and punishment helped colonials and then Americans to focus their thinking” about “identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, race and slavery, and the Enlightenment and democracy.”2

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.