Hellenistic queenship was richly represented across the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE. From luxury portable objects to large-scale monuments, public ceremonies to sacred spaces, extant material and visual culture show us that royal women were central to the articulation of dynastic continuity and legitimacy. Queens were important subjects of representation (that were sometimes objects of contemplation) as well as patrons of art and architecture. The art history of Hellenistic queenship comprises an eclectic array of representational strategies in different settings, across a range of materials and media, from the colossal to the miniature. As such, this volume has explored a variety of different case studies from various regions and kingdoms: Hecatomnid Caria, Lycia, Sparta, Argead Macedon, Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, and Attalid Anatolia.

This chapter examines the evolution of monumental civic architecture in Late Antiquity, exploring how urban spaces and public buildings adapted to shifting political, social and economic conditions. Challenging the traditional ‘decline and fall’ narrative, it argues instead for a process of gradual transformation. While some cities in the Western Empire experienced a decline in public building activity, urban centres in the east continued to flourish, with new constructions and adaptations extending well into the Islamic period. In these cities, public buildings such as basilicas, baths and colonnaded streets were frequently repurposed rather than abandoned. Christianity played a crucial role in this shift, as bishops assumed civic responsibilities and redirected resources towards maintaining and adapting urban infrastructure. As a result, late antique cities remained vibrant, with economic and social life persisting despite structural changes. The chapter also highlights the significance of imperial patronage and contributions from the local elite in sustaining urban architecture. By reassessing civic architecture through archaeological and textual evidence, the study presents a more nuanced perspective – one that emphasises urban resilience and transformation rather than outright decline.

This chapter investigates the material culture of saint veneration in Late Antiquity, detailing how objects, architecture and inscriptions influenced devotional practices. It draws on a range of sources to investigate how saints were honoured and how their presence was made tangible through physical artefacts. The chapter argues that material culture played a crucial role in facilitating interactions between the living and the divine. Saints’ memorials, inscriptions and relics served as focal points for devotion, strengthening communal identity and religious experience. Key examples include the engraved mensa (table) from Khirbet Oum el-Ahdam, which was used for communal feasting in honour of martyrs, and wall paintings from Wadi Sarga, which depict saints in orans postures, underscoring their role as intercessors. The evidence suggests that material artefacts did more than simply commemorate saints – they actively shaped devotional practices and evolved over time to meet the needs of different generations.

On 22 August 2017, the majority judgments of the Supreme Court of India pronounced oral, unilateral divorce, known in popular parlance as triple talaq, un-Islamic and hence illegal. A few months following the Supreme Court judgment, the right-wing BJP government proposed a legislation to criminalise the practice of triple talaq. While the fight to declare triple talaq unconstitutional had united most Muslim women's groups, the move to criminalise the practice saw a wide chasm between multiple voices seeking to represent Muslim women and a Muslim community. Across the country, a public sphere of fierce debate about law reform was shaped by competing voices that sought to speak for the Muslim community. However, this debate did not fundamentally challenge the idea of a homogenous Muslim community whose identity rests on a state-defined conception of Muslim personal law based on a gendered division of labour in the heterosexual family. Against the backdrop of this fierce debate, women navigating the legal domain of the women's shariat adalat in Mumbai – a space which is also a part of the BMMA's struggle for gender justice in community spaces – continually challenged the narrative of a homogeneous Muslim community founded on a Muslim family. The logic of the shariat adalat was based on a recognition of the violence and fragility of the family and the fluidity of gendered roles in the family. It provided women with a space of comfort where they could openly talk about the violence of the family and fight for a divorce at points of crisis in the heterosexual family. In that sense, the alternative dispute resolution forums were semi-public spaces situated in between the public sphere of debate on law reform and the home. These spaces provided a supportive environment where women could talk about the violence at home.

I integrate qualitative and quantitative evidence to shed light on the reversal in resource mobilization effectiveness between the CCP and the KMT. I show that the Sino-Japanese War fundamentally shifts the comparative advantages of party mobilization infrastructures of these two parties. The Japanese occupation significantly weakened the KMT by undermining the economic elites upon whom its elite mobilization infrastructure relied. Meanwhile, the CCP was able to take advantage of its mass mobilization infrastructure in rural areas to respond to the wartime fiscal shocks. At the point when both parties were forced to extract grains as an alternative source of revenue after 1941 to address rising fiscal demand, my research uncovers a surprising pattern: the CCP developed a significantly stronger capacity for grain mobilization than the KMT. I demonstrate that the CCP employed its grassroots party organization to mobilize compliance in the peasantry, maintaining popular support even in the face of a significantly higher degree of extraction. The KMT, by contrast, relied on local elites for grain extraction, which generated regressive taxation and corruption, stirring mass resentment despite a lower grain burden.

This chapter explores the archaeology of late antique Rome, focusing on the city’s transformation between the third and eighth centuries. It examines architectural, epigraphic and material evidence to trace changes in urban infrastructure, social organisation and religious practices. Recent archaeological projects, including excavations at the Crypta Balbi and the imperial fora, have yielded significant insights into the reuse of urban spaces and shifting patterns of habitation. This study challenges earlier narratives that describe late antique Rome as a city in decline, instead presenting it as a dynamic environment where old structures were adapted to new functions. A major emphasis is placed on the integration of Christian and imperial elements in the cityscape. This investigation highlights the construction of monumental churches such as St Peter’s and the Lateran Basilica, which repurposed materials from earlier Roman buildings, reinforcing Christian authority while maintaining connections to imperial traditions. Another important aspect discussed is the evolution of private housing, with evidence indicating a gradual shift from elite domus to smaller, more communal living arrangements. The chapter concludes that late antique Rome was characterised by both continuity and transformation.

A small room at the end of a courtyard housed the sharia adalat of the Indian Muslim Women's Movement (BMMA) in Mumbai. A group of men and women waited inside the room as the female judge (qazi) presided over cases. The female qazi usually sat in one corner of the rectangular room surrounded by some other activists of the BMMA as she heard cases of divorce, marriage and maintenance. Though this was an alternative dispute resolution forum meant to adjudicate Muslim personal law, the cases often included instances of criminal violations such as domestic violence. On the days when the shariat adalat was not hearing cases, this space hosted meetings with human rights organisations that trained women in approaching the police in instances of domestic violence. Stacks of leaflets and pamphlets provided by this human rights organisation lay in one corner of the sharia adalat. These resource materials provided details of how women citizens could access the police, how an FIR might be filed in a police station, and so on. These materials circulated within and beyond the shariat court. Activists of the BMMA distributed these materials to women who frequented the sharia court. They also distributed these materials in neighbourhoods in Mumbai where they conducted workshops on issues of gender equality and Muslim law with women. Some activists of the BMMA were also part of other activist networks. They frequented the meetings with senior police officials organised and facilitated by the members of the MCMT. In these meetings, activists exchanged pleasantries with police officials even as they recounted the difficulties that they faced in approaching the police. These events were held once a month in an auditorium where several activist groups and non-governmental organisations would assemble.

During the hearings of the cases, state laws were often invoked rhetorically by the qazi to convince men to pay post-divorce maintenance to their wives. The coercion of the state and state law remained an imminent threat, under the shadow of which marriage, divorce and maintenance claims were adjudicated by the female qazi. Deliberations on criminalising a certain form of oral, unilateral divorce by the right-wing BJP government found their way to the sharia adalat.

In the third century BCE, Ptolemy II, together with the architect Timochares, imagined a new kind of representation to commemorate his deceased sister and wife, Arsinoe II. The Elder Pliny explains how Timochares put his special knowledge of materials to work: he planned to construct the vaulting of Arsinoe’s Alexandrian temple out of lodestone – a dark mineral with magnetic properties – to suspend her partially iron portrait statue above the heads of viewers, achieving the effect of a levitating deity. Had the plans come to fruition, the visual experience would have, perhaps, filled the king’s subjects with terror and wonder.

This chapter explores the archaeology of late antique Egypt, discussing its diverse landscapes, urban centres and cultural transitions. It argues that Egypt’s long history and modern development have shaped archaeological research, with papyrology dominating due to the region’s arid climate preserving written records. To illustrate this the chapter examines papyri, inscriptions, settlements and religious structures. Greek texts dominate as a result of their administrative role, while Coptic gained prominence in the sixth century. Excavations reveal a varied urban landscape, from Alexandria’s intellectual hubs to Nile Valley and desert settlements. Sites like Kom el-Dikka in Alexandria and Karanis in the Fayum offer insights into daily life, while Christian sites illustrate religious shifts. A key argument is that Egypt’s late antique past is difficult to reconstruct due to modern occupation and destruction of later remains. The chapter emphasises the need to study non-elite settlements to build a fuller picture of society. Despite political instability and environmental threats, research in desert oases and urban centres continues to expand knowledge of late antique Egypt. Future efforts should focus on preserving and analysing everyday life remains rather than elite structures, ensuring a more balanced historical perspective.

The conclusion brings together the argument of expatriate social mobility with the historiography of British imperial benefits and costs, advancing the case for expatriate influences on British social structure. It links this larger account to the complexities of upward mobility abroad, underlining the tensions incurred for Edgar especially, and, with reference to Lambert and Lester’s work on ‘imperial careering’, notes the relevance of the book to the history of emotions, establishing the connection between imperial history and love. It stresses the ways in which the love story was shaped by expatriate life, with relevance to the history of heterosexuality, and to the concept of companionate marriage between the wars. The Wilsons return in England was bound up with their expatriate identity, coloured by nostalgia, but for Edgar an idealisation of domestic settlement, contrasting with Winifred’s father’s adherence to an expatriate masculinity preoccupied with global wanderlust. The succeeding generation of this mobile ‘expatriate clan’ followed their parents’ mobile habits but gradually returned to England, adopting Edgar’s model of the domestic ideal, enhanced by the prosperity and social status generated by Edgar, Winifred and William’s expatriate ventures, illustrating the power of expatriate social mobility.

At the time of writing this book, the Muslim minority identity itself seems to be under existential threat in India. With the passage of the Constitutional Amendment Act and the impending countrywide National Register of Citizenships, the Muslim minority stands to be shorn of whatever little rights it possessed in Indian democracy. This Act facilitates the naturalisation of migrants belonging to ‘Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian’ communities and migrated to Indian from ‘Afganisthan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan’ who entered India on or before 31 December 2014. This is yet another legislative move in a long history of marginalisation and otherisation of Muslim minorities by the purported secular, liberal Indian state. But it is more salient than earlier legislative interventions. Pratap Bhanu Mehta observes that this is the first time since India's Constitution was enacted in 1949 that the Parliament has ‘explicitly linked religious identity to citizenship’. Mehta observes that the act redefines Indian national identity ‘emphatically in the direction of becoming an ethnocracy’. He argues that this is the culmination of the long desired ideal of Hindu nationalists to remake India ‘as a homeland for Hindus, embracing an idea of nationhood similar to the Israeli model’. This is an extension of the ‘unfinished business of partition that Hindu nationalists’ want to complete as they want to signal to ‘Muslims inside India that they don't have an equal claim to belonging here’. In addition to the implementation of the CAA, the expansive and arbitrary use of anti-terror laws in the recent past has led to widespread incarceration of Muslim youth. There has been a concerted effort to police inter-faith marriages by several state governments using legislation that penalises such marriages by linking them to religious conversions. Muslim youth in interfaith relationships have largely been the target of such legislation. The trope of love-jihad has been invoked by the Hindu right in India to demonise Muslim men marrying Hindu women; Muslim men are considered to be participating in a larger project of converting Hindu women to Islam.

Along with the Constitutional Amendment Act, there is an impending proposal to initiate a nation-wide National Register of Citizens, a document which is meant to categorise the legal citizenship status of all individuals in India. Scholars have pointed out that this could lead to a genuine humanitarian crisis in India, a country where poor people find it very hard to access identification documents.

Rousseau casts the social contract both as a genealogical account of how governments arise and a prescriptive account of how they ought to be made. He can also be read as casting the social contract in a critical role: showing how society would organize itself in certain counterfactual circumstances. A merely hypothetical contract can serve the critical role of reconciling us to our actual circumstances while at the same time specifying what reforms are demanded. Rousseau’s social contract creates a general will, volonté générale, which is not an aggregation of separate wills, nor is it simply the immersion of several selves into a “hive mind.” It is what each wills, even those who disagree with the majority, which announces what the general will wills. Especially interesting is the act by which the general will arises: Citizens abstract from their own selves and situations and surrender all their rights to the political community. And “since each gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all, and [thus] no one has any interest in making it burdensome to the rest.” Rousseau’s social contract requires there be a civil religion intolerant of those who believe their own faith to be the unique way to salvation.

This chapter examines the archaeology of identity in Late Antiquity, challenging traditional notions of a homogeneous Roman identity. It explores how individual and collective identities evolved between the fourth and seventh centuries, particularly as the Roman Empire fragmented and new cultural identities emerged. The chapter discusses a range of sources, including material culture, burial practices, inscriptions and architectural remains. It critiques past archaeological approaches that focused on elite identities while overlooking broader social diversity. By analysing artefacts such as clothing accessories, funerary goods and urban structures, it highlights how identity was fluid and shaped by factors such as status, gender and ethnicity. This investigation also integrates theoretical perspectives, including post-colonial critiques of ‘Romanisation’, and applies methodologies like isotope and aDNA analysis to reassess past assumptions. A major argument is that Late Antiquity was not just a transition from ‘Roman’ to ‘non-Roman’ identities but a period of complex renegotiation. While elite Romanitas persisted in some regions, new identities emerged through interactions with barbarian groups, Christianity and shifting power structures. The chapter ultimately calls for a more nuanced archaeological approach that moves beyond static labels, recognising identity as a dynamic and context-dependent phenomenon.