Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

This chapter explores the archaeology of late antique Syria, emphasising its historical significance and research challenges. Syria has one of the highest concentrations of late antique sites, particularly in the Limestone Massif, yet modern national borders obscure historical connections with Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Drawing on historical texts, travel accounts and archaeological surveys, the chapter traces the development of research from early European explorers to twentieth-century French-led excavations. It examines the influence of colonial mandates and political changes, including the impact of the Syrian civil war on archaeological preservation. A central argument is that late antique Syria has been overlooked in favour of earlier Roman and later Islamic studies. Limited excavations, instability and destruction have further hindered research. However, the chapter stresses the importance of studying Syria’s role in connecting the Roman, Persian and early Islamic worlds. Instead of focusing solely on elite monuments, the chapter calls for research on everyday settlements to provide a fuller picture of Syrian society during Late Antiquity.

This chapter charts Edgar Wilson’s elevation in status and class identity, embodying the book’s main theme, the capacity of expatriate employment to create career opportunities for ordinary Britons, in this case for the impecunious lower middle class. Wilson’s earlier family background, with schoolteacher parents, underlines the precarious position of the ‘middling sort’ in semi-rural districts during dramatic social and economic transformation, but then the role of education and culture in enabling the three sons to achieve professional and business careers. After marrying, and with dismal white-collar stagnation in London, his subsequent experience in Persia depicts a rare picture of life on a remote river port, Ahwaz, in the early years of oil exploration. The tragic loss of his first wife from typhoid left him with two infant sons, a grim price of expatriate social mobility. His transfer to Tehran, mixing with political and diplomatic elites, cemented his rise in status and authority, and brought a new romantic venture. Socially, Wilson had arrived.

Does partisanship undermine the ability of courts to affect citizens’ attitudes? We introduce a dueling theoretical account to our own which suggests that citizens prioritize partisanship over constitutional rules when evaluating executive actions. We test these rival perspectives in Germany and the United States with a survey experiment that leverages the countries’ federal structures. We find that citizens of both countries are remarkably steadfast in their willingness to punish executives – including copartisans – for breaching constitutional limits and flouting court orders. Contrary to fears that partisanship is an overwhelmingly pernicious threat to the rule of law, we show that independent courts are resilient in their ability to cut through the binds of partisanship, to monitor executives, and coordinate public actions to reign in incumbent excess.

Bombay's cotton mills and their relation to the city's emergence over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as India's prime metropolis have been extensively studied from various perspectives, and this is a wide and ever-expanding area of critical scholarship. Within this rich corpus of literature, the development of public education in the city of Bombay and its place in the wider imagination of the emerging industrial city remain a virtually uncharted area. The diverse historical trajectories of state-funded education in the city point to how education discursively constructed the ‘public’ in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century.

This chapter attempts to trace these developments in the mill district of colonial Bombay (now Mumbai). It provides a descriptive and thematic account of the expansion of education through the implementation of free and compulsory primary education (FCPE) in Girangaon, literally ‘the village of the mills’. The wards that make up the Girangaon area were selectively chosen for the FCPE when it became operational in the city in 1925. Girangaon covers the administrative wards of F and G, as well as parts of E ward, although this was not included in the initial scheme. With the caveat that the archive we have had to work with is largely limited to official records,1 we look at debates on FCPE in the city and attempt to chart the contexts within which policies on primary education in the Girangaon area were being discussed and enacted. The chapter aims to move away from colonial and nationalist narratives of well-known elite educational institutions in Bombay to interrogating the contexts within which children of the working classes were intended to be educated.

This chapter begins by setting out the history of AML regulation, which spans many centuries and jurisdictions. The regime we have is best understood as a product of evolution, rather than intelligent design, stemming from intuitions about complicity in crime and the benefits of financial surveillance. Section 2.1 outlines the development of thinking about money laundering as a species of complicity in the predicate crime. Section 2.2 covers the genesis of the two central tenets of the AML regime: reporting obligations, ranging from suspicious activity reporting to multiple other modes of reporting, and customer due diligence. Finally, Section 2.3 traces the genesis of the international AML regime, as relates both to substantive rules and its institutional architecture. In particular, it explores how and why the FATF, an initially ad hoc grouping convened in Paris in 1989, became the primary vehicle for the development of international standards against money laundering. The conclusion brings together the lessons that this historical experience holds for understanding the financial crime challenges of today.

Mumtaz Shaikh, an activist of the BMMA, conducted a range of workshops and training sessions with other working-class Muslim women in her neighbourhood. In these sessions, she spoke about the difficulties that Muslim women faced when they approached the police for redressal of grievances such as domestic violence. In her discussion of these difficulties, she invoked the rights (huq) of Muslim women in terms of the rights of a collective, communal entity. For Shaikh, rights became meaningful in these moments of collective communal mobilisation for rights.

In a similar training session, Noorjehan Safia Niaz, a founder member of the BMMA, spoke of the right to religious freedom for Muslim women. She construed the right as the freedom that allowed women to carry out the duty towards individual and collective self-improvement. The right to religious freedom was exercised through political action. Activists understood the right as the right to collectively challenge and reconstitute religious authority in spaces of adjudication of Muslim law on marriage, divorce and maintenance. This was not merely a form of individual freedom that enabled women's autonomy. Collective organising to challenge religious authority in communities was considered a pious obligation and a duty for women who wanted to construct a more just world in accordance with the principles of the Quran. In the activism of the BMMA, an ethic of duty reconstituted liberal freedoms such as the right to religious freedoms in moments of negotiation with Muslim family law and minority rights.

This chapter builds on participant observation in the workshops on the Quran and the Constitution conducted by members of the BMMA. It traces how discourses on marriage and divorce rights within the framework of Muslim Personal Law interact with the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, especially the right to religious freedom and how transnational ideas of Islamic feminist ethics shape these interactions.

The Encyclopaedia of Late Antique Art and Archaeology seeks to fill a significant gap in historical research by placing art and archaeology at the forefront of late Roman and late antique studies. Recognising the need for a comprehensive and accessible reference, this work moves beyond the traditional focus on ‘early Christian archaeology’ to adopt a broader perspective. It highlights the dynamic interplay of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, challenging outdated notions of a fully Christianised Late Antiquity. Organised into six sections – architecture and iconography, artefacts and material evidence, urbanism and rural landscapes, regional and ethnic diversity, and key issues and debates – the encyclopaedia offers a structured, in-depth exploration of the field. With contributions from leading scholars, it synthesises archaeological discoveries to challenge narratives of decline, instead presenting Late Antiquity as an era of transformation and cultural fusion.

The aim of this chapter is to apply the book’s general organizing principle and method to some of the most significant developments in the English-speaking Protestant world in the last four centuries, including the transition from pietism to evangelicalism, the explosive growth of Protestant missions, the origins of premillennial dispensationalism and its contribution to the rise of American fundamentalism, and finally the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism. None of these developments in the creation of a “Protestant International” can be studied within a single denominational or national tradition, and none can be understood without coming to terms with its nucleus of ideas/theologies, the nodal points of transmission and dissemination, and the transnational networks that facilitated growth.