The “othering” of international humanitarian law has a demonstrated past resulting from the exclusion of so-called “Enemies of the Faith” from the laws of chivalry. It is no surprise, then, that the idea of “sharp war” should seem so natural to some commentators given its historical application “by the discretion of the commander and such rules of justice and humanity as recommend themselves in the particular circumstances of the case”. The application of humanitarian principles, in other words, was the measure of the commander's charity rather than the result of legal compulsion.

The viability of sharp war appears to have increased in attractiveness as conventional State-on-State warfare has seemingly decreased in frequency; however, the question of sharp war has never been approached through a legal historical lens. Utilizing the research found in The Laws of Yesterday's Wars, a multi-author series edited by the present author, this paper seeks to fill this gap by scoping over a range of geographically and temporally disconnected case studies and the customary law developed to mitigate warfare. Ultimately, the paper highlights that “soft war” has naturally evolved in all cultures and that arguments for sharp war are a historical anomaly.

Church construction was one of the most challenging, and most political, tasks undertaken by medieval cities. Comparing examples from across Europe reveals profound differences, however, in both the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture; that is, how building projects were administered and how their administration shaped their socio-political significance. Although ranging across the continent, this article is centered on construction in two representative cities: Vienna and London. While the former had a small number of churches, all under the direct control of the mayor and council, the latter had over a hundred, each overseen by locally appointed officers. In Vienna, church construction was, thus, an important field of activity for the city government, which oversaw the work and celebrated its own leadership of the project; in London, it lay outside civic control and offered local opportunities for domination by wealthy families. This difference can be found across the continent, separating the large, old cities of England, northern France, Spain, and the Low Countries, which could have numerous churches, from smaller towns and cities both in these places and across the rest of central, northern, and southern Europe, which typically had a single, major parish church and only a few subordinate ones. This article considers the implications of these two contrasting models—centralized and decentralized, civic and parochial, high government and local politics—on how architectural production functioned as a field of political activity and how church building shaped local distributions and articulations of power in medieval Europe.

Reproductive health in state socialism is usually viewed as an area in which the broader contexts of women’s lives were disregarded. Focusing on expert efforts to reduce premature births, we show that the social aspects of women’s lives received the most attention. In contrast to typical descriptions emphasising technological medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, we show that expertise in early socialism was concerned with socio-medical causes of prematurity, particularly work and marriage. The interest in physical work in the 1950s evolved towards a focus on psychological factors in the 1960s and on broader socio-economic conditions in the 1970s. Experts highlighted marital happiness as conducive to healthy birth and considered unwed women more prone to prematurity. By the 1980s, social factors had faded from interest in favour of a bio-medicalised view. Our findings are based on a rigorous comparative analysis of medical journals from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

This article reveals the hold that German history and constitutionalism had on Indian federalists in the interwar period. A range of federalists from Indian princely states and British provinces, eager to see India become a federation rather than a unitary state fashioned on the English model, looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons. They saw in German history and constitutionalism a federal solution to the so-called “Indian problem,” wherein the rights of the states would be primary over those of individuals or groups. This German-inspired federal tradition, I argue, departed not only from political pluralism and association-based federalism, but also from the nationalist vision of placing individual rights over state rights. This article presents an alternative genealogy of comparative constitutional thought in India, and examines a post-national worldview that sidestepped the nation-states. By bringing a comparative approach to bear on political and constitutional histories, it escapes the national insularity that often characterizes such histories in colonial India, and places them in the comparative and global context of the interwar circulation of federalist ideas. German-inspired federal ideas of the period offer a counterpoint to corralling futuristic visions of India, and its founding, on the twin axes of anticolonial nationalism and popular sovereignty to the exclusion of state-centric ideas articulated by the princely states.

At the core of this article lies the argument that the Ottoman grand vizierate and the rise of the Köprülü family to power in the seventeenth century should be studied and analyzed mainly within two analytical and comparative frameworks. First, we should situate the office of the grand vizier in a diachronic view of the Islamic vizierate. Second, the Köprülü grand vizierate, in particular, should be viewed as one part of a synchronic ‘Eurasian age of the chief minister,” in a historical domain stretching from early modern Mughal and Safavid worlds to European empires and kingdoms. This article presents preliminary observations that may form a blueprint for future investigations into this global aspect of the grand vizierate and chief ministry. A broad perspective that merges these diachronic and synchronic approaches will allow us to detect theoretical and practical peculiarities of the Ottoman grand vizierate in comparison to its peers in Islamic history and across early modern Eurasia. Using that Eurasian macro perspective, I argue that the Köprülü grand viziers spearheaded the restoration of an independent vizierial authority that was idealized by generations of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman political writers and had numerous precedents in Islamic history.1

This article examines the emergence of global environmental perceptions and policies in the preparatory phase of the UN Conference on the Human Environment 1968–1972, based on an internationally comparative study of sixty-three preparatory country reports. Located at the intersection of global, knowledge, environmental and political history, the article raises two theses. First, that ‘the environment’ emerged as a field of knowledge in not only capitalist industrial societies but globally, thus in socialist and non-industrial societies too. Second, the article demonstrates a large overlap of environmental policies taken across geographical and ideological lines. Thus, the article sheds light on the understanding of environmental problems as well as national and international environmental policy measures around 1970 and thereby contributes to the question of how environmental governance emerged as a global field.

This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well as smaller datasets for other dates and locations. The results of this analysis are surprising. In spite of a high degree of consistency in the notarial profession and terminology (a trait that facilitates our comparisons), the notarial style of each city varied greatly. Variations within a single state were sometimes greater than those across state borders. Both supply and demand of notarial services differed from city to city. Overall, our conclusions are as important as the methodology that we adopt to reach them. Our aim is to offer a replicable analysis that puts quantitative methods in the service not only of the study of a source (notarial records) that is widespread across late medieval and early modern continental Europe and its overseas empires but also of a renewed comparative social history that does not shy away from the heterogeneity of primary sources.

The Black Death is a secure feature of European and west Asian history; in Chinese history, by contrast, the record of mass epidemic outbreaks over the same centuries is not. As a step towards integrating these two zones into a global history of disease, this article establishes a timeline of roughly a thousand major outbreaks in Ming–Qing China during the century 1567–1666. On the basis of these data, comparison is made of how pandemics were received and interpreted in two delimited zones, the Chinese province of North Zhili (now Hebei) and Tudor and Stuart England, with particular attention to differences in their literary incorporation, religious meaning, and political resonance.

While the role of coal has been the subject of long-running debate in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, its part in the economic development of the global periphery has been comparatively neglected. The technological context of the ‘First Globalization’ (c.1870–1914) made pastoral production in the periphery increasingly dependent on modern energy, as new methods of production and transportation bridged the distance between grasslands in the south of the world and kitchens in the north. By comparing choices of meat preservation techniques in Uruguay and New Zealand – two small settler economies that prospered on the back of pastoral exports – this article highlights the usefulness of an energy perspective on agriculture-based transitions to modern economic growth. Different conditions of access to coal shaped how New Zealanders and Uruguayans exploited their livestock herds when terms of trade favoured them the most, with important consequences for the persisting income gap between them.