Hungary was by far the largest constituent part of the Habsburg Monarchy, and a considerable European state in its own right. The relationship between the Habsburg ruler and Hungary’s assertive, noble-dominated estates was characterized by a traditional duality between “crown” and “country” which limited the monarch’s ability to raise taxes and mobilize resources. Maria Theresia (1740–1780) skillfully managed this system, while her radical son, Joseph II (1780–90) openly challenged it. He introduced a blizzard of reforms in pursuit of an efficient and unified Habsburg state. His uncompromising reform drive provoked resistance, verging on open revolt by the end of his reign. This chapter argues that effective resistance to Josephist absolutism originated in a group of disillusioned Hungarian officeholders and that these cannot simply be dismissed as dyed in the wool conservatives. Under the new ruler, Leopold II (1790–2) a compromise was reached: the traditional duality was restored and the bulk of the Josephist reform programme was jettisoned. Nonetheless, three key reforms were incorporated which helped to unify the Hungarian élite and made the country, and ultimately the Habsburg Monarchy, better able to face the challenge of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Several small towns in Hieradoumia received polis-status between the Augustan and Flavian periods. None of these communities seem to have had an especially dense or elaborate urban fabric, and all had a relatively limited roster of civic magistrates. There is little sign that the local civic elite was strongly distinct either in wealth or cultural horizons from the ordinary rural population, and Roman citizenship was not widespread before the constitutio Antoniniana; the largest private landholdings in the region seem to have been in the hands of wealthy non-resident landowners from Sardis, Philadelphia, or further afield. The polis remained a marginal phenomenon in Roman Hieradoumia, where the chief focus of communal life was instead the self-governing village. Villages overlapped strongly with cult-associations, and in a few cases, we have good evidence for segmentary organization of villages by kin-groups. The chapter concludes with a defence of the conception of Roman Hieradoumia as a fundamentally kin-ordered society.

Built infrastructure, housing, land management etc., are historically conjoined to the legacy of Anglo-Irish big houses. These prominent questions also need to be viewed in relation to ecological imperialism. By 1870, as Kelly Sullivan reminds us in this chapter, there were at least 4,000 big-house estates all over Ireland. In later decades many of these estates fell into disrepair or were razed to the ground by financially strapped owners. In addition, the “violent destruction of close to three hundred big houses during the War of Independence and Civil War (1919–23)” and the repurposing of the remaining houses as “schools, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions [such as] hotels, museums, and tourist sites, or as small privately owned farms,” point to their centrality in Irish geographical, political, and cultural landscapes. However, Kelly argues that although “Big House novels … have undergone a reassessment, with scholars no longer reading them as elegies for an extinct way of life, they are yet to be viewed from an environmental perspective.”

This essay examines the vexed history of Trelawney Town, Jamaica, from its grant by treaty in 1738 to Jamaica’s self-emancipated Maroons until its expropriation by the colonial state after the so-called Second Maroon War (1795–6).Maps provide evidence of the different ways Maroons and their colonial enemies understood territory and their relationship to it.As an imperial practice, cartography both determines state-sanctioned boundaries and distributes the ideological beliefs that enforce them.But it sometimes also records evidence of the way Maroons inhabited their territory. Close examination of pencil notations on maps produced to establish the boundaries of Trelawney Town and its environs reveal the refusal of Maroons to acknowledge their territory as a bounded space. With the inevitable encroachment of patented estates, they rebelled to assert their right to inhabit their territory as they saw fit. Through guile and terror, the colonial state prevailed against them, expropriating their territory and transporting the Trelawney Town Maroons to Nova Scotia. Later maps show the parcelling of their territory into 300-acre plots secured by a central military barracks. So prevails the proprietary space of capital: by force.

The judicial landscape in thirteenth century Japan was highly complex with multiple stakeholders in local conflicts. Court nobles, temples, governors, and warrior families all had vested interests in provincial affairs, yet official institutions for conflict management were often lacking or imperfect. The reach of the political centers was limited, and local officers in charge of law enforcement were rarely reliable in mitigating or de-escalating local conflicts. Local communities therefore had to develop their own conflict strategies on a continuum from evasive strategies to violent confrontations with estate owners, warriors, and neighboring communities. With the threat of a Mongol invasion in the second half of the thirteenth century, central powers sought to increase their control over the periphery. This process led to increasing resistance from locals who saw their traditional or recently acquired privileges and autonomy coming under pressure, and many of them resisted through violent means. This chapter argues that local communities developed armed organizations to manage inter-community disputes and as protection against violent, exterior threats, while such organizations were often described by central elites as banditry and predatory violence.