The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.

The conclusion encapsulates the book’s main arguments, discussing the role of Manchuria in modern China, the intricate interplay between technology transfers and national security, and the complex manifestation of power within Mao-era China’s socialist political economy. In doing so, it contextualizes Mao-era China within the broader global narrative of socialism and capitalism.

This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level

By purpose and design The Cambridge History of International Law is situated at the forefront of the drive towards more global perspectives on the history of international law. This chapter accounts for the foundational choices and general architecture of the series. It does so by, first, surveying the broad outline of the evolution of the historiography of international law as an academic discipline since its first emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century in terms of gradually overcoming the many self-imposed epistemological and mental constraints of the traditional state-centric and Eurocentric historiography. Second, the chapter assesses current methodological debates among historians of international law hailing from different disciplines – primarily law and history – within the broader contexts of general legal-history debates. The third section of the chapter indicates how the architecture of the series is purported to advance the agenda of the globalisation of the field, through a focus on the diverse histories of international law in various regions of the world.

The introduction outlines the arrangement of the book, explains the comparative method and the selection of the case studies, and comments on the primary sources.

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.

This chapter sets the scene for a reorientation of thinking about the scope of Byzantium and Byzantine Studies for a new generation of scholarship. It charts the changes in the field since the seminal *East of Byzantium* volume of 1982 and argues for the inclusion of the broader Christian East under the umbrella of Byzantine Studies. To what degree is “East Rome” too limiting a concept for the vibrant fields of Eastern Christian Studies that find themselves often adjacent to Byzantium in modern scholarship? At the same time, real connections and disconnections must be explored across political and imperial lines, and the value of Global History is assessed as a tool for understanding the field holistically. The Byzantine Near East is a burgeoning field that brings many new questions and a host of literary, artistic, and material evidence to bear on what “Byzantium” meant in the early Middle Ages.

This chapter addresses the premodern history of maternal impressions, the enduring belief that the emotions and experiences of a pregnant woman could leave permanent marks on her unborn child. The idea of the reactive womb has been present across multiple cultures, geographies, and centuries; however, it contrasts starkly against the recent view of the womb as boundaried. While we are not suggesting that maternal impression is a direct predecessor of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), with this overview we are reminding of the ubiquitous interest in pregnancy as ’an active project requiring self-discipline and work on the part of expectant mothers’ (1) in multiple medical systems. We focus on Greek, Roman, Latin Mediaeval, Jewish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Ayurvedic sources before and alongside the rise of modern biomedicine and analyse their view of the pregnant female body. We locate our reading in the wider context of a cross-cultural perception of body porosity and the power of environmental factors to shape the physical and moral traits of people. By delving into historical examples and engaging a longue durée perspective, this chapter aims to situate the current postgenomic claims linked with DOHaD findings that ‘soft inheritance has now been reborn’ (2).

The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

This chapter introduces the essay collection Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750 – 1830. It argues that the history of exclusion and forced removal must be put center stage in order to understand the era often described as the cradle of political modernity. The collection argues against a dichotomy between free and unfree mobility, rather regarding them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. It emphasizes both the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the counterforces that kept people in place. It draws together hitherto separated scholarship on the mobilities of enslaved individuals, convicts, soldiers and war prisoners, refugees, and displaced Indigenous communities. The result is a set of entangled histories that together break down assumptions about geographies and chronologies, and interrogate the dynamic interplay between systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.