The invasion of Mesoamerica – set off by the arrival of Cortés and his followers – was neither peaceful nor simple. These events played out in three phases between February 10, 1519 when the expedition left Cuba and August 13, 1521 when the Mexica tlatoani, Cuauhtemoc, was captured. During the first phase, Moteuczoma and Spaniards sought to learn about each other. Each used diplomacy, Moteuczoma to repel the Spanish, Cortés to gain indigenous allies, to affect events. The second phase of the Spanish-Mexica war began with the Spanish arrival in Tenochtitlan and their imprisonment of Moteuczoma shortly thereafter. That phase ended with Spaniards forced to retreat after their disastrous assault on the Templo Mayor and slaughter of many Mexica leaders. Re-equipping and solidifying his alliances, Cortés and his fighters succeeded in defeating the Mexica in mid-August, 1521. Many kinds of transformations would follow including extensive depopulation and the introduction of new technologies and religious beliefs. Adjustments by Nahuas followed in social and legal affairs as well as in forms of identity. The idea of “Aztec” has tenaciously survived. It exists in contemporary Nahua communities, as an element of national history and culture in Mexico, and as a transnational idea.

This chapter describes the first week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the immediate sanctions and export control measures that followed. While focusing on the U.S. response, it describes key steps taken by the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, and others. The chapter links developments in the ground war to the key economic responses by the forces aligned against Russia. As the extent of the Russian invasion became clear, sanctions were announced and subsequently ratcheted up extremely rapidly. The chapter also highlights the extraordinarily coordinated nature of the sanctions response.

By the end of 2022, the sanctions were voluminous. But the economic and other measures deployed against Russia were not as comprehensive as other sanctions regimes had been. Technically, the sanctions remained targeted. There was no comprehensive trade embargo, for example, against Russia by the United States or the European Union. Regulated parties, however, tended toward overcompliance; companies also ceased to do business with Russia for reputational reasons. These trends meant that the implementation of targeted sanctions often resembled comprehensive ones in practice. But the Russia sanctions were not so sweeping as those imposed upon Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Syria, for instance.

Why are the nine years of destructive invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland unknown to English literary criticism? This chapter shows why we have forgotten this unusually brutal invasive war of 1542–1550 and why it matters to remember it. It introduces the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, through which English kings claimed feudal overlordship of Scotland. It shows how Henry VIII deployed Geoffrey’s history in his Declaration of 1542 to justify invasion, but also how Henry’s rhetoric and strategy disavowed any desire to conquer in the pretence that he was reluctantly forced into reminding the Scots of English overlordship. Such rhetoric, subsequently repeated and reprinted, helped both justify English claims and trivialise the war to the point of oblivion in modern English historiography. The chapter reads a neglected Scottish text by William Lamb which, opposing Henry’s claims by appealing to the law of nations, exposes the precarious fictionality of English claims to overlordship and its lack of credibility in a broader European context.

With an international focus, this chapter analyses Portuguese neutrality in wartime China before the fall of Hong Kong in late 1941, with reference to the British and Japanese imperial presence in the region. It argues that the war in South China saw Macau and its Portuguese administration engaged constantly with these two major imperial powers in a precarious balance marked by continuities in Portugal’s relations with its old ally, the United Kingdom, and a novel proximity to Japan that generated contradictory practices on the ground.

The Vietnamese Le dynasty launched a massive invasion of its neighbor, Champa, in 1471. The invasion, which was the culmination of centuries of back and forth conflict, produced widespread Cham deaths, and the permanent weakening of the southern kingdom. The Vietnamese actions, resulting in at least 40,000 recorded deaths, may well have been genocidal, though the limited historical record is unclear. It does, though, reveal that the Vietnamese used beheading against many of the victims, an action that appears punitive rather than incidental to warfare, and uniquely applied to the Cham. Furthermore, the Vietnamese carried out a project to rename geographical features in the Cham territories, suggesting a degree of cultural erasure while also substantially and permanently reducing the size of the Cham realm. Thus, although the evidence for genocide is ambiguous, it is clear that the Vietnamese actions in the late fifteenth century sought permanently to reduce the influence and threat posed by Champa via an overwhelming show of force.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

As Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s borders in late 2021, few believed that Russia would actually carry out a full-scale invasion. On February 24, 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine along four axes. Contrary to expectations, Ukraine put up a spirited response and Russia’s attack stalled. The West enacted extensive sanctions and provided arms to Ukraine. By the summer of 2022 the war bogged down, with Russia in control of roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. Both sides appeared committed to pursuing success on the battlefield rather than the bargaining table. The war was turning into a contest of logistics, resupply, and endurance.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered any remaining illusions about order in post-Cold War Europe. What caused the conflict? The grounds for conflict were deeply rooted and multiple factors interacted. From the outset, the actors’ goals were incompatible, even if that was obscured by the euphoria that accompanied the fall of communism. All the causes of the conflict remain in place, exacerbated by the war and responses to it. Understanding the deep causes of the conflict forces us to confront the likelihood that simple solutions, like Putin’s passing, are unlikely to solve it.

This chapter argues that the conflict at sea was an important and frequently overlooked part of the Napoleonic Wars. Focusing primarily on the Royal Navy and French maritime forces, but also mentioning the navies of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and United States, it outlines the manifold ways in which maritime warfare shaped wider events on land, and helped determine the conflict’s final outcome. It demonstrates that French attempts to invade Britain were successfully rebuffed by the Royal Navy, ensuring that Britain remained in the conflict. The chapter then offers a more modern take on the commonly misunderstood Battle of Trafalgar, arguing that it was far from decisive and did little to change the course of the war. The naval conflict continued in earnest after 1805, and the war of trade became all-consuming, particularly after the inception of ‘Napoleon’s Continental system’. Here the navy offered a stubborn resistance to the French Emperor’s objectives, helping to encourage illicit trade with the European continent while also expanding Britain’s empire and mercantilist reach elsewhere in the globe. Finally, it demonstrates that maritime support was crucial to the land war, not least Wellington’s Peninsula campaign.

By comparison with the continental powers, Britain had no more than a medium-sized army, but the largest navy in Europe.  This chapter seeks to explore the bases of Britain’s naval strength, going back to the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts, and then to consider how that strength was deployed in the war against Napoleon.  It argues that the Royal Navy, despite the limited impact it might be thought that it could have on land warfare, played an important part in the final defeat of Napoleon.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s argument. Naming Ukraine’s war is controversial. Russia quickly appropriated the term “civil war,” cynically in order to claim noninvolvement. This flies in the face of evidence. The social science literature on civil war violence and barriers to settlements may be analytically useful, however, for understanding why the conflict in Ukraine was so difficult to bring to resolution in the 2015–2022 period. This book explains that Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (the Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decision-makers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate how that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively “Ukrainian” polity.

Chapter 8 concludes our analytic narrative. We describe the politically frozen, yet militarily hot conflict from 2015 until 2022. Russian military intervention in the Battles of Ilovaisk (end of summer 2014) and Debaltseve (February 2015) produced the Minsk Agreement, backed by France, Germany, and eventually the UN Security Council, whereby Russia sought to impose conditions on Ukraine over the status of the disputed Donbas territories and the sequence required for Ukraine to regain control of its borders. Kyiv rejected this interpretation of Minsk, resulting in a diplomatic stalemate. The stabilization of the de facto frontier in the East took on familiar characteristics of a frozen conflict. On its side of the line of control Ukraine became more Ukrainian in terms of national cohesion and language/memory policies. On the other side of the line, the DNR/LNR became more Russian. Consistent with our model predictions, the policy preferences of the Ukrainian West met less resistance. In the final part of the chapter, we describe Putin’s decision to abrogate the Minsk Process and initiate a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s account of the conflict is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix B).