Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was Britain’s first modern financial crisis. This chapter uses digital tools to study the development, during the early eighteenth century, of a conceptual framework describing bubbles in the financial market. It traces the emergence of the phrase ‘South Sea Bubble’ in the months and years after the crisis, alongside the more complicated patterns of evolution in what that phrase describes, ultimately arguing that there is little resemblance between the ‘South Sea Bubble’ of the 1720s and that of the present-day historical imagination. The chapter’s final claim is that the conceptual framework underpinning how we understand present-day financial crises has its origins in the latency of the words used, at the time, to describe the emerging and interlinked crises of 1720.

This chapter considers the Book of the Laws of the Countries, attributed to Bardaisan of Edessa (d. c. 222), as an exemplar of modes of knowing in early Syriac literature. Despite reports of a wide-ranging corpus, the only work surviving under Bardaisan’s name is this text, which innovatively combines two genres into one. The first half, a dialogue in a Platonic mode transcribed by his student Philip, considers the question of free will. Bardaisan insists that human behaviour is not determined by the stars, an argument which serves his broader commitment to divine goodness in theodicy. The second half is a catalogue, a pseudo-ethnography of peoples to the east of Edessa. The crux of the catalogue comes with a report of King Abgar VIII who ‘believed’, meaning, potentially, converted to Christianity. Regardless of confession, Abgar’s ‘belief’ serves as the culmination of both halves of this work and the ultimate proof against astral determinism. The unique and experimental work shows a foundational Syriac author wrestling with perennial questions and modes of expression at the beginning of late antiquity.

The introduction identifies a generation of men and women of letters whose activities strongly influenced politics in a time of conflict, but who do not fall neatly into the categories of either Renaissance humanist or philosophe. These actors moved on the edges of official diplomacy. Often marginalized, they developed practices of self-promotion and improvisation which helped them become multi-embedded across different societies and political spheres. Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) was one such actor, who used this multi-embeddedness to ease political communication between different powers. His trajectory parallels that of many other imperial agents and literary figures who circulated in and out of the global territories of the Iberian monarchies and especially among other southern European powers.

All constitutions rely on history. Without constitutional history the political affairs of the United Kingdom would be unintelligible. As J. R. Seeley aphorised in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1885: ‘History without Political Science has no fruit; Political Science without History has no root.’

This chapter deals with the issue of the role of philosophy in Mesoamerica and its sources. Offering an expansive account of philosophy, it argues that the sources of philosophy in ancient Mesoamerica include, but are not limited to, textual material. While there is a long textual tradition in Mesoamerica, particularly in Maya and Aztec cultures, we find philosophy in other sources as well, including architecture, art, oral tradition, and performance. The chapter describes the ways philosophy can be found in these numerous sources, and argue for the importance of philosophical interaction with anthropology, art history, and other relevant fields.

Although we will be taking Maitland as our main tour guide, this chapter will explore the various storytellers by introducing the various perspectives. It will begin by distinguishing between what may be referred to as the intellectual history tradition in legal history, which explores the development of legal ideas within legal sources, and the social history tradition, which explores legal changes within their social context. It will demonstrate that both approaches complement one another and that, although Maitland is often regarded as a significant figure in the intellectual history tradition, some of his work can also be situated in the social history tradition. Further, it will be shown that Maitland’s work often demonstrated what may be styled a radical approach to legal history. The chapter will conclude by examining a number of radical perspectives that have been taken to the interaction between law and history, namely critical legal history, feminist legal history, critical race theory and my own call for a subversive legal history. These approaches are presented so that you can critique and apply insights from these perspectives as we re-tell and question the conventional stories of the genesis of the common law.

This short conclusion pulls together the implications of tracing this cohort’s work and thought, through the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, for our understanding of the social and intellectual processes that accompanied legal-constitutional decolonisation. It focuses on the broader and less state-centric picture that emerges, on the importance of a regional framework to arrive at this ‘distributed’ history, and on the merits of microhistorical methods for revising heroic narratives of both national liberation and global solidarity projects. A new intellectual history of anticolonialism could thus make more room for social histories and collective labour.