Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This Introduction to Volume I of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, which covers the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, raises questions about the nature of premodern genocide, about the meaning of genocide and genocidal intent in the premodern era, and about both perpetrators and victim groups, and about the scale, techniques, and ideologies of genocide in that long historical period in comparison to those of genocides committed in modern times. The chapter considers whether or not genocide can be considered a ‘transhistorical phenomenon’. It also asks whether mass violence in the pre-modern and early modern periods occurred in a different moral context than that of modern times, presenting some differing views on this question. Finally the chapter introduces the substantive chapters of the volume, and how they variously examine material, political, sociocultural, and ideological factors that contributed to premodern outbreaks of genocide, as well as noting some changes over time from prehistory to the early modern era.

Chapter 2 argues that the early modern theater’s techniques for the production of narrative suspense emerged from its cultivation of spectators’ phenomenological uncertainty. Attending to moments of temporal suspension in history plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, William Shakespeare’s Richard II, and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, the chapter shows that theater practitioners regularly aimed to resist the unrelenting forward momentum of live performance by grinding dramatic time to a halt. Narrative suspense was especially hard to come by in the history play, which emerged as a new genre in the 1590s by dramatizing well-known chronicles of English kings. But the playgoers who flocked to theaters to see these stories of succession were living through a succession crisis of their own, for Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir rendered England’s dynastic future crucially opaque. The theatrical invitation to unknow England’s past trained spectators in speculative thinking oriented toward their own politically uncertain future. History plays transformed the anxious wait for Elizabeth’s successor, that is, into the pleasure of theatrical possibility.

This volume is a selection of essays taken from the excellent range of papers presented at the British Legal History Conference hosted by the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, 10–13 July 2019. The theme of the conference gives this book its title: ‘comparative legal history’. The topic came easily to the organisers because of their association with the St Andrews-based European Research Council Advanced grant project ‘Civil law, common law, customary law: consonance, divergence and transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries’. But the chosen topic was also connected to the fact that this was, we think, the first British Legal History Conference held at a university without a Law faculty. Bearing in mind the question of how far institutional setting determines approach, our hope was that an element of fruitful comparison would stimulate people to think further about the range of approaches to legal history. With its explicit agenda of breaking down barriers, comparative legal history provided a particularly suitable focus for this investigation. After situating the subject matter of comparative legal history, and then discussing the levels of comparison that may be most fertile, this introduction moves on to considering the practical tasks of researching and writing such history, using the essays included in the volume to suggest ways ahead. The introduction groups the essays under certain headings: ‘Exploring legal transplants’; ‘Investigating broader geographical areas’; ‘Case law, precedent and relationships between legal systems’; and ‘Exploring past comparativists and the challenges of writing comparative legal history’. Yet the essays could be kaleidoscopically rearranged under many headings. We hope that the book, like a successful conference, includes many stimulating conversations.

James VI and I was the first king personally to act as a judge in both Scotland and England. He was also the last king to sit as a judge in either country. Although James did not sit as a judge frequently, he did so on several occasions. James’s ideas about the king as a judge were disseminated in his speeches and printed works. This material has not been used by historians, despite the importance contemporaries attached to some of James’s appearances as a judge. This paper investigates James’s judicial role. It compares both James’s judicial activity in his two realms and James’s ideas of the king as judge to his practice of judging.

The introduction presents the problem of early modern extraterritoriality, followed by the context, argument, and methods used for tackling this problem. Before closing with an outline of the book’s chapters, the introductory chapter defines the project’s three main axes; law, empires, and capital. In particular, it discusses why we need to separately conceptualise law in terms of jurisdiction, why we need another book on early modern European empires, and why we need to include capital from a Marxist perspective in a historical sociology of international law.