In the Lushai Hills, colonialism provided the infrastructure for the circulation of violence and disease that helped drive upland populations towards its own institutions. An overlooked age of warfare underwrote the destitution, poverty, dislocation, and sickness that invading colonial agents misrecognized as primitivism but that was, in fact, the results of their own cataclysmic disturbances. A focus on profound violence and disruption - rather than the celebration of continuity, cross-cultural interaction, and cultural resilience that often characterizes Indigenous-centred studies of colonial encounter - demonstrates that highlanders had to adapt and reinvent themselves within a particular colonial situation and its imposed constraints: brutality, heartache, disease, forced labour, sexual violence, hunger, and loss. At the same time, Mizos developed creative responses to, and confidently articulated critiques of, their invaders - forces that often found themselves dependent on upland know-how, hospitality, and labour. Far from passive victims, Mizos resisted colonialism and sought out ways to moderate its most profound effects. They adopted new trade goods not only to make their lives easier but also (as with the adoption of colourful synthetic materials for headdresses and jewellery) to make everyday life more beautiful amid the bleakness of fear, dispossession, and conflict.

The Murder Act of 1752 required that criminals who were not dissected to be hung in chains on a gibbet. Yet just as many non-killers were hung in chains during the years 1752–1801 as in 1700–52. And. by the time use of the gibbet was confined strictly to murder, its use against any crime whatsoever had fallen into disfavour. That process was well under way in London no later than 1700 and was apparent in many other places soon after 1750. Urbane people frequently demanded that gibbets be removed to places more remote from respectable residences, and further back from roadsides to avoid offending travellers’ sensibilities. By the nineteenth century, the erection of a gibbet seemed more often an occasion for carnival than a plausible deterrent to crime. Until its abolition in 1834, however, England’s traditional elites clung to the option of the gibbet almost as determinedly as they did to execution for crimes against property.

This chapter examines when goods become owned. It starts with the traditional Demsetz model and then considers cases of nonlinear transaction costs.

Chapter 2 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the crucial role of cities in building empires, defined as states that conquer and rule multiple cities and their hinterlands. It also argues that empires decisively influenced the size and shape of cities. While it acknowledges that camp- and village-dwelling peoples could conquer large empires, it argues that imperial regimes always required capital cities to administer empires over long periods. It illustrates these arguments with references to cities throughout the world: imperial capitals, administrative and monumental structures of many kinds, city walls, provincial capitals, armies and army camps, roads, canals, settler cities, and the infrastructure of imperial borders, including the Great Wall of China and the limes of the Roman Empire.

This chapter examines the layout of the city, its neighborhoods, its interior and exterior, and its relationship to the natural environment that framed and constrained its growth. The chapter also provides an overview of the layout of the Asakura palace, the key neighborhoods, the doctor's residence, and the active neighborhoods found outside the city gates that help us to understand the larger hybrid function of the city.

Examining the vibrant commercial sector of the economy as well as the busy transportation network that supported it, the third chapter demonstrates how canoes and pack animals enabled artisans and traders to reach local and distant markets. The transportation infrastructure also contributed to the ongoing vitality of exchanges in markets as well as the survival of specialist craft industries and commercial networks that connected Xochimilco to the wider global economy. Crucial to the provisioning of Mexico City, canoes and the dock facilities became key resources in the political economy of central Mexico even as haciendas increasingly replaced Nahua communities as the main source of Mexico City’s food supply by the early eighteenth century. Competition and conflicts developed among different interest groups, among them merchants, colonial officials, ecclesiastics, and Nahua communities, and the rowers of canoes emerged as key figures in the transportation system who could bargain and negotiate from a position of strength.

The third chapter examines the sharp rise of security concerns in the late nineteenth century and the changing role of roads: from conduits of trade to instruments of imperial security. In particular, it focuses on the two central examples of road building in the northwestern Himalaya: the Hindustan-Tibet Road and the Leh-Yarkand Treaty Road. Roads, I show, were conduits that became synonymous with communication. By examining the vast and detailed journals kept by the British Joint Commissioners stationed in Ladakh, beginning in 1870, I reveal how commercial potential beyond the frontier eventually led to the paradoxical desire to “close” the frontier in order to better secure it. As the commissioners were responsible for supervising the Indo-Yarkand and Indo-Tibetan trade routes, their primary tasks were to regulate the movement of people on these routes and to ensure the roads were in good working order. But they were also concerned with gathering intelligence from Central Asia and Tibet. Here we see the interplay of technology, commercial expansion, and security and the limits placed on each by the Himalayan environment. Road building, I show, became a central piece of the larger complex of border making.

This introduction explores the widespread moralizing rhetoric that constitutes – both underlies and articulates – literary representations of problematic forms of Roman transit, first surveying portraits of the outrage voiced by disapproving observers when confronted with luxurious or ostentatious transportation, and then homing in on a special, written variety of this broader discursive phenomenon: the set-piece account of the staged confrontation between opposing embodiments of transportational ethics. The next section unravels the rhetoric of depictions of Romans whose involvement in their mode of transport is conspicuously physical, and examines the unequal distribution of praise and blame on travelers for such behavior. This is followed by a discussion of the underlying tendency of such portrayals to employ them as a means of promoting a higher, ethical ideal that transcends such bodily concerns: the rhetoric of Roman transportation uses such representations as a way to reach another end. An analysis of depictions of Roman traffic follows next. Finally, the introduction is concluded by a catalogue of the full fleet of attested Roman vehicles.

Chapter Six considers the importance of the map for Fantasy with particular reference to J. R. R. Tolkien as the creator of that genre. Tolkien’s cartographic imagination in the process of creative composition is unique so that the chapter is largely devoted to a full exploration of this. The chapter works across Tolkien’s compositional process, tracing his need to map in order to write. The final section of the chapter draws attention to a post-authorial context for literary mapping, reflecting the larger cultural power and influence of Tolkien’s maps. (89)

Having assembled a sizeable dataset in Part II, we now move forward in Part III to its analysis, synthesis, and conceptualisation. Multi-faceted problems invite cross-disciplinary approaches, and Part III engages in methodological and theoretical pluralism as it seeks ways to bring anthropology and history into a closer communion. At various junctures in this volume I have emphasised the importance of looking at the Classic Maya less as a series of separate polities than as a unified political culture. We have reached the point where that assertion needs to be more fully explored and its implications fleshed out.

Generating, collating and using scientific evidence is key to effective conservation. We illustrate this with examples from medicine and conservation, and in more depth with an example from our own studies, in which we assess the methods (overpasses and underpasses) used to reduce habitat fragmentation and mortality of bats caused by roads. Evidence is defined as the results of quantitative tests of interventions that directly address conservation effectiveness against clearly stated goals. The results show that methods used in the past were rarely tested quantitatively and when tested were rarely effective. We discuss why it can be difficult to get scientific evidence accepted and used routinely in conservation policy and practice. Finally, we discuss how evidence gathering and use can be improved in mitigation projects.