The academics studied are more than ivory-ensconced scholars, they are multiskilled and multi-committed to serving their communities, universities, and professions. One means is by integrating research, teaching, and service activities. Research might spark a new book, class, and workshop offering. Scholars especially take their work to the people, writing articles for practitioners and providing presentations and instructional materials for schools. Some serve the field by being journal reviewers or editors. Editorial positions not only serve the field, they help you grow as a scholar, introducing you to new theories, findings, and statistical approaches and exposing you to instructively good and poor writing samples. Surprisingly, several productive scholars served administrative roles at some career point. Most did because they wanted to make their organizations and people better and more productive. All found ways to remain personally productive through collaborations and assuming more back-seat research-directing roles. Still, productive scholars prioritize research over all else and accept that they might be less good at other things. They say one should not aim to be prolific scholars but the best one can be, whether that produces five hundred or fifty publications. Each publication should represent one’s best thinking and be impactful.

In Roman Egypt, Greek remained the language of rule but the introduction of the Roman legal system and practices resulted in changes within the bureaucracy and an increase in documentation. Declarations were now required for birth, death, taxes, and much else. There were minor changes in the vocabulary of slavery, but in terms of acquisition and use much remained unchanged. There was an active market in slaves who were primarily employed in the home. There is further evidence for slaves in labouring jobs, artisanal roles, in entertainment and sex work. Imperial slaves held some important administrative roles, and slaves might act as business agents in urban settings. Slave labour was little used in agriculture, though the balance between free and unfree changed over time. As earlier, the boundaries between these categories were sometimes blurred. There is evidence, too, for the manumission of slaves. Documents translated in this chapter illustrate the situation.

The history of Egypt during the first centuries of Islam comes with a striking paradox. While Upper Egypt, from Fusṭāṭ to Aswan, has received much attention due to the numerous papyri from the region, the Delta is rarely attested in these documents. This is most probably linked to the region’s humid soil, which contributed to the progressive degradation of papyri. Indeed, other than a few private letters written in Alexandria, no papyri from this period have been found in the Delta. Despite this, the Delta occupied a central place in the imperial construction of Islam, especially during the Umayyad period (40/661–132/750): it linked the new capital, Fusṭāṭ, to the Mediterranean and its main cities, was the prime locus of Arab settlement from the second/eighth centuries and was a choice transit space to Syria-Palestine and Cyrenaica. Based on narratives by Egyptian Muslim writers and papyrological documents mentioning the Delta, we can sketch the history of the administrative and fiscal management of this space, to follow the process of tribal settlement in relationship with imperial policies and to analyse the latter’s consequences on the social situation in the Delta at the end of the Umayyad period and in the early Abbasid period.

Chapter 5 builds the case that, in order to better facilitate the collection of agricultural taxes, the Hieronian state brought about the standardization of volumetric measurement throughout southeastern Sicily during the course of the third century BCE.

The chapter deals with the administration of Alexander’s empire. The main focus is on the satrapal administration. Although Alexander borrowed the system of regional governance from the Achaemenids, he introduced changes to it, adapting it to the new circumstances. Alexander’s actions in the administrative sphere were not aimed at a realization of any abstract ideal. They were taken to satisfy specific needs arising at given points. Nonetheless, it is obvious that all the actions of the king were in pursuit of one main goal: the creation of an effective administrative system for the Imperial lands that would allow him to control and exploit the subjugated peoples better.

Alexander spent at most eight months in Egypt (mid/late October of 332 to late June of 331), but his brief time there has sparked more academic debate than any other similar period in his eleven-year campaign. In order to contextualize such a diversity of scholarly opinion, this chapter will investigate the Greco-Roman literary sources, the contemporary Egyptian language documents, and the archaeological evidence through four key events–Alexander’s arrival in Memphis, his founding of Alexandria, his visit to Siwah, and his return to Memphis and departure.

Chapter 2 surveys the system of courts that emerged around the early Tudor monarchs. Examining ordinances for the organisation of the royal Council from the late medieval period, it reveals earlier precedents for prioritising justice-giving, particularly to poor suitors, within the central administration. Further procedural models are identified in the established central Court of Chancery, its procedure under English bills and its reference to conscience in decision-making, and in the arbitration of disputes by regional magnates. Turning to royal conciliar justice, the chapter outlines the administrative and judicial capacities of the councils in the North and in the Welsh Marches. Finally, it sets out the development of two offshoots of the royal Council by the very end of the fifteenth century: the council or court in the Star Chamber at Westminster and the Court of Requests within the attendant royal household.

The Ilkhanate was a Mongol-ruled state based in Iran and Mesopotamia between the mid-thirteenth century and the mid-fourteenth. Established by Hülegü, grandson of Chinggis Khan, after 1258, it drew on previous decades of Mongol military and administrative intervention in the region. Throughout their eighty years in power, the descendants of Hülegü faced the challenge of governing a society and landscape foreign to Mongol traditional life and heavily scarred from previous waves of Mongol invasion. They met this challenge by employing indigenous administrative elites and adopting local customs. Most notable among these was Islam, which was increasingly becoming the majority religion in the Middle East at the time of the Mongol conquest and which the Ilkhans themselves adopted as part of their ruling ideology. The Mongols’ particular rapprochement with these indigenous practices established important institutions of royal ideology, land tenure, religious practice, and cultural patronage that persisted at Persianate courts in later centuries.

For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.

This chapter examines the organisational structure of the ecumenical synods. First, a new interpretation of their organisation is proposed. Whereas earlier scholars have argued for a (con)federal structure consisting of a leading group in Rome and quasi-independent local branches in the provinces, the sources indicate that the ecumenical synods were much more uniformly organised, with a central headquarters in Rome, local headquarters in certain cities and mobile delegations travelling along the agonistic circuits. Next comes an overview of synod officials and a discussion of the finances of the two associations. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the relationship between the synods and the emperor. Whereas several other scholars believe that the synods were a tool with which the emperor kept the agonistic world under control, it appears that the synods had more agency than was earlier assumed. Finally, this chapter analyses other agonistic associations in the Roman empire and their relationship with the ecumenical synods.

The first half of the second century ad was marked by an important event in the history of the ecumenical synods. They both acquired headquarters in Rome: the thymelic synod seemingly settled in a precinct on the Campus Martius and the xystic synod occupied a part of the great bath complex of Trajan on the Oppian hill. This chapter analyses the reasons for this shift and its consequences. The establishment of the Capitolia in ad 86 played a key role, as well as the desire of the synods to be closer to the imperial court. Furthermore, this chapter argues that the move to Rome strengthened centralising tendencies, as it had become easier to take central decisions for the whole agonistic circuit in close consultation with the emperor. Special attention in this chapter is given to the xystic synod’s headquarters, which is documented in a series of inscriptions found near the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. Recent archaeological excavations on the Oppian hill have furthermore led to the conclusion that the synod was indeed settled in the bath-gymnasium complex of Trajan.

Constitutionalism in the decolonising world was not merely an adoption of a set of norms pre-fabricated in the West. A materialist analysis of the Indian constitution argues for the socio-historical specificity of the post-colonial constituent project. Externally the goal of decolonisation was not just political freedom but also economic sovereignty. Internally an under-developed and unequal society posed a persistent danger of unrest for the new regime. Across much of the post-colonial world the solution was a project of planned state-led development and social transformation. The post-colonial constitution was designed to facilitate and realise this goal. These projects demanded the primacy of sovereignty over property and, hence, the constitution differentiated from metropolitan norms privileging property and constraining state interventions. It was a constitution by and for administrators and planners who were the vanguards of Third Worldism. Sans a popular mobilisation, however, a top down project of transformation through constitution failed. As the fortunes of planning declined and the Third World was ‘liberalised’, lawyers supplanted the administrators as the primary custodians of the post-colonial constitutions. Projects of planned transformation gave way to social rights litigation.

Chapter 7, ‘One of Geometry’s Nicest Applications’, relates the digging of the Deep-George draining tunnel (1771–1800), named after George III, King of Great Britain and Hanover. During the planning phase, surveyors designed this engineering project with a previously unknown level of detail. Jean-André Deluc, Fellow of the Royal Society and reader to Queen Charlotte, visited the Harz mines three times as the operations were under way. Deluc’s geological and meteorological inquiries led him to perform barometric experiments in these mines. He relied on practitioners’ data to test and calibrate his instruments, marvelling about their precision in the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans. Scholars and amateurs – from Goethe to Watt – but also merchants and their wives rushed to visit the project. Year after year, journals reported to the public how the various sections of the tunnel connected seamlessly. In the late eighteenth century, the two worlds of natural scientists and mine engineers were meeting one last time, this time around common issues of precision, data gathering, and instrumentation.

Chapter 5, ‘“So Fair a Subterraneous City”: Mapping the Underground’, focuses on map-making and the visualization of the underground. It argues that these developments were deeply linked to broad changes in the political structure of mining regions. Drawing mining maps and working on them became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, gradually replacing alternative tools such as written reports of visitations, wood models, or annotated sketches. In Saxony, Captain-general Abraham von Schönberg (1640–1711) put his weight and reputation behind the new cartographic technology, hoping that its acceptance would in turn help him advance his reform agenda. At-scale representations were instrumental in justifying new investments, while offering technical road maps to implement them. Johann Berger (1649–1695) spent years producing a monumental cartographic enterprise, the Freiberga subterranea (1693) to support his patron’s ambitions. As surveyors finally realized the old dream of ‘seeing through stones’, the administrations rapidly seized their skills to reform and police their subterraneous cities.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany serve to this day as a “warning from history.” The precise lessons to be drawn from this episode remain controversial. Did the first German republic collapse from a lack of popular support or from institutional weakness? These questions were far from the minds of Republican elites. Arnold Brecht and Hans Staudinger regarded problems of stability as primarily administrative. Territorial reform and the creation of public–private partnerships were their creative attempts creating some much-needed breathing space for the young Republic. These initiatives tell us much about the reasons why elites overestimated the robustness of their own institutions. At the same time this ill-founded confidence was necessary for such administrative experiments. Paradoxically, assuming stability can be important in encouraging elites in new democracies to engage in necessary reforms. The administrative rationale also had a dark side, however. It led to a myopic focus on technical detail while ignoring the larger political context and in particular, underestimating the systemic threat from political extremism.