This is by far the longest chapter in the book. It takes the archaeological picture and returns to the biblical material, as analyzed critically in Chapter 2. Putting names and details to the generalities, it shows how the move to centralized sites fits with the biblical picture of Saul, the expansion of the highland polity into the surrounding areas fits with the biblical picture of David, and the building program plus investment in copper mining fits with that of Solomon. The chapter delves into many specifics such as the evidence from Khirbet Qeiyafa, David’s competition with Ish-Boshet, and the list of Solomon’s officials. It uses both minute archaeological information and specific details from the biblical descriptions to present a thorough reconstruction of the sociopolitical developments of the tenth century, and of the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon.

The evidence from Transjordan reveals a pattern: Most areas in the Transjordan experienced a wave of abandonment at around the middle of the tenth century BCE, whereas some regions flourished. The common denominator of the former is that it includes territories associated with Ammon and Moab, whereas the latter pattern is typical of regions that the Bible describes as Israelite. It appears that as Israel expanded, some groups opposed it and were defeated, suffering the consequences. Other groups, perhaps of similar backgrounds, joined Israel and adopted its identity (e.g., in the Gilead); subsequently, they flourished. Israelite expansion can therefore explain the changing pattern in Transjordan, even if not all the areas that suffered abandonment were actually conquered by Israel. It is likely that Israelite aggression resulted in a wave of abandonment beyond the area of actual Israelite control.

The third of Maré’s gangs, Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), controls an enormous territory, encompassing ten contiguous neighborhoods with an estimated population of 68,000 residents, more than twice that of Maré’s Comando Vermelho-connected gangs. Moreover, TCP’s turf has changed significantly over time as the gang has lost and won territory through violent battles with several rivals, which have had horrifying consequences for both gang members and residents. This chapter also shows how the nature of enforcement against gangs can shift radically as TCP developed highly collaborative relations with the police especially after 2009. The chapter traces these developments in TCP’s historic territories as well as the housing projects that they would control from the mid-1990s until 2002 and again after 2009. This chapter interweaves multiple types of data, including eighteen months participant observation, dozens of interviews with current and former gang members and residents, as well as journalistic accounts and denunciations to an anonymous hotline, to trace how TCP’s shifting security environment has shaped their governance practices over time.

This chapter is a reading of the scouts episode (Numbers 13–14). It begins life within the triumphant annalistic version of the wilderness narrative as a positive reconnaissance mission that preceded the conquest of Canaan in Numbers 21. It became a complaint episode when the wilderness narrative was reemplotted as a tragedy, with key features as defined by Aristotle, including error, reversal, recognition, and pathos, as well as a character (Caleb) who steps into the action in order to offer perspective that might help avoid a pathetic ending. The allegorical mode of the wilderness narrative remains active, as Caleb represents Zerubbabel, the Davidide in whom Haggai and Zechariah placed their hope for a restored temple. The return of an actual king was unlikely under Persian rule, but the tragic version of the wilderness narrative uses kingship discourse in order to frame this vision in terms of land, as the series of independent inheritances in Joshua 18–19 is transformed into a bounded territory dominated by Judah and inflected with Davidic resonances.

In early Islamic Egypt, “Arab-style” Greek (and later Coptic) letters employing religiously neutral monotheistic formularies were sent in the name of Muslim officials to Christian administrators. By analyzing old and new evidence of Egyptian Christians using this epistolary template, this paper argues that in the first decades of Arab rule, probably only a few beneficiaries of the new regime employed the “Arab-style” prescript in their letters written to other Christians to demonstrate their close connection to the new government and thus their social standing. Later, however, the “Arab-style” prescript became commonplace in communication between Christians and Muslims and among Christians only in everyday life. Thus, the religiously neutral template created by the conquerors for official top–down communication became a mechanism for facilitating not only the smooth functioning of administrative structures, but also, in the long run, the social cohesion of Christians and Muslims.

For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.

Chapter 1 presents the debate about republicanism before the French Revolution. Montesquieu played an important part in this debate as he formulated the influential “scale thesis” according to which republicanism could not be adequate for a large country. Montesquieu raised a set of challenges to would-be republicans in France (the “motivation,” “unity,” and “epistemic” challenges). The rest of the chapter presents theoretical resources in different republican traditions (notably Italian, English, American) that informed the French republicans on key issues (conquest, freedom, commerce, institutions). This chapter retraces the context in which the myth of outdated republicanism was born, but also how the elitist and martial dimensions of the republican tradition shaped French republicanism.

Chapter 7 is on the limits of Qajar political authority and imperial rule. The chapter focuses on the case of Khurasan in the early nineteenth century, when the Afshars, under the leadership of Nadir Mirza, a scion of Nadir Shah, repeatedly rebelled against Qajar rule and refused to send taxes and tributes. It explains how the practices discussed in prior chapters were ultimately unsuccessful in extending Qajar authority in Khurasan.

Chapter 2 focuses on the main source of revenue and wealth for Qajar rulers: land. It begins by explaining how the conquest of the Safavid Empire’s former territories was central to Aqa Muhammad Khan’s career, before explaining the continuities in land administration between the Qajars and earlier polities, with particular attention to the Qajar system of assigning land (tuyūl) and collecting taxes (māliyāt). The chapter then provides specific examples of how Qajar rulers handled disputes over land, and the political uses of land assignment.

Chapter 1, a prelude, provides necessary background about the Mughal Empire, and details about its conquest of Gujarat beginning in 1572. Standard histories portray conquest as swift and decisive. The picture I present is somewhat different. Akbar’s annexation of Gujarat was a slow and protracted effort requiring the astute balancing of military force and the pacification and absorption of local political elites into Mughal administration. A successful campaign, as we shall see, absorbed local elites into the Mughal idiom of hierarchy, privileges, duties, and system of wealth distribution. The arranging of tribute payments and indemnities was a core feature of this system. Money over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries became central to Mughal political dispensation. This background chapter concludes by laying out key opportunities Mughal rule provided for the Jhaveri family as they built their influence.

This considers Gibraltar as a special case in the history of Britains developing empire. Captured by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1704, assigned to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the rock was devoid of the resources and potential for agricultural development that might justify the violence entailed in its conquest. This was a problem for an early observer (the poet John Breval, who described the place in Calpe, 1717), but the development of a taste for unimproved and mountainous landscapes, and a more confident sense of British power as civilizing, made it easier for later observers to justify British possession. The great siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783) cemented the rocks status as British: its bare features acquired an iconic status as a symbol of British independence and freedom, a reference point that could be evoked in the context of other imperial conquests.

This chapter describes the emergence of a new kind of sacrificial military hero, rooted in Christian rather than classical precedents. This development appears in the context of wars involving supposedly savage peoples--the Scottish Highlanders encountered in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the indigenous peoples encountered as allies and enemies in North America and Canada. The figure of the devout Colonel Gardiner, killed at the Battle of Prestonpans, and looted by Highlanders, is compared with the brutal figure of the Duke of Cumberland (the victorious hero and butcher of Culloden). And responses to the death of General Braddock, killed in an ambush in the American wilds, and believed to have been left unburied, are compared with responses to the death of General James Wolfe, who died victorious at the Battle of Quebec (and who was sometimes represented as a Christian martyr). The hero-as-martyr was used to justify violence as part of a civilizing and Christianizing project.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

The chapter explores how the production of cosmographical knowledge and acts of self-fashioning interacted in negotiations over royal capitulaciones, which were contracts between the Crown and private individuals that permitted the latter to act on the Crown’s behalf in matters such as exploration. After a brief discussion of prior Spanish efforts to reach Asia, the chapter then concentrates on the legal cases that were argued and decided during the 1530s and early 1540s concerning the right to explore the regions in the Pacific Northwest and who was to be recognized as the discoverer (descubridor) of this part of the world. The analysis presented here shows how the efforts of Hernán Cortés, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and others to prove they deserved to be recognized as discoverers had an impact on the mapping of the Pacific Northwest and left deep marks on the laws of the Indies.

A simple Cobb-Douglas production function illustrates how supply shocks affect relative returns and, thereby, a society’s degree of economic inequality, whether measured as the rental-wage ratio, the share of income going to the top few percentiles of the distribution, or the Gini coefficient. Illustrative examples of positive and negative shocks to the supply of labor, land, physical capital, and human capital are presented and their main causes adduced. Trade also matters. An unanticipated opening or closing of trade routes can effectively change a factor’s supply or the availability of external markets for products that use that factor intensively. Unforeseen innovations in transportation and communication, or the discovery of new trade routes, open new sources and markets; wartime blockades often close them. Both historically have given rise to extreme supply shocks.

Dynastic periodization has traditionally structured the chronological ordering of China’s history. The period from 900 to 1350 encompasses two major dynasties, Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367). Historians in China and elsewhere typically saw the Song as culturally vibrant and militarily weak, and the Yuan as a conquest dynasty that briefly interrupted the narrative flow of Chinese history until the restoration of “native” rule in the following Ming (1368–1644). Twentieth-century national politics recast China’s history along a linear (ancient, medieval, modern) timeline rather than a dynastic cyclical one, placing the Song and Yuan in a medieval-to-modern transition. The high degree of commercialization and monetization of the Song economy led scholars to view the Song as experiencing an economic transformation that fostered dramatic changes in Song society. Recent interest in cultural diversity as well as political concerns with the role of minority peoples – in both the People’s Republic of China and elsewhere – have drawn new attention to the Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin empires that rose on the Song borders, as well as the Mongol conquest and rule of China as the Yuan dynasty. Middle-period China encompasses processes of political unification, social and economic transformations, and profound cultural achievements.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.