This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

This chapter examines Lucian’s manipulation of images of geographical authority in his True Histories, with particular reference to his representation of human and other bodies immersed in their environments. It look first at the tension between detached geographical observation and images of bodily immersion or entanglement with particular landscapes both in imperial Greek literature more broadly, and also in Lucian’s work, where that theme has a particular prominence. That point is illustrated first through discussion of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, which returns repeatedly to images that challenge the idea of a clear dividing line between bodies and their environments, and also between observer and participant status. The second half of the chapter then traces the contrast between detached observation and corporeal immersion through the True Histories, especially in the scenes in the stomach of the whale, from 1.30–2.20, arguing that Lucian in this text undercuts notions of detached geographical authority in ways that are closely related to his comical undermining of various other kinds of intellectual and social pretension in his other works.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

Swift wrote the most widely reprinted and profound fictional travel account in all literature. This chapter suggests that Swift’s Anglo-Irish status, and repeated travel between England and Ireland, shaped his perspective on travel. The first section of the chapter focuses on Swift’s own travels across the Irish Sea and on Irish roads. The second section looks into the Grand Tour and Swift’s reading of travel narratives. The third section shows how Swift’s reading of first-hand travelogues shaped the larger structure of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift is typical of his period in regarding travel writing as equally enlightening and suspect. He is atypical in being uncertain about his own place in the world, both geographically and professionally. However, it is that very uncertainty that grants Swift the ironic distance necessary to transform the popular form of the travel narrative into a timeless commentary on the human condition.

The chapter explores Lowell’s awareness of Boston’s complex class-marked topography. The Beacon Hill has become only a shorthand term for an anachronistically elite neighborhood, and we have become oblivious to the significance of its specific addresses. The Hill, however, was always intricately zoned and stratified, riven with class and ethnic conflict. Lowell’s story of his family moving from house to house within the Beacon Hill and then further and further east down the Back Bay is a dramatic story of social decline. The chapter also looks, in Lowell’s poetry and prose, for traces of the analogous class conflict over the downtown Boston’s public green spaces. The Lowells found themselves first “on the wrong side” of the Beacon Hill, then in the less prestigious section of the Back Bay impinged upon by the lesser castes. They enjoyed their leisure in the manicured Public Garden whose serenity was threatened by the messy, plebeian, enclosure-resisting Common.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.

This chapter deals with the main issues bearing upon Clitarchus and his work, moving beyond the usual division between Testimonia and Fragmenta and giving attention to the context and the agenda of each writer that mentioned him. Attention is given to his popularity as an Alexander historian and as a fine writer, as well as to the real significance of the narrative material attributed to him. This evidence can be combined with his few known biographical details in the evaluation of his chronology, which remains uncertain. The last two sections, dealing with his chronology and with the presentation of Alexander in his work, end with a question mark and invite the reader’s own reflections.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the historical, political, and economic context of Mozambique. We draw attention to the big picture story and argue that the post-independence socio-economic performance and patterns of change cannot be understood without reference to the troubled history of the country. We identify fourteen core messages to keep in mind throughout the volume. They lead to selecting eight thematic areas for further study in Chapters 4 to 11.

Through a careful examination of all aspects of the experience of hearing or reading a declamation, this chapter explores how in practice the audience could move from the declamatory past to the extra-declamatory present. The framing of declamations, whether by prefaces (prolalia, protheoria) or in Philostratus’ Vitae sophistarum, blurred the line between text and context. The location of a performance was also often suggestive: declamations were texts to a significant degree experienced by audiences in the same physical spaces that its fictions traversed. A declaimer’s language was another way in which the fiction remained tethered in reality: declaimers had distinct personal styles and often partook in the ‘Asian’ style so different from that of their historical subjects. Finally, by means of their body language and by means of a running ‘metarhetorical’ commentary declaimers frequently ‘dropped the mask’ in the course of their performances. In short, this was a genre that far from shutting out the world beyond its fiction, repeatedly included it in the performance.