This chapter explores the role of Antioch as a military base for centuries, from the days of the Seleucid kings to the campaigns against the Persians.

We focus on exogenous and unanticipated shocks, negative or positive, to the supply of any of the four main crucial factors of production: land, labor, physical capital, and human capital. Among the causes of such shocks are plagues, wars, migrations, and new technologies. Supply shocks matter politically because they threaten a sudden change in factors’ relative returns: a loss of labor, absent intervention, raises wages but lowers returns to land and capital; an infusion of human capital lowers skill premia but raises wages and the rents of land and physical capital. Owners of adversely affected factors will attempt to adjust, usually in one of three (increasingly costly) ways: through factor substitution, exit to another sector or region, or adoption of a factor-saving technology. (Hence innovation is usually endogenous but sometimes, by overshooting, can itself occasion a supply shock.) Only where none of these options avail will they resort to the (usually) costliest option of coercion: enslaving labor, seizing land, conscripting capital. What determines how a society adapts, or whether it does so at all, are such objective factors as soil, climate, and proximity to markets.

This chapter tracks the ways in which migration has shaped the South Asian novel. It provides an overview of key writers and novels from South Asia and the "new" diaspora to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in diaspora as a critical category. Diaspora, as a paradigm, often risks anti-historical or de-historicized readings of literary texts and their deep engagements with history. One may often risk attention to form when diaspora becomes the analytic rubric for the study of the vast body of anglophone South Asian literature. The chapter concentrates on novels that circulate among scholars and readers in the United States, United Kingdom, and to some extent Canada, and concludes by gesturing to what gets left out when diaspora becomes the reigning paradigm for understanding the long and deep history of South Asian literature in English.

Chapter 1 deals with the Municipal Council of Luanda and the politics of Portuguese governors in Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, detailing how the Municipal Council of Luanda was involved in illegal wars , treachery and robbery in capturing and enslaving Angolans and shipping them to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. It demonstrates how the Municipal Council of Luanda became the site of political intrigue, jealousy, deceit and mutiny in a political landscape in which the main drive was for economic gain; the enslavement of Angolans was the key part of that package. The methods deployed to capture them – wars, pillage, treachery – formed the basis for Mendonça’s Vatican court case.

Originating from its relatively tiny native speaking population on the narrow East African coastal strip and its adjacent islands, the Swahili language today has spread throughout East and Central Africa to become the most widely spoken African language after Arabic. This chapter explores the various forces – trade, religion, education, wars, and urbanization – that have led to this momentous linguistic expansion over the years. In the process, the language came in contact with a number of other languages – of international traders and invaders like the Arabs and the Portuguese, of settler communities of Indian and Arabic descent, and of a broad range of African ethnic groups inland – that resulted in the emergence of new varieties of the language. In conclusion, the chapter will look at how, through the different spaces and contexts of linguistic contact, Swahili came to impact on other languages of East and Central Africa.

This chapter considers the period of the war cult’s maturation (1960s–80s) as the victory myth came to eclipse alternative modes of patriotic expression. The chapter argues that late-socialist war commemorations, in line with the Soviet people doctrine, continued to dilute particularistic depictions of the Russian nation at war while channeling Russocentrism toward the contained outlets of prerevolutionary and early Soviet history, culture, and modernization narratives. But while authorities forced the most egregious claims about the Russocentric essence of victory underground, these ideas persisted at the margins of late-socialist culture, as well as outside the RSFSR, much as they had after the war. As the war cult grew in prominence, party-affiliated Russophile intellectuals occasionally contested the internationalist orientation of the dominant victory myth. In response, the Party promoted the war victory in a way that maximally overlapped with certain Russophile concerns (patriotism, love of the homeland, respect for tradition, anti-Westernism, etc.) while simultaneously enforcing the victory myth’s ideologically orthodox, pan-Soviet framing.