No ancient church of Antioch survives: the cruciform church of Kaoussié, Machouka, Seleucia’s martyrion, and a medieval church in Daphne are the scanty examples of a tradition of rich ecclesiastical architecture that punctuated Antioch’s cityscape. This chapter offers a comprehensive catalogue of ecclesiastical buildings known through the textual sources and piecemeal archaeological evidence.

Antioch is the first place where Christians congregated. This chapter will explore the establishment of Antioch’s Christian community, as well as its leadership and connections with other churches.

William Fitzstephen wrote a vivid description of London in the 1170s, as the prologue to his biography of Thomas Becket. He describes the churches, the schools and above all the life of the people in the city, such as their festivities and sports, including skating.

The concluding chapter of the book summarises the main findings of the present study and puts these in the conceptual and historiographical framework of the introduction of the book. This chapter reconnects to the central question of the present study and shows how and why the developments in the transatlantic management of economic and monetary affairs created decisive political momentum for bold Franco-German (supranational) initiatives in European integration, but also which transatlantic and European ideational and emotional undercurrents co-steered this development. Furthermore, this chapter highlights the increasingly central role of Western Germany in this history.

This chapter is the second building bloc of a wider reconstruction of the main economic, (geo)political, and ideational forces that enabled European integration to take off as of the spring of 1950. It describes the practical unfolding of European integration after the Second World War. This part of the book tries to uncover deeper layers (of psychology and belief) in this history through three crucial sub-histories. This chapter deals with the second of these sub-histories. It traces how the coming about and the workings of the Marshall Plan gradually illuminated an institutional, economic, and political pathway for integration in Western Europe. This second sub-history shows how the gradual (self-)outmanoeuvring of the United Kingdom in matters of European cooperation happened to that country and the West, and how this worked as a catalyst for regional European integration and ‘the emergence of a continental West’.

Jesus was a Jewish preacher and, for some Jews, a Messiah. His first followers lived in Jewish contexts. Only gradually did the differences between Christians and the followers of other religions become visible. Thus, there was a parting of the ways between Christians and Jews, but it was never complete. Jews and Christians always observed and influenced each other. Christians also set themselves apart from the many groups they called pagans. Although they believed in the existence of the gods, they considered them to be demons. They also developed their own rituals and created places where they met, so that Christianity became increasingly recognisable as a religion in its own right.

Chapter 17 ends with an exploration of the generalisability of this book’s findings, their limitations and potential for new research. It also returns to a fundamental challenge that right-wing populists’ religiously laden identity politics poses for Western societies. Namely, that instead of being just the latest iteration of religious opposition to secularisation, these developments point to a question of post-religious politics itself: what can still unite us in a society in which sources of social connectedness such as class, shared understandings of history, national culture and religion have lost most of their universal appeal and in which parts of the population are left in a profound crisis of identity? Who are ‘we’? Who is the ‘other’? As these questions drive a split between cosmopolitans and communitarians, right-wing populists have recognised a gap of representation and offered their own remedy: an ethno-cultural identity politics based on sweeping ideas of Western civilisation, in the context of which Christianity has become a secularised idea of ‘Christendom’ dissociated from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Yet, faith leaders and mainstream parties also still have a tremendous influence over which role religion will play in liberal democracies. While the godless crusade may be well under way, its destination and success are yet to be determined.

Based on the theoretical foundations established in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 presents the book’s overall argument. In response to the research questions formulated in the Introduction it makes four key claims. First, that far from being the result of reignited religious culture wars, the surge of right-wing populism in the West has been driven by the emergence of a new identity cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians. Second, that to capitalise on this new divide, right-wing populists employ references to Christianity in the context of a new brand of white identity politics as a secularised cultural identity marker, but often remain distanced from Christian values, beliefs and institutions. Third, that this strategy tends to be most successful amongst irreligious voters or non-practising ‘cultural Christians’ whereas practising Christians often remain comparatively ‘immune’ to right-wing populist appeals. And fourth, that the existence and strength of this ‘religious immunity’ against the populist right critically depends on the availability of a ‘Christian alternative’ in the political landscape and on churches’ and faith leaders’ willingness and ability to create a social taboo around the populist right. These four claims constitute the theoretical cornerstones of this book’s overall argument and serve as an underlying structure for each empirical case study.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

The formulas show us property transactions among laypeople that are fundamentally similar to those between laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions that we see in the extant charters. Laypeople sold or gave property to each other, or exchanged it with each other, and they used documents to do it. However, the formulas broaden our view of the sorts of transactions laypeople engaged in and who engaged in them. For example, different kinds of property changed hands: not simply arable but also vineyards, plots of land within cities, and even townhouses. People used property as security for loans. Laypeople also arranged to hold property as benefices, or as so-called precarial grants, not only from churches/monasteries or kings but also from each other. One person used a benefice arrangement with a king to pass property to a chosen heir, in much the same way as others did with monasteries. The evidence in the formulas for these sorts of arrangements suggests that the property arrangements between lay families and ecclesiastical institutions or kings that dominate the charter record reflect only part of a larger culture, in which a variety of people in the Carolingian world used property to create and maintain ties with each other.

This chapter explores how one particular group of people defined as disabled, Deaf people, experienced and articulated that identity. Whilst deaf people were labelled ‘foreigners in their native land’, in this chapter I argue that deaf people came to inhabit distinct cultural identities, positively identifying with what they called the ‘deaf World’, or sometimes the ‘deaf nation’. Working from the twenty-first century backwards, there is good reason to focus on deafness as a particular case study here: contemporary theorists have argued that deaf identity is so strong that it operates as a form of ‘ethnicity’. Whilst, as I discuss, there continues to be disagreement about the utility of framing deaf people as an ethnic group, I use the idea of deafness as an ethnicity as a starting point to think about deaf community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I explore what deaf belonging means for the intersection of identities based around nationhood with those constructed around disability. The Chapter therefore explores, deaf communities in Britain (through the deaf press, deaf intermarriage etc), deaf plans for a separatist deaf state or colony, and deaf internationalism.

The chapter considers how the Polish Government in Exile sought to exert influence on various civil society organisations in order to advance understanding of the situation of Poland under occupation and to encourage such organisations to support calls for retaliation and post-war justice. It examines the Polish engagement with women’s organisations, the Churches, the broad Left, and legal/political organisations. It is argued that the Polish Government in Exile attempted to shape the wider discursive environment in a manner favouring Polish policy but faced a number of challenges, including the counter-discourses promoted by different actors.

This chapter sets the social and ecclesiastical scene. It introduces the place of ecclesiastical law in the law of England. It explores the changing place of the Church of England in the life of the nation from the early nineteenth century, the role of the universities in educating future clergy and the significant place of the bishops in political as well as pastoral and spiritual leadership. It describes the need for more churches as the Industrial Revolution took a growing proportion of the population from the country into the towns. It introduces the challenge of the Dissenters with their rival chapels and the complexities of applying ecclesiastical law when there were controversies.

Chapter 4 examines the legal, economic, and political life of the Free Womb law in the Colombian Pacific and the making of new racialized labor structures. For the first time, enslaved women were granted limited legal rights of maternity and motherhood over their children—at least those born after the promulgation of the 1821 law, which was at times malleably interpreted by lowland masters to defend their claims over Free Womb children. By carefully examining notes of sale, mining inventories, dowries, and wills, this chapter charts the formation in the northern Pacific lowlands of a parallel market for Free Womb children, which instantiated a new and at-times confusing regime of property rights. Reversals of the 1821 law are the subject of the chapter’s last section, which looks at extension of Free Womb bondage, partly inspired by the British Caribbean apprenticeship model established under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, in the aftermath of Colombia’s first civil war (1839–1842).

Chapter 5 explores emerging diasporic communities and their relationships to host societies. Through studies conducted by the sociologist Paul Siu and the historian Wang Gungwu, this chapter explores the ways in which Chinese scholars and writers explored these relationships. The chapter shows that one factor making explorations of these relationships so urgent was the obstacles that Chinese migrants faced in host societies, such as restrictions on immigration and other forms of anti-Chinese legislation. The chapter demonstrates that urgency also stemmed from disruptions to existing diasporic trajectories due to revolution in China and the onset of the Cold War. This chapter then introduces another example of an evolving diasporic community, Los Angeles, focusing in particular on a husband and wife who played prominent roles in shaping the city’s new Chinatown and in asserting the rights of Chinese Americans. The chapter then turns to “return” migration and “secondary” migration in the mid-twentieth century, as ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere faced anti-Chinese violence and legislation.