This chapter focuses on the urban and rural landscapes of the Balkans in Late Antiquity, covering modern-day Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia . It examines how cities and countryside areas evolved between the third and seventh centuries, with a particular emphasis on the material traces of early Christianity. The chapter draws on archaeological evidence, historical texts and urban planning studies to highlight the transformation of key cities such as Thessaloniki, Nicopolis ad Istrum and Serdica (modern Sofia). This contribution argues that the Balkans served as a cultural and political bridge between Asia and Europe, influencing the spread of Christianity and shaping imperial policies. It also explores how urban centres adapted to economic shifts and military threats, with some cities reinforcing their fortifications while others declined. Thessaloniki, for instance, maintained its urban layout and economic role, even as certain Roman public buildings fell out of use. Religious change also played a crucial role in shaping the Balkan landscape. Christian basilicas replaced pagan temples, while monasteries and bishopric centres became focal points for local governance and cultural life. The chapter further addresses the challenges of dating archaeological sites, emphasising the need for more precise chronological frameworks.

This chapter deals with the history of money in ancient times. We start with ancient Mesopotamia, where fundamental value (silver and barley) was stored in temples. Clay tablets circulated openly, supporting fundamental value and contractual arrangements. Coinage in ancient Greece and Rome was a step forward in terms of ease of use but involved the risk of debasement – reduction of the content of precious metals. We describe debasement of coins from the late Roman empire to the Middle Ages, then move to China, where the first banknotes were printed in the early part of the second millennium. The use of paper in finance spread to Europe, where it became the key technology supporting the rise of banks in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We describe the rise of central banks in Europe, starting from Sweden and ending with Germany and Italy. We draw several lessons from these experiences. The main one is that a successful money is a private–public partnership, where “public administration” and “private interest” combine and complement each other. The chapter ends with the birth of telecommunication in the nineteenth century and its early applications at the beginning of the twentieth century, which gave rise to radical changes in monetary technology in the subsequent period.

This chapter introduces a Schematic Guide to present some of our arguments about the political manipulation of statistics by governments in power. We apply this Guide to examples of manipulation in four countries: two autocratic (Stalin’s Russia and contemporary China) and two democracies (Greece and Argentina). The Guide highlights three possible stages in the process of statistical manipulation, each stage involving different acts of manipulation. Stage One: a government minister puts pressure on official statisticians to manipulate official statistics; Stage Two: the statisticians comply and produce biased, misleading numbers and/or biased misleading descriptions of the numbers; Stage Three: the government seeks to manipulate the public by using the manipulated statistics to persuade them of the government’s successes. The four examples show that in practice the manipulation does not happen necessarily in a neat sequence. Each of the examples has its own unique features. The persecution of statisticians is a feature of three of the examples, including the two democratic examples. The example of China raises the possibility that statistics can be manipulated by the data that is not collected and published, just as much by the data that is collected and published.

The warfare of the Greek city states was limited by their means, lacking military academies, professional officers and standing forces. Small communities fought local wars with levies of citizens, often highly motivated, but precious to the polity, which could not be kept in the field for long. Fruits of victory were modest, and defeat could put the survival of the whole state at risk. Fortification as a passive defensive policy was essential. In offensive warfare, states and coalitions mostly pursued a strategy of opportunism, in which the desirable was subordinated to the attainable. Commanders typically tried to avoid decisive engagements due to the risks involved; they focused their attacks on exposed targets like farmland, small towns, isolated garrisons and unprepared enemy troops. They relied heavily on local dissenters and deserters to guide and facilitate operations. When wealthier states like Corinth, Athens and Syracuse found themselves able to invest in warfare, we clearly see their dissatisfaction with this strategic straitjacket. The rapid development of fleets, extensive fortification networks, standing corps of specialist troops and siege technology allowed these states to dominate their less fortunate neighbours. This gives the lie to old notions that the Greeks preferred their wars to be limited in scope. A state that had much more than the others could disrupt the entire system, as Macedon would eventually show.

Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, despite coming to power in similar circumstances, approached their rule in very different ways. In particular, it suggests that along with a contrast of style, in Keegan’s terms Alexander being a ‘heroic’ leader, his father an ‘unheroic’, one their approach and, as a consequence, the aims and practice of their strategies were quite different. While it could be argued that Philip’s was simply one of survival exacerbated by ever more ‘mission creep’ towards the south of Greece, here it is suggested that instead Philip had from very early on a firm proactive vision of ruling all Greece and used an integrated strategy of diplomacy, financial subversion, and military force to achieve that end and on its success established a firm method of retaining his rule. In contrast, Alexander, while tactically brilliant, unlike his father was a reactive rather than a proactive strategist and his campaigns are best seen as a series of micro-strategies responding to specific circumstances as opposed to an overarching vision. This approach explains the lack of a firm political strand to his strategy and the subsequent collapse of his empire on his death.

The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.