Chapter 3 explores the production of knowledge about Catholicism by people of African descent and their engagement with Iberian and their religious vernaculars. It is based on a small body of Inquisition records, largely relaciones de causas de fe, and one full proceso de fe, the sacrilege case of Felix Fernando Martínez in 1776. The only chapter that focuses on the Caribbean region, it demonstrates the importance of Catholicism in black material and oral culture, whether that be through embrace, questioning, or overt criticism of the Church, Catholic cosmology, and the saints. The religious knowledge production of defendants from the Caribbean, most of whom were free and described as mulato, does not suggest African intellectual genealogies alone. Rather, people of African descent were part of and constructed a vibrant and heterogeneous religious Caribbean and exchanged knowledge about the supernatural, especially Catholicism, with people of all ethnicities. Such speech, and on occasion acts, nevertheless was potentially dangerous to them in the transcultural Caribbean, evidenced by the violent sentences handed down, ranging from spiritual exercises, to forced labour and execution.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from ship to shore in order to explore metropolitan writing that captured the distinctive urban-littoral spaces of the Victorian port city. Forging connections between the urban ethnography of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, with accounts of ‘sailortown’ and its attendant ‘waterside characters’ in novels by Herman Melville (Redburn: His First Voyage), Charles Dickens (Our Mutual Friend), and James Joyce (Ulysses), this chapter reveals the urban waterfront to be an important edge space that functioned as both a working-class habitat shaped by waterside industry and an imaginative locus for a range of nineteenth-century writers. The analysis demonstrates that despite its physical location on the edge of the city, and its peripheral status within literary history, the watery city was a site for the production of new narratives of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines travel and communication in Late Antiquity, analysing the complexities of movement across the Roman and Byzantine worlds from the third to the eighth century. Rather than viewing this period as one of declining mobility, the chapter argues that travel remained vital, though its dynamics shifted due to political, economic and religious transformations. A major focus is on the infrastructure that supported travel, including roads, bridges, way stations and ports. The cursus publicus, the state-run courier system, is highlighted as a crucial mechanism for imperial communication and administrative efficiency. Trade networks, both maritime and overland, played a fundamental role in sustaining long-distance movement, with Mediterranean seaports, river transport and caravan routes facilitating commercial exchanges. Religious travel, particularly pilgrimage and episcopal councils, became increasingly significant after the rise of Christianity, with the movement of monks, clergy and pilgrims contributing to the spread of religious ideas and artistic traditions. The chapter also addresses migration, discussing the movements of soldiers, officials and entire populations in response to military campaigns, economic opportunities and political upheavals. In this way, this contribution demonstrates that mobility remained central to the late antique world, shaping social, economic and cultural interactions across the empire.

This chapter delves into the production of scientific knowledge and its practice within the expansive temporal and geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire. Organized chronologically into two main sections, the chapter portrays the foundational scientific institutions and conventions while also introducing the textual and material facets of scientific enterprises. Through this focused lens, the chapter traces the enduring and evolving elements of scientific pursuits and their sociopolitical implications from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Perhaps the key area where global history has affected European history has been the study of the trade in commodities and its impact on European consumer behaviour. Yet there remains a divide between study of the production and distribution of goods from coffee and sugar to porcelain and muslins and study of how these goods became desirable, then embedded in European consumption and everyday life. Historians have investigated the profound impact of Asian manufactured goods on the material cultures of Europe, but they know less about their conditions of production and trade in China, India, and Japan. Global history, now combined as it is with the recent rise of the history of capitalism, also challenges European historians of consumer culture and industrialization to connect the European reception of wider world goods and raw materials to the Americas and to slavery. This is a key new direction in historical research. At a time now of historians uncovering Europe’s slavery past, and enquiring further into coerced and low-wage labour systems, we continue to write histories of slavery and slave plantations separately from those of Europe’s consumer cultures of sugar, coffee, and cotton.

This chapter addresses the place of material culture in the global turn in European history. How did extra-European objects come to be part of, and sometimes even define, the materiality of Europe? Goods from outside Europe have gained attention as objects of historical research through several separate pathways: the focus on global goods in the field of economic history on the one hand, and the growing presence of ethnographic objects and anthropological approaches in historical studies on the other. The thinking about material culture in Europe has profoundly changed with the integration of the global turn. From considering European material culture only from within a tightly bordered European perspective, approaches have shifted to not only identifying the ubiquity of non-European goods within European material landscapes but also recognising the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between European and non-European. European material culture is now understood to be full of traces that lead back to empire, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of labour. It includes objects that that were created elsewhere for European consumers, objects that were brought to Europe by collectors and (scientific) explorers, as well as European-made objects consumed and/or recreated in other parts of the world.

This chapter concentrates on church buildings, arguing that while they were one of the most significant products of the Catholic Church’s fundraising in this period, they were also, in themselves, important sites of both highly public and deeply intimate fundraising. Taking a material culture approach, the chapter treats a sample of churches built in the post-Famine era as sources that illuminate important aspects of the financial relationship between people and priests. It first discusses the widespread understanding of the church as the ‘house of God’. It then analyses the phenomenon of sponsorship of material and sacred items in the church interior via memorial inscriptions, as well as the interaction of lay people with shrines and a variety of collecting boxes commonly located inside chapels.

This chapter collates the archaeological evidence presented in Part II. It begins with a reassessment of the evidence put forward to refute the historical plausibility of the United Monarchy, showing that it did not stand the test of time and that in the long run, the challenges raised failed to shake the kingdom’s foundations. The chapter then moves on to integrate the archaeological evidence into a coherent picture of the United Monarchy’s establishment, expansion, and solidification. Finally, it reviews the theoretical underpinning of the discussion, arguing that much of the debate was based on a red herring, leading to an evaluation of the United Monarchy in comparison to well-established empires such as Assyria and Rome, rather than short-lived empires, which is further developed in Chapter 14.

True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.