Sea power, classically defined as a strategy to control communications, was an essential asset for the creation of European maritime empires, enabling them to secure seaborne trade, open new markets, and acquire territory. It has often been conflated with seapower, a concept developed by the ancient Athenians to distinguish states like their own, whose economy, culture, and identity were enmeshed in the maritime sphere, from continental military powers like Sparta and Persia. In this period Britain, the only seapower Great Power, created an extensive maritime empire outside Europe, one combining colonies of settlement, like Australia, with those of occupation, and informal imperialism based on economic power. While many Continental European powers created maritime empires after 1815, they did so in the knowledge that their possessions would be exposed to British naval power in the event of war, and tended to focus on land and security rather than commerce.

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.

Chapter 6 shifts its attention to the southern extremities of the lake and illustrates historical connections tying the lake together from another thematical angle: commercial flows. It examines the broader regional trade networks around Lake Kivu, emphasizing the interconnectedness of Goma and Bukavu in Congo with Gisenyi and Cyangugu in Rwanda. It introduces the concept of a “transboundary space,” shaped not only by colonial border impositions but also by preexisting social, political, and ecological asymmetries. The asymmetries created an “arbitrage economy,” enabling Africans, particularly those close to the border, to exploit differences across regions.

The chapter further considers cattle trade between the center of Rwanda and the westerns shores of Lake Kivu. This cattle trade connected different cultural and ecological zones, fostering commercial interactions long before colonial intervention. The chapter argues that the border accentuated existing disparities, emphasizing differences in the distribution and societal meanings of cattle. Despite colonial attempts to regulate the cattle trade, African traders managed to capitalize on their “liminality” – the ability to inhabit different spheres simultaneously. The chapter further underscores the significance of this “liminality” as it facilitated the negotiation of oppressive colonial structures. At times this “liminality” was embedded in formalized bonds of friendship, sometimes formalized through bloodpacts. Highlighting the everyday impact of borders demonstrates how they could be used to circumvent colonial policies, even though they could never undo the consequences of colonialism.

International law is a system of rules, institutions and practices that govern the relations of States with one another. It is designed to distribute resources and solve problems that States identify as relevant for creating order in the world. In a world without a centralised government States use international law and its institutions to generate solutions for emerging and complex issues and problems, such as climate change and terrorism. The effectiveness of international law is often called into question when it fails to stop certain kinds of activities that appear abhorrent to most people from around the world. However, it also manages to resolve and address issues and challenges that would otherwise get ignored without international cooperation. A lot of international law is designed to meaningfully contribute to establishing order. States also use it to legitimise disruptions to global relations.

This chapter reposits the dominant narrative of the United States to shift away from a monolithic identification whereby American means English speaking and Christian, to one that embraces plurality and difference in its origins, and specifically includes the Sephardim as a group that was part of this foundational effort. The Sephardic Diaspora in New England was connected through trade to the early modern Atlantic world (1640–1830). Within the boundaries of the present-day United States, Charleston, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were key nodes in these commercial and slave networks. These merchants who fled from religious persecution in the Iberian Peninsula and sought religious freedoms in New England, also became slave traders who made huge profits on trafficking the freedom of others. Although often espousing endogamous ideals for unions, the lived reality of those members of the Sephardic Diaspora demonstrates how race became a contested site of identity for practitioners of the Jewish faith living in widely disparate places.

On their first arrival in North America, Europeans entered a strange land but, most of all, an unfamiliar Indigenous economy. While capitalism functioned on a disembodied trade of goods or an abstract exchange of currency, Native societies honored the idea of the gift. On this belief in a gift economy, Indigenous people nurtured trade relations, but also diplomacy, war alliances, marriage, friendship, and peoplehood and ecology themselves. This chapter elucidates the idea and operation of an Indigenous gift economy, as it served and serves Native nations, and explores the gift’s impact on and disruption of European and American capitalist market economies. From this alternative Indigenous economic approach, as presented in anthropology as well as in traditional Indigenous thought, we turn to several representative works in American literature, from ancient myth and early testimony to autobiography, novel, and poetry, to illustrate the place of Indigenous ceremony, such as the giveaway and the potlatch, in its resistance to destructive colonial policy such as removal and allotment. Ultimately, Indigenous gift exchange economies give voice to America’s haunted money, from wampum to bucks, in which Native land was never “the gift outright.”

The ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’, launched in 1968, introduced a distinctly political perspective in campaigns for fair trade, exposing the unequal structures of global trade around the disparities in the global sugar trade. The campaign was ignited by the stalling negotiations of the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development in 1964 and 1968. It thus directly responded to the impact of decolonization in international politics. Through transferring these issues to local activism, it related such international development to the everyday lives of people in Western Europe. The chapter charts the emergence of attempts to address global inequality through interventions in national, European, and international politics. It then shows how European integration in particular prompted activists to set up transnational campaigns, but also severely hampered attempts at campaigning because of the difficulty of transnational communication as well as a lack of experience in addressing transnational institutions.

The Ottomans had a variety of ways of dealing with non-Muslim foreigners. In theory, Islamic law assumed a constant state of war between Muslim and non-Muslim rulers, but in practice, long-term peace arrangements were possible and even common. In terms of diplomacy, the Ottomans’ instruments and peacemaking procedures were similar to those of the West, the Turks likewise building on established customs and practices from the Byzantine period and beyond. The ahdnames were particularly important for international relations; originally unilateral documents, they evolved into more reciprocal instruments, only to become more unilateral again in the second half of the seventeenth century. In theory, peace with unbelievers should be temporary, but in practice, the duration of treaties concluded by the Ottomans reflected their assessment of the likelihood of hostilities resuming; in the case of countries that did not pose any military threat to the sultan’s domains, peace could even be concluded indefinitely. As long as both sides maintained the friendship between the two parties, there was no need to fear the Turks. The interconnected phenomena of slavery and privateering regularly put a strain on this friendship, as men, women and children on both sides were dragged off and sold as chattel. This loss of life and property sometimes led to international incidents, in which the Ottoman authorities made it clear that the basic Islamic parameters of peace could not be ignored with impunity.

In this period, states strove for more control over their international trade routes. However, this was a matter of ideology and planning rather than a reality. Trades were still mainly supervised by chartered companies. States increasingly aimed to restrict exports of their colonial goods to other countries. However, their ‘mercantilist’ approaches did not yield the results that were expected. In attempts to reduce smuggling, private trade became acknowledged more. An aim of consolidating and perfecting colonial trade had more impact in Asia than in the Caribbean. There, geopolitical contexts as well as features of crops precluded strict control. Compared to the previous period, international trade law consisted mostly of treaty law. Some clauses, such as the most-favoured-nation clause, could be opted for in many treaties. Legal borrowing happened, for example, with regard to governance structures in colonial territories, but there was no harmonised law of international trade. Domestic legislation was combined with treaties. Ius gentium doctrine mainly focused on a right of trade. In the later eighteenth century, views of this type were combined with ideas of self-reliance of the economy. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, financial markets had become a factor that policy-makers had to take into account. Because of the growing intertwining of state finance, colonial trade and speculation at stock markets, the risk of bubbles rose.

Between 1660 and 1775 the number of European countries with diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that obtained ahdames of their own grew rapidly, but many of these newcomers did not establish networks of consulates and vice-consulates in the eastern Mediterranean. Instead, they appointed the consuls of other European nations as their vice-consuls. This did not hurt the legal privileges of the merchants from these countries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some nations asked the Ottoman government to renew their capitulations several times with the single aim of obtaining more privileges. This development culminated in the French capitulations of 1740, which incorporated the clauses of virtually all earlier ahdnames. In the eyes of many Ottomans, the capitulations of 1740 came to symbolise the Europeans’ ceaseless attempts to obtain more and more privileges from the Turks. But the French renewal of their capitulations in 1673 already laid the foundations for the rise of imperialism. It was then that the Ottoman authorities granted Ottoman subjects working for foreigners as interpreters or as warehousemen the same fiscal and legal status as the Westerners. It was also in 1673 that the French had their role as protectors of the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, as well as of all Catholic clergymen – not just Western missionaries, but all Catholic clerics – in the Levant codified in their capitulations. It was this French model that the Russians used in 1774 to claim their own protectorate over all Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman realm.

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

In the period of the Renaissance, trade became a matter of legislation and policy. Municipal governments and princes aimed to facilitate trade. International trade relations became increasingly supervised by states. This came in tandem with more treaties. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, specialized institutions were created and they increased control over foreign merchants. As a result of growing government intervention, the rules relating to trade were found in bylaws, charters and statutes. Besides those there were customs of trade, which were mostly local. New mercantile techniques, becoming widespread in this period, were maritime insurance, bills of exchange and partnerships of merchants. Insolvency became regulated in the sixteenth century. From the 1500s onwards, rights of hospitality for traders and a right of trade were developed in ius gentium writings. However, due to the mostly local customs and legislation, trade across European countries was far from harmonised. Gerald Malynes proposed a universal custom of trade, but he struggled with the combination of ius gentium ideas with the more factual customs of trade. His views nonetheless laid the basis for later categorisations of commercial law as being customary and transnational.

European arrival brought many hardships for tribes; however, tribes seized the new opportunities that arose. Tribes incorporated guns, horses, and other items into their cultures. Moreover, tribes organically modified their economic practices to effectively trade with Europeans. Tribal cultures influenced Europeans too. Europeans adopted Indigenous foods, medicines, housing, and political ideals.