This essay examines first the understanding of sex equality by the philosophic forebears of the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes was the more thoroughgoing egalitarian of the two. He insisted that men were not inherently superior to women, either in strength or prudence. Locke by contrast wrote that in the conjugal union, even in nature, while the union by mutual compact could be limited to whatever was needed for raising children, still, because of the need to have some authority stronger and more able, men were entitled to rule the household. Despite this public claim that men are the “abler” sex, Locke’s private writings showed him to be much more gender egalitarian than Jefferson himself.

This chapter considers the ideological aspects of classical education, exploring how the shifting political and cultural landscapes of Gaul changed the way Gallo-Roman aristocrats practiced and perceived education, and how this is reflected in our sources from the fourth to sixth centuries. While in the fourth century classical education is valued mainly for its tangible rewards and is closely linked to imperial structures of power, throughout the fifth century Gallo-Romans increasingly highlight the personal and ideological uses of education in shaping and affirming their status and identity. Teachers of grammar and rhetoric are more closely linked to aristocratic literary circles, which goes hand in hand with an increased blurring of the distinctions between grammatical and rhetorical teaching and a narrowing of education and literary networks. These changing attitudes and practices of education reflect the underlying political and social transformations of fifth-century Gaul and Gallo-Roman aristocratic anxieties and responses to them.

Chapter 3 focuses on grotesque representations whose contemplation provokes in the viewer a mixture of horror, pity, and laughter. The buffoon is the main figure related to the grotesque, an iconographic motif with a long tradition in Western visual culture. The representation of three persons of African ancestry are analyzed and, taken as a whole, they can be thought of as a compendium of many of the traits that are related racial hierarchies. In the cases of Rosas’s buffoons, Biguá and Eusebio, they were circumscribed to the role of jesters, which not only implies playing the role of entertainers but is also related to other characteristics of the grotesque: madness, deformity, diabolic and comical connotations. In the case of Mendizábal, a specific portrait becomes a grotesque image that confines the person portrayed, and by extension all Afro-descendants, to an enslaved past, without the possibility of becoming protagonists of their present or their future. In these stereotypical images, prejudices and general beliefs are manifested, in tune with the racist ideology present throughout the nineteenth century, more prominently among those who forged the project of the Argentine nation.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

The counter-movement against commodification in the 1930s and 1940s reached a milestone on 1 October 1949 when Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This chapter begins by outlining the fundamentals of the regime of marginal labour precarity in the Mao era, which took shape between 1949 and 1956 out of the ashes of the Republican era and remained in effect throughout the Mao era. It then narrows the focus to the period between 1949 and 1957. During this period, boundaries among labouring people took shape and were redrawn by swings in the industrialization path between centralization and decentralization, and in labour policy from promoting permanent employment to constraining its expansion and then to promoting the labour contract system.

Much of the book’s narrative is dedicated to trace the complex interactions between China and Europe since the sixteenth century, but how did these interactions affect Chinese cartographers and Chinese cartographic practice? The focus of this chapter moves to the perspective of Chinese cartographers, their attitudes and uses of world maps, as well as hybrid world maps created using Western techniques and Chinese elements. The chapter demonstrates that Sino-Western world maps prompted different responses, ranging from rejection to enthusiasm and adoption. Chinese cartographers incorporated elements from these maps, cited them in their own work. Beginning with the Qianlong period of the Qing, cartographers started working with Western cartographic techniques in producing new types of maps.

As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.