This chapter examines the historiography of the comparisons made between Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878–1944) of Iran and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) of Türkiye in scholarship published in the three main languages connected to the United States (English), Türkiye (Turkish), and Iran (Persian). I focus on two events that Anglophone history has identified as sites of salient difference. First is the fact that Atatürk instituted a republic in Türkiye (1923), whereas Reza Shah continued monarchical rule in Iran under a new dynasty (1925). Second is the contrast between a harshly enforced nationwide ban on women’s veiling in Iran under Reza Shah and the absence of such a law in early republican Türkiye.

This chapter analyses the changing reception of ‘declinism’ and its evolving depiction in British postmodern fiction. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there existed a tradition of characterising Britain by its lack of enthusiasm for science, the indifference of government to commerce, and the low status of research and development, industry, and engineering. Numerous political scientists, economists, columnists, and historians drew on ‘decline’ as an interpretative framework despite many disagreements about its meaning, evidence, causes, and remedies. At mid-century, postmodern British writers created analogies between narratives of national decline and stories of individual dissolution. Following the Thatcher administration, they offered nascent critiques of ‘declinism’, presenting it as a discourse rather than historical fact. Finally, late-twentieth-century writers joined the growing ranks of professional historians who sought to debunk ‘declinism’ and caution against nostalgia for a halcyon past that may not have ever existed.

The current understandings of the green revolution are captive to short-term analyses that focus on the introduction of the new technology of high yielding variety seeds (HYVs) under a new agricultural strategy in 1964-66. Such a perspective cannot account for the fact hiding in plain sight that HYVs were progressively introduced into other areas on the subcontinent where they did not succeed. This book instead embeds the green revolution into a history of agrarian modernization patterns in three sub-regions of north India. It considers the colonial past, the post-independence rebuilding programs, and the wider influence of global forces of modernization to account for the birth of the green revolution.

The Introduction proposes the book’s thesis. During a long fifteenth century stretching from the 1380s into the 1510s, Perpignan’s residents self-consciously abandoned many of the foundational institutions and practices that had been established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They came to believe that the past’s answers could not be the present’s answers. They also came to believe that the present’s answers would not be the future’s answers, because they anticipated a future of unending, unpredictable change and ceaseless adaptation. Driving this development was a series of disorienting experiences, from depopulation to economic decline to social conflict. And even when townspeople sought to preserve their foundational institutions and practices, they could not prevent their destruction at the hands of monarchies that had grown more powerful than ever. The introduction situates Time and Governance in historiographical debates concerning periodisation, as well as the nature and chronology of late medieval state formation. It also relates the study to methodological developments in institutional history and the history of mentalities.

The Introduction presents a historiographical discussion of the main topics analyzed throughout the book. It begins by offering a summary of the history of the city of Chuquisaca during the period under study (1777–1809). Then, it examines the crisis of the Spanish-American order in historical perspective. It is argued that, taken together, the study provides an alternative narrative to a growing historiographical consensus that American territories were kingdoms ‒ like the European ones ‒ rather than colonies; that “imperial collapse” (the French invasion of Spain), not “revolution”, was the starting point of independence; and that in their opposition to Bourbon absolutism, the creole elite looked backward, seeking to restore an ancient Hispanic monarchical order. It is my contention that absolutism and colonialism were indistinguishable, that the demise of Spanish rule in the Andes was rooted in a longstanding historical process, and that the traditional language of monarchical legitimism couched modern, utterly subversive, concepts of representative government, free speech, elections, public opinion, and sovereignty. In addition, the Introduction focuses on two large historical themes: the conformation of a culture of dissent and the place of Chuquisaca in the age of Andean insurrection in terms of issues of race, honor, and coloniality.

Adherent to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, Qiu Jun’s magnum opus demonstrates the nature of Neo-Confucian learning, which is a knowledge practice rooted in the Confucian Classics, corroborated by orthodox histories, and oriented to statecraft – a mixture of humanist antiquarianism (or Confucian Classicism) and pragmatism. Preoccupied with the Confucian qualities and the piety towards Confucian institutions and traditions, Neo-Confucian scholars were concerned with China’s secular constitutional structure beyond moral self-cultivation. In their socio-politically oriented programs, the Classics were presumed to be instrumental, and histories useful, for maintaining the Confucian institutions and traditions that are reciprocal to Chinese identity and qualities.

The Waldensians began inside the church in the 1170s, were excommunicated, went underground and survived into the sixteenth century. In our efforts to get at their past reality, how far can we penetrate the texts about them produced in the Middle Ages by a persecuting church, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation by polemicists and in modern times by academics modelling them according to the latest intellectual fashions?

O’Casey had originally thought about writing a book about his life experiences as early as August 1926. In 1938 he completed the first volume, but the project continued to balloon, such that O’Casey eventually composed his autobiographies over the course of two decades, publishing six volumes between 1939 and 1954. This chapter puts the autobiographies in the perspective of working-class self-representation in Ireland during the twentieth century, interrogates the sense of self that can be found in the books, examines the response to the autobiographies in Ireland and beyond, and assesses the worth of O’Casey’s autobiographical writings.

The epilogue reflects on the memory of the 300,000 Italian emigrant soldiers today, in Italy and elsewhere. In the interwar period, emigrant communities erected monuments and commemorative plaques to the emigrant soldiers who had died on the battlefields between 1915 and 1918. The decision about whether and how to commemorate the ‘fallen soldiers’ from emigrant communities was one taken at a local level and usually a result of the interests and priorities of specific figures or groups, both state and civilian. There is no evidence of any coordinated programme of commemoration or coherent timeline. Today, there is little public awareness of the emigrant soldiers and neither did the centenary of the war, between 2014 and 2018, bring about any widespread recognition of their role and experiences in the war.

This chapter explores the coherence, evolution, and national specificity of antisemitism. It introduces and contrasts the different categories of antisemitism scholars have deployed to provide an explanation for violence (political, racial, eliminatory, redemptive, and so on.)It explores questions of contrast and continuity, and particularly the role of the First World War and its aftermath, and the relevance for understanding Nazi violence against Jews of the unprecedented lethality of the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Civil War.

The Introduction focuses on the experiences of victims of the Holocaust rather than perpetrators. It addresses victims’ perceptions, understandings, reactions, self-help and varied attempts at resistance. It also concerns Roma, mentally and physically challenged individuals, Slavs and Soviet POWs, and homosexuals. Finally, it addresses historiography, as do most of the chapters in this volume.

An introductory examination of written texts dealing with the tenth century, focussing on Liutprand of Cremona and Benedict of Monte Soratte. These constitute our principal historical sources in the absence of Liber pontificalis entries for this century.