This chapter examines how environmental movements challenge, halt, and prevent hegemonic environmental lawfare. The first part deals with rights-based legal mobilisation. It explores the mobilisation of human rights to build arguments in challenging hegemonic environmental lawfare in litigation and legal reform at the domestic, regional, or international levels. The second part problematises the rights-based mobilisation in Southeast Asia, demonstrating its problem in the region. Inspired by the ‘duty-turn’ in resistance studies, the third part proposes duty-based legal mobilisation by conceptualising the obligation to defend the environment as a justificatory defence in resisting hegemonic environmental lawfare.

Aristocratic capitalism, based on landowners, pluriactivity and the coercion of labor survived until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain, the First World War in France and Russia. It helps explaining the central role of empires and labor between the seventeenth century and the First World War. However, the hierarchies between peasants, landowners, cities and the state were different in the Anglo-American, French and Russian empires. Therefore, coercion and resistance also took different forms. The transformations of empires and labor in the twentieth century responded to these roots and provoked the convulsions in the USSR and the different kinds of social tensions in Britain, France and the United States.

The essay reviews the ebb and flow of Jewish conversions to Catholicism, as well as the ambiguous process of categorizing religious identity. It examines the types of accusations launched against conversos, as well as the motivations for such accusals and their gendered nature. The essays discusses the truthfulness of surviving Inquisition records. It compares trials from the Spanish Inquisition’s first decades to those of later years, with particular attention to the presence of Jewish converts from Portugal. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish Empire and around the world. The end of the chapter notes the decline of trials for Judaizing in the eighteenth century.

The Kingdom of Sicily, which belonged to the Kingdom of Aragon, was a challenging environment for Spanish inquisitors. The island was by default a space through which people, goods, and ideas circulated. It also amounted to a frontier zone in the eastern Mediterranean. Inquisitors in Sicily attempted to monitor the ports while attending to the numerous populations of foreigners which resided there; they also focused on the Catholic orthodoxy and morality of the Christian residents. This chapter explores the ways in which the inquisition tribunal on the island continuously came into conflict with other courts, institutions, and powers of the kingdom. It argues that Sicily’s inquisitors were significantly affected by their local environment. While the history of the Sicilian Inquisition demonstrates its ability to adapt to particular social and institutional contexts, as well as political situations, it also reveals resistance to the confessional society that the Inquisition represented and promoted.

The introduction presents the aims, scope and structure of the book and discusses major historiographical issues: the role of empires in global history; that of slavery in the Atlantic world and that of serfdom in Eurasia; the great divergence debate; the historical meanings and practices of emancipation in a global perspective. The introduction then discusses the question of scales; the role of gender and law; the definitions of institutions, empires and capitalism as well as the qualification of coercion, resistance and agency.

This chapter asks how ‘the people’ has been mobilised in contemporary literature as an anti-hegemonic category for imagining collective life in times of crisis. Reading a handful of poems written by Sean Bonney, D. S. Marriot, and Andrea Brady, the chapter’s hypothesis is that poetic address – the axis of communication, the deictic situation that obtains between articulation and understanding – acts as a cipher for the people in moments of social upheaval. Specifically, this chapter shows how poetic form bears witness to the people as an antagonistic social force defined by class, race, and gender, but also as a category that disarticulates – or has been forcefully disarticulated from – labour and its traditions and cultures.

Antiwar sentiment grew during 1967. Divided over some issues, the movement’s decentralized nature resisted control by any one faction and it advanced along coexisting paths. Liberals appealed to moderates through Vietnam Summer and Negotiations Now, but by autumn, leftist influence was more pronounced. Frustrated over continued escalation, some activists engaged in more direct confrontation. Students challenged university connections to the military-industrial complex, draft resistance proliferated through organizations and individual conscience, GI dissent gained momentum, and radicals increasingly adopted civil disobedience, most evident at the March on the Pentagon. New layers of moderate antiwar opinion worked through the democratic process and street demonstrations worked in conjunction with government critics. Government officials tried to undermine this loyal opposition. Harassment ranged from infiltration and sabotage to politically influenced trials. President Johnson responded to antiwar pressure with an optimistic progress campaign that would have serious future repercussions. The movement endured these assaults as a coalition of diverse organizations and perspectives.

Following the Tet Offensive, the struggle to define the war intensified. The most widespread antiwar activity during 1968 was mobilizing behind the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Peace forces coalesced at the beginning of 1968 for what many perceived as a quixotic effort to replace a president who had promised peace with one who would actually secure peace. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race in late March inspired a realistic potential for an antiwar Democratic Party nominee. Kennedy’s death in early June ended that hope, however, and strained the collaboration between movement insiders and outsiders. Street demonstrations and growing dissent within the military worked in conjunction with persistent critics within the federal government. Liberal emphasis on electoral campaigns reduced their impact in the national coalition. Leftists, radicals, and the counterculture played a greater role in the spring National Mobilization, the nationwide student strikes, and the August confrontation in Chicago. The government used the courts to deter ongoing draft resistance but without noticeable effect.

This chapter describes how the East African Court of Justice is rooted in colonial legacies, which affect regional political norms and legal culture. It shows the EACJ’s decisions are characterized by substantial deference, frequently ruling in favor of states and relying extensively on restrictive interpretation. Less deference, however, is observed through the Court’s remedial orders. The chapter draws linkages between the EACJ’s deference and its pervasive political constraints. Namely, the EACJ’s strategic space is narrowed by weak formal independence and moderate political fragmentation. These two factors combine to undermine the Court’s legitimacy and imply that state resistance is feasible and credible. A significant episode of prior resistance also suggests states could execute future resistance. To the extent the Court does not defer, the chapter reveals how persuasive argumentation and public legitimation facilitate nondeference. Last, the chapter illustrates how the Court’s support networks insufficiently account for its substantial deference.

Chapter 6 argues that Milton’s priorities in Paradise Regained are moral rather than Christological or political. The chapter applies this thesis to some enduring critical questions around the poem: the question of the Son’s identity, the purpose of the temptation, and the nature of the poem’s outcome; lastly it shows how Satan is like a Washington lobbyist. The consequence of this reading is to make Paradise Regained appear at once simpler and more demanding. The poem makes strenuous moral demands upon its readers, not because its messages are esoteric but because it calls them to follow the example of the Son.

Finally, the analysis turns to forces of resistance and rebellion. World history may be suspected of occluding the life of ordinary people and forces that could resist the ruling imperial elites and cultures so far discussed. This is a misunderstanding. World history has revealed a broad range of forms of resistance. These insights yield crucial tools for the Roman historian. The Greco-Roman literary record is teeming with references to rebellious activities, but most are very brief. By using the perspective of world history, these brief references may be brought to life and tell us about rebellions fuelled by millenarian prophecies, banditry and other forms of resistance. A world history perspective will also confirm the impression that peasant risings rarely succeeded in turning over the agrarian order. If we want to look for ‘revolution’, it more often came from frontier regions of the empire and usually arrived in the form of a new conquering force overturning the old imperial rulers. This was how the Roman world was brought to heal, both by its so-called Germanic federates and by the rise of the Arabs and foundation of their new empire on the basis of both Rome and Persia.

Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

Chapter 3 highlights the centrality of Spain in the development of a particular kind of ‘professional revolutionary’ deployed by the Comintern in the late 1930s and 1940s. It focuses on the life of the Italian communist Ilio Barontini and follows his long militancy within the anti-fascist front. Barontini, unlike most Europeans of his generation, had been confronted with violent fascism since the early 1920s. Nevertheless, the Spanish Civil War marks a watershed in his life, as it was in Spain that he refined his skills as a fighter. But Spain influenced Barontini’s trajectory in a political sense, too, as it was during the period of intense fighting at Guadalajara in early 1937 that fellow volunteers in the Italian brigade began to discuss the need to bring the anti-fascist fight to the colonial front as well. In the following years, Barontini went both to fight and to train new recruits in Ethiopia, France, and Italy. In this way, the chapter offers a glimpse of one way in which anti-fascism and anti-imperialism connected in this period.