The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

This chapter lingers on the very notion of territory itself as a spatial imaginary, a literary trope, and a political crucible for competing ideas of sovereignty. In particular, it examines how territory, or perhaps more precisely, territoriality, did not simply work at the behest of US empire but also served as an essential spatial register for working alongside and even against US territorial annexation, occupation, and colonization. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States asserted an understanding of sovereignty that foregrounded dominance over a territory and its inhabitants. At the broadest scale, territory denoted the sovereign’s property (the United States), and sovereignty denoted control over territory. Settler-colonial notions of sovereignty and territory conflicted with Indigenous understandings of sovereignty that often foreground responsibility to human and other-than-human relatives within a shared space or territory rather than possession of property. This chapter’s three sections, “Terra Nullius,” “Indian Territory,” and “Black Territories,” each take up a concept of territoriality that profoundly influenced US colonial expansion at the expense of other narratives of placemaking. Each section details how narratives of territoriality forcefully shaped US politics and culture while also describing competing notions of placemaking that disrupt these dominant narratives.

Putting things on public display is an ancient habit, which took off in the cities of the early modern world, not least Edo (today’s Tokyo), its largest. It was clear to Japanese observers of international exhibitions in the 1860s, however, that there was a categorical difference between them and the shows of Edo. This chapter uses their experience to specify the difference and to explain why they were able and eager to import the practice of exhibition to Japan. On the one hand, international exhibitions showed Japan to be at odds with the emerging world of industry and empire, not least given its sclerotic political constitution. On the other, by disaggregating its exhibits, they also revealed the archipelago to possess resources (e.g., silk) and abilities (especially craft), with value on the international market. The world of industry and empire, revealed at the exhibition, was a challenging, even threatening, one, but its more perceptive Japanese observers could see reasons for hope.

As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, Japan remained an enthusiastic participant at exhibitions overseas (Chicago 1893, Paris 1900, St Louis 1904, London 1910), showing off both its indigenous endowments (art and architecture, imperial history) and modern achievements (burgeoning industry, victorious military, and emergent empire). It was not able to prevent others supplying the more familiar Japan demanded by white audiences, who were interested in exoticism but dismissive of seeming mimicry. At home, too, the government was beginning to endorse, and cities to exploit, the use of exhibitions as much for municipal development as industrial promotion. This chapter examines in detail how Kyoto in 1895, Osaka in 1903, and Tokyo in 1907 used ‘industrial’ exhibitions to present themselves as tourist destination, industrial powerhouse, and metropolitan primate, respectively. To do it, exhibitions increasingly supplemented didactic exhibits with popular attractions, opening up a space where the press could use exhibitions as much for social commentary as economic report.

Máire ní Fhlathúin considers how colonial narratives circulate in India, and how they intersect with British power. We read of the East India Company’s annexation of the state of Awadh in 1856, and the outbreak of revolt that brought about the Government of India Act’s transfer of powers from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1858, precipitating a massive mobilisation of British soldiers and their families to India. Ní Fhlathúin revitalises this familiar story by examining contemporary para-literary texts and poetry published in British Indian newspapers and periodicals during and immediately after the rebellion. Much of this material is newly available, and enables us to gain a more holistic view of events across the subcontinent. This broad range of texts and writers bears witness to the inherent instability of British representations of its Empire, and exposes the shaping influence of the British imagination on accounts of India

Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in Dublin to the post of Professor of Greek at University College Dublin in February 1884. He was thirty-nine. He died of typhoid in his university rooms in June 1889, a month short of his forty-fifth birthday. Never the most prolific of poets, Hopkins wrote about twenty-five completed or near-completed poems in his five and a half years in Ireland, including undoubted masterpieces. Caught between devotion to church and resistance to state, Catholic Ireland was not exactly hostile to the priest who worked there for five years before his death, but its divisiveness immeasurably deepened the pitch and the discomfort of a poetry tugged in two ways, between the desolations of self and the consolations of church and state.

Jessica Howell turns to an emblematic masculine figure: the explorer. Howell shows how Royal Geographical Society publications contribute to the imaginative construction of Africa within 1850s travel literature, and rhetorically create the need for further expeditions and exploration. These expeditions work hand-in-hand with the interests of the Empire, in extending and mapping its boundaries. Further, Howell highlights how the travel writing of Empire selectively appropriates local knowledge forms and occludes the suffering of the indigenous peoples who were co-opted to assist British explorers. This chapter demonstrates how one may read the archives of the Royal Geographical Society for both the discursive and physical forms of violence enacted upon local guides and servants. Howell draws upon the work of historians of gender and race to illuminate the ‘archival fragments’ (Fuentes) within the RGS materials, thereby reasserting the central role of African physical and intellectual labour to travel writing as a genre.

The strategy of the Mongol Empire underwent four basic phases. The first centered on the rise and creation of the Yeke Monggol Ulus (Great Mongol State/Nation) by Chinggis Khan and the Mongols’ irruption from the steppes. The second phase was the formulation of a coherent strategy of conquest during the reign of Ögödei Qa’an. While this was derived from the campaigns of Chinggis Khan, it sought to maximise the deployment of the empire’s military on multiple fronts while simultaneously not overextending the resources of the empire. This further evolved into a third phase during the reign of Möngke Qa’an, who, through a series of reforms, allowed the Mongols to marshal more resources. In doing so, the Mongol strategy altered as they no longer had concerns of overextending themselves. During Möngke’s reign, the Mongols truly became a juggernaut. The final phase of strategy came into formulation with the dissolution of the Mongol Empire after Möngke’s death in late 1259. As the empire split into rival states often embroiled in internecine conflict, each new state had to develop its own coherent strategy, but without the massive resources of a united empire. The Mongols conceived of pragmatic grand strategy that was viable, if not always successful, rather than simply theoretical plans.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.