Rome: Empire, City, and Church

Chapter 2 describes the Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries and important emperors of the period. Among imperial reforms was the introduction of a new form of coinage, the gold solidus. The chapter introduces the emperor Honorius’ important general of the western imperial troops, Stilicho, and his wife, Serena, who will figure in Melania and Pinian’s attempts at divestment. It describes the life of cities in that era, especially the city of Rome, and the role of Christianization in changing its urban landscape. Rome’s inhabitants were dependent on food brought from elsewhere and distributed to them by a system called the annona; disruption of the supply could lead to food riots, one of which plays a role in the couple’s attempts to divest. The building of churches and martyr shrines in and around Rome, importantly spurred by the emperor Constantine and his family in the early fourth century, later often became a cooperative venture between bishops (especially Damasus) and local elites. The cult of Saint Lawrence plays a significant role in the life of Melania: at his shrine or church, Pinian was persuaded to adopt a life of ascetic renunciation with her.

The Violence of World War, 1914–1920

This chapter investigates the unfolding of the war in the Arab provinces, examining how imperial reforms morphed into extreme violence as the Ottoman state enacted genocidal campaigns against Armenians and practiced political repression against Arab activists while European forces invaded, blockaded, and occupied the famine-stricken Levant. It focuses in particular on the rather sudden delegitimization of Ottoman authority in the Mashriq as a consequence of the multiple Allied invasions; the Committee of Union and Progress’s emerging policies of mass conscription, material requisitioning, and political repression in greater Syria and the Iraqi provinces, symbolized particularly by the public executions in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916. It also articulates how the Allied military campaigns in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine aimed not only to defeat the Ottomans but also to establish the outlines of a postcolonial absorption of these territories and their resources into the British and French Empires.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met

During the late eighteenth century, Portugal and Spain sent joint mapping expeditions to draw a nearly 10,000-mile border between Brazil and Spanish South America. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas and coincided with broader imperial reforms enacted throughout the hemisphere. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met considers what these efforts meant to Indigenous peoples whose lands the border crossed. Moving beyond common frameworks that assess mapped borders strictly via colonial law or Native sovereignty, it examines the interplay between imperial and Indigenous spatial imaginaries. What results is an intricate spatial history of border making in southeastern South America (present-day Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) with global implications. Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession. It reveals that Native agents shaped when and where the border was drawn, and fused it to their own territorial claims. While mapmakers' assertions of Indigenous disappearance or subjugation shaped historiographical imaginaries thereafter, Erbig reveals that the formation of a border was contingent upon Native engagement and authority.

Educated with Distinction

Beginning in the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire’s educational landscape expanded and diversified. During this era of imperial reforms, discourses around education increasingly focused on the importance of female education. This article uses census material from Tripoli in today’s Lebanon to explore the experiences of students in the wake of these shifts. It examines literacy rates across different social and religious groups and the extent to which educational decisions parents made were biased by gender and class. The analysis reveals that the rate of Muslim boys’ literacy was high even before new schools opened starting in the 1850s. As for the post-reform developments, it shows that although around a quarter of propertied families decided to send their sons and daughters to school, a considerable proportion of Muslim and Christian families privileged sons alone. Still, reforms allowed a number of groups in the generations between 1860 and 1910 to achieve higher rates of literacy, including Muslim and Christian girls as well as the children of artisans.

British Imperial Policy and the American Revolution

In the 1760s and early 1770s, British policy towards America was similar to a series of parallel initiatives throughout the British Empire. There was a concerted attempt by the home government to reform the empire, increase revenues, regulate trade, improve colonial defence, incorporate native populations, and strengthen metropolitan control which also resembled similar reforms in the empires of France and Spain. The chapter contends that the causes and aims of those policies are more comprehensible when understood in the broader imperial context which illuminates the origins of the American Revolution. It traces and explains a shift in policy towards more direct metropolitan rule that increasingly involved intervention in colonial affairs by Parliament. The chapter shows that the implications of these novel policies made colonial fears far from groundless even if overstated in the Whig conspiracy theory of a deliberate plan of tyranny by George III and Lord North. Nevertheless, it was one of the ironies of the revolution that the newly independent nation felt obligated to adopt many of the earlier imperial reforms including a more central form of government with the power to tax.

The Age of Imperial Reform, c. 1486–1521

This final case study in associative political culture’s shaping of the evolving Holy Roman Empire examines the new legislation passed during the reign of King/Emperor Maximilian, which modern historians have often called ‘imperial reforms’. At the heart of the reform narrative is the idea that the Empire experienced a constitutional watershed around 1495/1500 as a set of new institutions was established through laws issued at the imperial diets, such as the so-called ‘eternal public peace’ (Ewiger Landfriede), the imperial chamber court (Reichskammergericht), and the imperial council (Reichsregiment). However, the functions and discourses of these institutions and the legislation that created them were remarkably similar to associative practices and documentation. Viewed from the perspective of the Upper German culture of multilateral assistance through stipulated mutual obligations and adjudication and negotiation at Tage, the outcomes of ‘imperial reform’ appear not as radical departures, but as iterations of deeply rooted structures and dynamics.