The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

A significant increase in agricultural production underpinned the many socioeconomic transformations that define first-millennium-BCE Italy. However, the farming regimes that underpinned this rise in surplus production, and its evolution through Republican times, are poorly defined. This lack of clarity is problematic, because cultivation and herding practices dictated the relative value of land versus labur. Without good archaeological data on this fundamental area of the Republican economy, we are ill-equipped to address central questions of land use, investment, and the motivation for territorial expansion in the Middle Republican period. This chapter argues for the importance of farming regimes as a force that shaped Roman social and economic history, and provides a first step towards an agroecology of the Roman expansion. It presents a new synthesis of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data integrated with wider evidence for agricultural processing and rural production. This analysis places bioarchaeological evidence for Republican farming in its peninsular context for the first time. Results indicate that production was motivated more by regional trajectories than by Roman annexation, and that rural settlement changes did not have a major immediate impact on the bioarchaeological data considered here. Lastly, we highlight key points of change alongside pathways for future research.

This chapter seeks to consider the legal background and precedents for the developments of the Middle Republic, with a specific focus on the Twelve Tables. By thinking through what the Twelve Tables imply about the conditions of later sixth- and fifth-century Rome we can arrive at a clearer understanding of the fourth century, and a picture of considerable and long-term intellectual sophistication in Central Italy.

The conservation status of the taxa in this book is measured using the criteria of the Red List of Threatened Species™. The Red List is overseen by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and categorises species according to extinction risk. This chapter summarises the history of the Red List and explains the criteria used to assess species’ extinction risk, as well as the quality control procedures in place today. This chapter also introduces a new part of the Red List, formalised in 2021: The Green Status of Species, a set of metrics which assess species’ progress towards functional recovery across its range and the impact of conservation actions.

The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

Agricultural policy should have been a primary focus for the Vichy regime, to restore the values of working the land as promoted by their propaganda, and to feed French citizens. This chapter explains Vichy agricultural policies, the alienation of French producers, and it details the economic and individualist rationales for farmers to sell to and rely on the black market, with three product case studies for black- market behaviours and logic: butter, meat, and wine.

This chapter explores the various methods employed by Jewish ghetto leadership and the German ghetto administration to distribute food inside the ghettos. Different ghettos used different methods at different times. Food distribution through house committees, ration cards, soup kitchen, private food stores, private kitchens, vegetable distribution points, and other methods were employed in various places at various times. In Warsaw and Krakow, a combination of rations and private provisioning prevailed while in Lodz, a ration system prevailed over private food sources. People also received food through mailed packages. All three ghettos employed communal coping mechanisms to supplement the scarce food resources through a variety of means. Food processing, particularly to minimize food waste, and agricultural projects were ways in which the community sought to expand food provisions. Soup kitchens and welfare supplemental payments were used to help supply food to the impoverished of the ghetto. Also discussed was the ubiquitous food line which was a major feature of many types of food distribution.

Evolution of labor and reconstitution of plantation system on sugar and cotton plantations of lower Mississippi valley during 1863. Sugar and cotton reflect different regimens but also share characteristics in common: conflict between former slaveholders and former slaves over new modes of work; Federal officials fear dependency of freed people on government support; plantation-leasing system to northern transplants intended to bring free-labor notions to South. Planters determined to reestablish labor control; freed people determined to achieve meaningful economic independence. Wartime military free labor in sugar and cotton regions encounters many difficulties, and all parties express dissatisfaction with system. By end of year, calls for reformed system for 1864. Military free labor essential step in moving from emancipating slaves to abolishing slavery, but also reveals shortcomings of military emancipation.

The evolution of wartime free labor and the reorganizing of the plantation regimen in the sugar and cotton regions of the lower Mississippi valley during the first half of 1864. Federal military labor policy expands upon the rights of the freedpeople, in response to earlier criticism, but it still includes elements of involuntary labor. Sugar planters maintain their insistence that slavery still exists, but they accommodate themselves to new labor arrangements in order to operate their plantations. The cotton plantations also experience conflict between former slaveholders and freedpeople over labor, as well as jurisdictional disputes between Federal military and Treasury Department officials over administering the plantation-leasing system. Confederate raids, along with other difficulties, continue to disrupt development of the new labor system, and reenslavement remains a danger.

Chapter 8 proposes a three-tier system for eliminating food insecurity, avoiding famine, and reducing conflict in the twenty-first century.

The selections in this chapter discuss the management of the realm and the importance of specific royal practices. Ensuring the prosperity of the rural and urban populations, the productivity of the land, the proper maintenance of the army and sound financial management feature prominently among the king’s responsibilities. Many mirrors emphasise the necessity of constant royal oversight, particularly of the officials involved in the collection of taxes. Strict and consistent oversight, accompanied by swift dismissal when cases of abuse came to light, were the only measures that would protect the revenue-producing categories on whose labour the entire edifice of government depended. In cases of injustice, it was the ruler’s obligation to provide a means of redress, through the practice of listening to the petitions of his subjects and restoring to them any property that had been wrongfully seized. In many instances, the practices of good governance urged upon the wise and virtuous ruler reflect the principle of maṣlaḥa, the common good. The texts are drawn from al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.