The chapter begins by describing the presidents relations with Congress, backed the threat of presidential vetoes on one side and impeachment on the other. It then traces the rise of the federal bureaucracy as an independent policymaker, asking whether and to what extent presidential power, rule of law norms, and bureaucratic incentives can ensure broadly democratic outcomes. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the Presidents War Powers, the dynamics of wartime elections, and the Executives alarming authority to impose emergency measures without Congress.

Chapter 6 traverses the aftermath of Mughal rule as members of the Maratha confederacy, led by the Gaekwads, and officials of the early colonial state in the form of the British East India Company sought to capture Ahmedabad and strategic routes connected to the city. It was in this context that the sons of Khushalchand, Nathushah (1720–1793) and Vakhatchand (1740–1814), became entrenched in financing new forms of political organization by guaranteeing loans to groups seeking the purchase of revenue farms from emerging stately authorities. I call this phase of political-business relations competitive coparcenary. By becoming speculators in land revenue farms and advancing capital to those seeking to establish state power, the Jhaveris tactfully adapted their expertise to new political circumstances. This was a major departure from the high tide of Mughal rule in the seventeenth century when power manifest through warfare. Now, principles of the market and revenue sharing diplomacy became the hallmark of political organization, and the later Jhaveris were central to such emerging diplomacy.

UN Charter Art.33 points to means such as negotiation, mediation and arbitration to settle disputes and to avoid the risk of use of force. Judgments of the International Court of Justice are of great value also to further develop international law. However, courts are hardly ever employed to save peace by the judicial settlement of big disputes. Following the precedent of the Nuremberg tribunal, special tribunals have been set up to try war crimes. Even more important, an international criminal court has been established. Fact-finding (termed ‘enquiry’) has achieved a prominent role both to solve and to prevent conflicts. Thus, the safeguards system of the IAEA using inspectors, cameras and satellites and environmental sampling continuously verifies that no fissionable material is diverted away from peaceful uses. With much fake news around, impartial professional inspection, monitoring and reporting – for instance, about the use or possession of chemical weapons – has become more important. Diplomacy seeks to secure or create peaceful relations by agreement, precluding or removing the threat or use of force. Examples are given of successes of diplomacy to preserve peace as well as of failures and of talks going forever without result.

A farewell is given to something that is leaving. After thousands of years of freedom for nations to go to war, new proximity, interdependence, risks of nuclear war have led them to exercise restraints and to commit themselves to the UN Charter and the requirement to abandon interstate uses of force. This book concludes that while states will continue as always to compete, the great powers are saying farewell to direct interstate wars. For over 75 years there have been no wars between them and no nuclear weapon has been used. The Charter as rule-based international order has often been violated and the veto has often stood in the way of action. Yet, the General Assembly has asserted the order and declared that it does not recognize illegal annexations. The nuclear arsenals remain and pose existential risks to humanity. At the same time, the fear that they would be used in second strikes makes it implausible that any nuclear-armed states would initiate hostilities that could risk leading to nuclear war. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is seen as out of tune with the twenty-first century – an aberration. The growing interdependence of states is creating restraints against causing ruptures and, at the same time, enables states to use crippling economic measures as substitutes for the use of force. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis shocked the parties and prompted them to use diplomacy to avert the acute risk of nuclear war. Today, one may speculate if the war in Ukraine and threats to the human environment might shock nations to turn to diplomacy and disarmament and switch to the defence of the threatened human environment a major part of the some 2 trillion dollars that they now spend annually to defend themselves against each other. For this to become reality, an engaged public mind would be as important as it was against slavery and nuclear weapons.

This chapter examines the medieval Greek and Arabic sources for the movement of medical substances between the Byzantine and Islamic worlds in the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Although commerce was the most common means employed in the movement of materia medica, and the part played by tribute taking and looting was not negligible, the role of diplomatic gift exchange cannot be ignored. A relatively wide range of drugs were exchanged, ranging from theriac and a stone against dropsy to spices and perfumes. Moreover, this chapter examines the peculiar role of drugs as gifts in diplomatic communication compared to more typical diplomatic gifts such as expensive textiles and luxurious objects. Not suited to acting as objects of display, materia medica seemed to convey a personal message of care, creating mutual ties between the sender and the recipient.

Europe was affected by a book crisis in the aftermath of the Great War. Much specialist literature had not been received in institutions across Europe since 1914 or had been destroyed during the conflict and was then rendered prohibitively expensive due to soaring exchange rates. This chapter explores the organization of book relief. The supply of literature was seen as an emergency that required humanitarian assistance to address ‘intellectual hunger’. Intellectual relief of this sort demonstrated the prominence of the belief that the spread of knowledge was essential to the reconstitution of the Republic of Letters and the ultimate stabilization of European political life. While initial responses hinged on humanitarian assistance, the ultimate resolution of the book crisis depended upon the restoration of international exchange networks – many of which had been severed by the war – and which came to fruition around the mid-1920s.

This chapter examines the last phase of the Buffalo Agency’s existence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It refracts this institution’s history through an existing body of historical literature that explores the intersections among print technology, Islamic reform and ecumenicalism, and political life in the history of Ibadi and other Muslims communities in Egypt in the context of colonialism. The chapter examines these themes by telling the stories of two people whose lives are largely unknown. The first figure, Saʿīd al-Shammākhī, served as the director of the Buffalo Agency in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1871, however, he was appointed agent (wakīl) for the Husaynid bey of Tunisia in Egypt and served as a line of communication between the governments of the two Ottoman provinces. The second figure is Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, owner of the first Ibadi printing house in Cairo. In terms of its operation, its financing, and its choice of titles, this Ibadi press functioned in much the same way as other late Ottoman presses in Egypt. Through the stories of these two men, the chapter situates Ibadis in the changing technologies and politics of late nineteenth century Ottoman Egypt.

This chapter begins in Paris in 1919, a year in which prognostications of the collapse of civilization became widespread. By the end of that year, the largely imagined crisis of civilization had become a tangible one; the ongoing conflicts in central and eastern Europe presented a material threat to the lives of intellectuals and institutions, reports of soaring prices and starvation in central and eastern Europe became widespread, and the spectre of Bolshevism threatened the new democratic order. The chapter explores how intellectual reconstruction was framed – but mostly not acted upon – at the Paris Peace Conference and that it was not until early 1920 that intellectual humanitarianism began to take shape.

The introduction identifies a generation of men and women of letters whose activities strongly influenced politics in a time of conflict, but who do not fall neatly into the categories of either Renaissance humanist or philosophe. These actors moved on the edges of official diplomacy. Often marginalized, they developed practices of self-promotion and improvisation which helped them become multi-embedded across different societies and political spheres. Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) was one such actor, who used this multi-embeddedness to ease political communication between different powers. His trajectory parallels that of many other imperial agents and literary figures who circulated in and out of the global territories of the Iberian monarchies and especially among other southern European powers.

In 1939 John Gielgud visited Denmark to perform Hamlet at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, a location closely associated with the setting of Shakespeare’s famous play. A photograph of Gielgud and Fay Compton, who played Ophelia in the production, shows the two actors posing in front of a stone relief of Shakespeare, which was unveiled at Kronborg during their visit to mark what was clearly intended as both a cultural and a diplomatic exchange between Denmark and the UK at this tense moment in European history. This essay suggests that Gielgud’s performance in Elsinore and the events that surrounded it were ‘haunted’ in different ways, both by the memory of the previous war and by the fear of the war rapidly approaching. It shows how several factors – the location, the play, the historical moment between two world wars – would have created a particularly resonant intersection between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘war’.

The chapter opens the analysis of social structure in the transition from the CAPE to the modern eras by reviewing the primary institutions carried over from the CAPE era into the transition, seeing which became obsolete, and which adapted to the new conditions and survived. It constrasts the relative simplicity and straightforwardness of the material developments during this period to the complexity, contradictions and turbulence of the social structure.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

This chapter centres on Macau’s experience from the occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 until the end of the war in September 1945, when the enclave became the last foreign-ruled territory in China to remain unoccupied by Japan. It argues that collaboration through compliance was a way of avoiding occupation. In this period, the practice of neutrality in Macau reached a peak of ambiguity. It was marked by the interplay of different forces and important new players competing for political legitimacy, economic control and social influence. These included Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Wang Jingwei’s Reorganised National Government, Portuguese colonial authorities, Japanese military forces and local elites.

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It places Macau in the history and historiography of the Second World War in China and in Portugal, and contrasts Macau with other foreign-ruled territories in China, such as the International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai. The chapter also revisits the history of Sino–Portuguese relations in Macau, framing the enclave’s Second World War experience in a larger context of global connections, ambiguities and relative autonomy unfolding since the sixteenth century.

With an international focus, this chapter analyses Portuguese neutrality in wartime China before the fall of Hong Kong in late 1941, with reference to the British and Japanese imperial presence in the region. It argues that the war in South China saw Macau and its Portuguese administration engaged constantly with these two major imperial powers in a precarious balance marked by continuities in Portugal’s relations with its old ally, the United Kingdom, and a novel proximity to Japan that generated contradictory practices on the ground.