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.

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.

“The Ties that Bind,” takes us in a new direction as we begin to explore Lucretius’ curative efforts toward his male audience. Quite naturally then, we train our focus on the famous honey-rimmed cup of medicine metaphor of 1.921–50 (4.1–25). We find that the verses present a figure denser than the simple doctor-patient-medicine schema. Rather surprisingly, Lucretius has woven into the image a complex set of allusions to mythical female characters. In overlapping ways, Lucretius identifies his authorial voice with Circe, Helen, and the Sirens as he seeks to seduce, drug, and divert his audience away from what they might imagine to be their dearest goals in life. Lucretius reveals that the emasculating web of deceit he spins becomes a safety net to rescue his audience from the trap of self-delusion and superstition in the face of nature’s laws.

This chapter compares and contrasts the thought of three philosophers – Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum – who developed influential and idiosyncratic ways of reforming Anglo-American moral philosophy. Their positions substantially overlap inasmuch as they hold that the goods of human life are necessarily multiple and persistently in conflict, which has implications for the structure and content of ethical life everywhere. All three are of interest to anthropology because they hold that history, culture, social relations, and biographical experience make a difference to the goods and values that inform human life, and therefore that moral philosophy needs to be, to at least a very large degree, an empirical, descriptive, and comparative discipline. The different, sometimes even rival, ways in which they pursue that project offer anthropologists of ethics the chance to reflect on how and why they might develop an anthropology that would fulfil these authors’ different visions of moral philosophy.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

The breadth of topics covered in Defoe’s extensive canon is universally acknowledged, but so too is the seemingly consistent nature of an authorial perspective marked by authority, firm occupation of the moral high ground, and extensive use of scriptural imagery and language. This chapter considers the textual and biographical evidence for Defoe’s erudition in religious literature. Immediately apparent is Defoe’s use of specific stylistics shared with contemporary ministers, both within and outside the established church. In an author trained from an early age to join the ministry, such linguistic features are hardly surprising, though Defoe’s ministerial training and scholarship is equally apparent at the level of structure and rhetorical device. The chapter further explores how a cultural period fraught with religious contention between English Protestants came to shape the purported identity of Defoe’s authorial ‘voice’ as that of a non-specific Protestant Christian. Notwithstanding this specific authorial response to contesting notions of Christian identity in the period, Defoe engaged first-hand in a series of contemporary religious debates, which the chapter also scrutinizes.

While Defoe’s position as a Dissenter in a confessionally divided England is consistent and clear in his work, this chapter probes some of the shifts, contradictions, and complexities that characterized that position. These arose when Defoe wrote ‘about’ religion within specific generic forms, and unfolded in the context of religious controversies and against the rise of religious toleration and the taming of Dissent as Britain moved away from the religious wars of the mid 1600s, through the bitter religious politics of the Stuart Restoration, to the new détente conformity and Nonconformity that supported its identity as both a consolidating nation and a complacently ‘Christian’ empire. Alongside this, Defoe’s early writing as a Dissenting controversialist gave way to quasi-allegorical narrative fiction, home piety manuals, and popular studies of the supernatural. These transformations both reflect and played a key role in an Anglican nation’s transition from ’Old Dissent’ to ’New Dissent’. Yet Defoe’s own religion is ’hard to be found’, perhaps best understood as an ongoing experiment with form at a moment when debates about formal expression shaped English religious identity.

The fact of religious pluralism is one of the most challenging questions for contemporary liberal democracies. Political theorists variously argue that religious belief and practice can be a support for prosocial morality, can cause social division, may prevent citizens from adopting important civic norms, or should simply be an area of civic competence. All of these positions carry significant consequences for democratic education. This chapter surveys a range of positions present in political theory and democratic education literature, drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Western democracies, particularly the American context. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibility that modern liberal democratic regimes are properly considered religious themselves, and by considering the implications of this notion for debates regarding democratic education.

Although it is widely thought that more education is a reliable remedy for democratic ills, I argue that it is not always so. The problem arises because education plays a role in shaping what I call people’s trust networks: the set of sources of information they regard as trustworthy. A democratic society can falter if its citizens live on isolated epistemic islands (i.e., occupy nonoverlapping trust networks). If the educational system serves to reinforce one kind of trust network rather than help people build bridges between trust networks, education will rearrange the population of these islands but potentially make the underlying topography less democracy-friendly. The chapter makes this case and then looks at some potential educational remedies to the problem it outlines.

The concluding chapter summarizes the case for embracing a wider approach to the deep intellectual roots of the IPE field in the pre-1945 period that goes beyond the common focus on just thinkers from Europe and the United States and the debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists. The wider approach of this volume highlights important contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States in the pre-1945 era as well as important debates both within each of the three orthodoxies and with perspectives beyond them. In addition to providing a more comprehensive history, this wider approach can help to strengthen efforts to foster more “global conversations” in the field of IPE today, to improve interpretations of contemporary political discourse as well as to contribute to the study of topics that are attracting growing interest within current IPE scholarship.

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.

Throughout his life, Martin Buber insisted that his dialogical thinking was “not the result of reading but of personal experience.” This emphasis on his own generative experience does not vitiate the fact that, as Buber likewise acknowledged, “in all ages it has undoubtedly been glimpsed that the reciprocal essential relationship between two beings signifies a primal opportunity of being, and one, in fact, that enters into the phenomenon that the human being exists.” Although historical antecedents pointed toward Buber’s dialogical thinking, its crystallization occurred during the tumultuous years of the First World War, when he underwent a conversion, personal as well as intellectual, from the mysticism of his prewar writings to his signature postwar dialogical thinking.

Higher education in England and in America also arose from Judeo-Christian religion and its speech. Here, the focus turns from Protestants to Catholics, because the establishment of higher education in continental Europe and in England was by Roman Catholics. Because universities are largely secular today, it is easy to forget that the oldest universities were founded by a Judeo-Christian faith with a heavy focus on educating Roman Catholic ministers and canon lawyers, and that their curricula and activities were pervasively religious. The same is true of the oldest universities in Europe – the Universities of Bologna, Salamanca, Paris, and others. Only after dozens of European universities had been established by Catholics did the Reformation bring Protestant colleges to England and to America. What was religious about early higher education was its message and perspective – its religious speech in the forms of teaching, reading, questioning, defending – adding a religious message and perspective to Greco-Roman classical studies. Early universities were founded by church officials, designed primarily to train prelates or ministers, taught with specified church-approved texts from a religious perspective, and presided over by bishops’ appointees or other ministers. Colonial American colleges followed the religious path of the early English universities.

The abolition movement in Britain and America was primarily led and supported by people driven by Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. The major role of Quakers before 1800 is generally acknowledged. However, "[m]ost recent assessments neglect, avoid, or dismiss the Evangelicals," one scholar noted, and their much greater role after Quaker efforts faded after 1800. By contrast, the prior generation of historians typically concluded that the "evangelical roots of radical abolition are well documented"; "the abolition movement grew out of evangelical Protestantism"; and "[t]here is no question of the importance of Evangelicalism in American anti-slavery." Quakers and Evangelicals publicized the horrors of slavery, and condemned slavery theologically as sin, while building on the revolutionary generation’s widespread discomfort with slavery, and achieving steps toward gradual emancipation in the northern states. Evangelicals after 1800 broadened the movement, appealing to many of those claiming conversion in the Second Great Awakening, and supported immediate abolition. Though not every leader or supporter was primarily motivated by religious beliefs, a large number were, and Judeo-Christian faith was crucial in the abolition movement. Those activities of the abolition movement consisted largely of Judeo-Christian religious speech: sermons and oratory, tracts and circulars, antislavery newspapers and other publications, and petitions.

The modern civil rights movement in America was directed and sustained by ministers and churches fervently proclaiming Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Its leaders were mostly black ministers, who preached religious sermons inside and outside churches, insisting on promised rights. Its organizations were primarily black churches, along with an association of ministers; and the demonstrators were mostly their congregations. Though the movement’s base of support grew to include many who acted on other impulses, and its approach adopted tactics from Gandhi and others, the civil rights movement remained primarily a product of Judeo-Christian faith and its religious speech. Its religious speech was evident in the leadership by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was "first and foremost ’a clergyman, a Baptist preacher,’ a Christian," and he led by the religious speech of sermons, addresses, books, interviews, and demonstrations. That can be seen in each of King’s major campaigns in the modern civil rights movement. Other leaders also advocated Judeo-Christian principles and nonviolence, through speeches and pamphlets, marches, and church rallies. The triumph of the modern civil rights movement came mostly from the religious speech of the larger religious wing of ministers and congregations, not of the much smaller secular wing.

Freedom of speech was conceptualized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and grew into common acceptance, primarily through Puritan belief in parrhesia in the Bible and through Puritans’ religion-based discourse asserting freedom of speech in books and sermons and speeches. This is, of course, contrary to the other authors, ancient and modern, who have discussed freedom of speech from a secular perspective based on parrhesia as it appeared in classical literature and other sources. However, those other authors generally underestimated the important role of freedom of speech in Puritan writing and thought and its influence on later English and American assertions of freedom of speech. The Puritan advocates of freedom of speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were quite aware of the classical uses of parrhesia – most had received a classical education, a significant portion at Oxford or Cambridge – but they deliberately chose instead to rely on the biblical basis for parrhesia. Their frequent assertions of freedom of speech call into question the contention that "[f]ree speech as we understand the term ... remained nearly unknown to legal or constitutional history and to libertarian thought on either side of the Atlantic before 1776," as Leonard Levy claimed.

A number of other freedoms, besides freedoms of speech and press, also developed out of the conflicts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England – most notably freedoms for the criminally accused, many of whom were prosecuted for the crime of their religious faith. As Puritans and others were charged with the crimes of preaching and printing dissident religious beliefs, they raised objections to each element of criminal prosecutions: searches, arrests, imprisonments, trials, and punishments. The most vocal objectors were the Levellers, radical "Puritans of the Left," who supplemented their objections with proposed freedoms or rights against unjust elements of prosecutions. Their objections and proposals were mostly in the fervent language of religious speech – religious appeals laden with biblical references – whether in statements at trial, transcripts of proceedings, or pamphlets. The best known Leveller leader, John Lilburne, in his three major criminal trials and in related pamphlets, identified and claimed all thirteen freedoms of the criminally accused that, 150 years later, were collected together in the Fourth through Eighth Amendments of America’s Bill of Rights. Lilburne also sought to legitimate and secure those rights as part of the rights of "free-born Englishmen" or of "the birthright of Englishmen."* Other Levellers advocated those rights.

The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.