This chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases.

Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

Literature and history, the two largest fields in the humanities, now give significant attention to worldwide dimensions of their disciplines. This volume, with five essays by world literary scholars and five by world/global historians, explores issues that criss-cross the contested terrain of globalization. Historian Neilesh Bose, the leader in assembling this productive exchange, saw the benefits in focusing the book on India—long a nexus of global discourse and institutional diversity— without abandoning the subcontinent's heritage of area-studies analysis. The result brings a fresh look at the global, with a wealth of materials.

The volume draws on two centuries of Indian writing in global literature and history—a nexus of global thought from numerous perspectives. For scholars in India as elsewhere, a core concern within the two expanding disciplines is contemporary globalization, with its social and environmental transformations and crises. At the same time, authors and critics in both fields are expanding the scope of their work along temporal, spatial, and topical axes. Attention to topics beyond elite dominance creates space for such issues as the lives of commoners, the complexities of gender, the significance of ancient antecedents, assumptions on human agency, and the limits of nature. Each of the resulting perspectives necessarily entails challenges to the priorities of others, so that a growing range of issues now contends for space in the understanding of the global.

African economies were globally integrated yet regionally autonomous. This chapter addresses volume and direction of slave trade, continental and regional export value, and theories of economic growth and enslavement. Details address the varying regional peaks in slave trade as related to warfare, population, regional social orders, and gender relations. The overseas diaspora grew to 10% of the African total of some 140 million. African economies felt the effects of imperial rivalries and global trade, notably in textiles. (Large-scale colonial rule came only after 1870.) The eighteenth century brought expanding overseas slave trade and its steady incursions into domestic economies. The nineteenth century brought a mix of economic changes. Silver became key to African currencies; peasant agricultural exports rose, but only the post-1870 exports of South African diamonds and gold exports exceeded slave-trade earnings. In the ‘second slavery’, African enslavement reached a mid-century peak, in parallel to current maritime Asian and New World plantations. Analysis of African economies benefits from growing collections of empirical data; contending theories on enslavement, the domestic economy, and overseas trade – developed over half a century of analysis – can be strengthened in global context.

This overview of the book introduces the Human System as an open, historical, and adaptive system, formed 70,000 years ago by a founding human community as its members created syntactic language. The system grew to the point where it is now in trouble because of excessive growth and painful social inequality. Analysis relies on Darwinian assumptions of evolutionary growth – biological, cultural, and social – as these processes coevolve with each other and with Gaia, a model of the natural world of living things. The discipline of world history is introduced to provide the framework for the narrative and the underlying analysis: world history combines concepts, data, and perspectives from multiple disciplines in natural and social sciences. It gives special attention to behavior of human groups as well as individuals. The chapter concludes by reviewing the book’s argument, presenting two or three historical and analytical hypotheses for each chapter: these hypotheses are to be documented, tested, and debated in the details of each chapter.

Innovations of the Anthropocene rely on expanded group agency. Popular culture, growing first through literacy, brought successful antislavery campaigns. A spate of twentieth-century media highlighted celebrities, reaching across family and ethnic lines. New knowledge arose at both general and specialized levels. Literacy and the internet have now reached most adults, while specialized knowledge, in disciplines within universities and institutes, confirms human biological equality. Yet results can be contradictory: patents enabled monopolization of knowledge, while open-source computing brought its sharing. The juncture of popular culture with the exchanges of knowledge created a global discourse: indeed, a democratic discourse, in that more and more participated. Topics ranged across the claims of indigenous peoples, the meaning of equality, gender issues, environmental worries, and religious views. Ideologies conflicted, since social priorities and perspectives varied, yet debate continued. This trajectory yields a call for global debate more than for world government – a balance among multiple perspectives rather than delegation to a global elite.

Social institutions collided from 1000 to 1600 CE, halting population growth. Gaia brought the Medieval Warm Era, nourishing prosperity from 800 to 1200 CE, until the Black Plague infected the Old World. The sixteenth-century mortality wave of the Americas reinforced population shrinkage; declining agriculture reinforced the cooling of the Little Ice Age. Meanwhile, earlier prosperity had encouraged ambitions among warriors: their bellicose emotions revealed links of social and biological human nature as they destroyed empires in China and the Mediterranean. The Mongols regime supported commerce and knowledge exchange, yet their legacy brought further warfare. Maritime encounters brought other collisions, especially after the tenth century. Transoceanic routes, completing the global trade network, spread disease, conflict, and mortality. Inherited representations of the world met with challenge: the major religions each experienced doctrinal schisms. The sixteenth century, while it offered innovative elements of global expansion, also reproduced the collisions of previous centuries, revealing the inherent challenges and limits to the human order.

The “society” emerged in the warmth of the early Holocene, absorbing the preceding communities and confederations into institutions of more than a thousand members. The chapter contrasts two models of society, exploring whether diversity was beneficial or harmful. A cultural-evolution model places a premium on evolutionary unity within societies, so that each would maximize internal cooperation and fare better in conflict with others. A social-evolutionary model emphasizes diversity within society, favoring migration, multiple institutions, and tension of network and hierarchy. Further modeling of social evolution traces, society, its clans, and its elites, as both networks and hierarchies emerged in the institutions of agriculture, animal husbandry, artisanal workshops, towns, and judiciary. Some societies grew larger: they built states, measured time and created calendars. Agriculture supported cities but also sustained migrations: agriculture created enough greenhouse gases to warm Earth. Afro-Eurasian advances led the mid-Holocene in literacy, empires, water supply, and large-scale religion.

This chapter, presenting the main theoretical statements on social evolution, stems from the hypothesis of a sudden rise of spoken, syntactic language in Northeast Africa, 70,000 years ago. The youth among a small population of Founders formed a cohesive group through the shared efforts of developing agreed-upon syntax and vocabulary, and then formed a community of roughly 150 persons to sustain their language. These were the initial social institutions. These institution led to creation of others, such as for ritual and migration, and enabled processes of social and institutional evolution: innovation (through representation or modeling as a source of variation), inheritance (through social reproduction and regulation), and the assessment of the fitness of institutions for the community. These processes brought into existence the Human System. At the multiple scales of family, community, and cross-community networks, it underwent coevolution among biological, social, cultural, and environmental influences, yielding a “group-level human nature” that relied on emotions at group as well as individual levels.