Among the requirements of a liberal order is the ability to pursue collective goals through enduring private organizations. Such organizations contribute to political checks and balances, which sustain individual freedoms. In the Islamic Middle East, a possible starting point for autonomous nonstate organizations was the Islamic waqf, a trust that an individual formed under Islamic law to provide designated social services in perpetuity. Waqfs came to control vast resources. They might have used their enormous wealth to constrain the state and advance the freedoms of their constituents. The resulting decentralization of power could have placed the Middle East on the road to liberalization and perhaps also democratization. However, despite their immense wealth, waqfs remained politically powerless. A key reason is that they were governed according to their deeds, not the preferences of their caretakers or beneficiaries. In these respects, Islamic waqfs differed from European corporations, which were self-governing organizations enjoying legal personhood. In the Middle East, waqfs supplied services that the corporation provided in Western Europe. For instance, whereas churches and universities operated as corporations, mosques and madrasas (Islamic colleges) were financed by waqfs. This institutional difference contributed to the interregional divergence in political patterns.

In addition to the personal characteristics, values, and knowledge, there are additional technical skills community consultants may want or need to develop, depending upon the type of work they are doing. Chapter 5 describes those additional skills and provides information about how community consultants can develop them.

After losing 500,000 soldiers in Russia during 1812, Napoleon quickly rebuilt his army in early 1813 to stop the pursuing Russians in Germany. His strategic situation took an unfavorable turn after Prussia broke its alliance with him and joined the Russians and British to form the Sixth Coalition. With Austria choosing to remain neutral, the Allies hoped to achieve a victory to convince Vienna to join the Coalition. Although the Allies took the offensive against his raw conscripts, Napoleon remained the master of operations. He drove the Allied army over 200 miles eastward in one month, earning important yet indecisive victories at Lützen and Bautzen. With the Allied army pinned against the Oder River in eastern Silesia, Napoleon agreed to an armistice brokered by the Austrians. Both sides used the time to build up massive forces and to woe Austria but Napoleon’s intransigence drove them to join the Coalition. After the armistice expired on 17 August, Napoleon won his only victory in the campaign at Dresden on 27 August. For the first time in the history of the coalition wars, the Allies had a plan of operations that Napoleon could not overcome. For the next six weeks, he chased phantoms, exhausting his troops, and grinding his army into the ground while the Allies defeated his subordinates in Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony. Finally, tired of running after an elusive enemy, Napoleon allowed himself to be surrounded in the city of Leipzig in the hope of finally waging and winning a decisive battle. The contest started on 16 October and ended with Napoleon commencing the retreat to France with a battered army on 19 October. Germany was lost.

In the weeks following Napoleon’s monumental defeat at the battle of Leipzig, Coalition forces failed to catch his army as it retreated through Germany and across the Rhine River. Regardless, the Allies decided to launch a comprehensive invasion of France from the North Sea to Switzerland. In late November 40,000 Prussian, British, and Russian troops invaded Holland. One month later, 200,000 Allied soldiers crossed the Upper Rhine to invade Alsace, Switzerland, and Franche-Comté. Shortly after, on New Year’s Day, an additional 75,000 men crossed the Middle Rhine and drove through Lorraine toward the fortress of Metz. By the end of January, Holland and Belgium had fallen, and two Allied armies stood at the Marne and Aube Rivers ready to march on Paris. This circumstance forced Bonaparte to leave his capital and finally assume personal command of the army. After ferocious fighting in February, Napoleon made a daring gamble. To threaten the Coalition’s lifeline across the Rhine, he decided to maneuver against the rear of the main Allied army in the hope of forcing it to withdraw from France. With the French emperor between them and the Rhine River, the Allies took advantage of the open roads to reach Paris. The city surrendered on 31 March. Six days later, Napoleon abdicated unconditionally.

The chapter examines Churchill’s role on the international stage and his summit diplomacy with Roosevelt and Stalin. Faced with the surprise collapse of France in 1940, he was forced to seek new partners, assiduously courting the United States while seizing the opportunity of an alliance with the Soviet Union. The result was that he had to juggle the conflicting demands of Roosevelt and Stalin, embarking on strenuous personal diplomacy in the face of declining British influence. The chapter reviews the key decisions of the major meetings before looking at their postwar legacy in Churchill’s attempts to advance European reconciliation and his ultimately unsuccessful bid to resume summitry with the Soviet Union.

Langston Hughes spent a year in Carmel, California, beginning at the culmination of his round-the-world trip in 1933 and ending with his fleeing for fear of vigilante violence in the summer of 1934. During this time, he became increasingly involved in the Carmel John Reed Club (JRC), in part through his relationship with Ella Winter, with whom he wrote a play based on a local cotton strike, Blood on the Fields. He published his poem “Wait” (1934) in the West Coast JRC organ, The Partisan. This chapter argues that the work Hughes produced through his affiliation with the JRC displays a “coalitional aesthetics” that reflects the organizational mode of the clubs themselves. By addressing the specific labor concerns of the San Joaquin Valley alongside those of other regions, states, nations, and continents, it simultaneously focuses on both the molar and the molecular, ultimately enacting – at the level of form – coalitional networks of solidarity that cut across racial and geographic designations.

Building on the turn to religious and political networks in the field of early modern women’s writing, the Introduction draws on the theory of intersectionality and the historiography of Puritan culture to argue that uses of the female voice in early Stuart England cut across lines of gender to build coalitions and undermine the essentialism on which the field is based. Challenging critics who suggest that early modern male ventriloquism leads to repression of the female voice, the Introduction offers the counter-example of Thomas Scott, who uses Esther’s words to articulate his own radical politics. Situating the present study as a necessary intervention in a field that is increasingly marginalized even as its archive has ballooned and its dispersal celebrated, this book answers the call for a larger narrative that puts the female subject and her voice at the heart of the early Stuart political imaginary.

This chapter explores the borders of education in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Europe, specifically addressing the informal ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, Northern France, where University of East London (UEL) colleagues taught an accredited Life Stories short course between September 2015 and October 2016. It suggests that this pedagogy apparently beyond the borders of the conventional university is in some ways precisely the terrain of the university and education more generally. It disassembles ‘education’ itself, in a context where it was at the same time a humanitarian response, a human right and a political field of reciprocity, traversed by processes of coalition, commoning and association. Within this field, the outside of the camp, more than the camp itself, might appear as a jungle, irrational and denying humanity, while the ‘Jungle’ space itself contested neoliberal education and counterposed its own ‘university’.

Although the inscriptions contain bountiful self-representations of royal performances, personas, and encounters, they by no means present an exegesis on the political system as such. To build a view of five centuries and more of societal success we must look beyond these individual expressions to the way that they synergise with other sources, revealing patterns that can only be appreciated in the assemblage. This chapter therefore moves to draw together the different themes examined in Part II so as to offer a synthetic interpretation of Classic Maya political culture, both as it was constituted in the specific unit and the interactive whole.