Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Within the scholarship on ‘U.S. state and empire building in the longue durée’, Alaska plays a surprisingly small role.3 Past the sizable shelf of studies on World War II, the region also vanishes in the literature on the early years of the global Cold War, despite Alaska’s geopolitical prominence and the corresponding effects of additional defence spending, construction, and employment in the period leading up to statehood in 1959.4 Support for (essentially concurrent) statehood in Alaska and Hawai’i was unquestionably ‘entwined with the buildup of both territories as major Cold War defense installations’.5 To rectify that double oversight, and to draw together periods frequently rendered discrete, this chapter uses the United States (US) military, an institution pivotal to the establishment, expansion, and direction of Alaska as a settler colonial society, to stitch together a century of Alaskan history.

Chapter 7 examines the extent to which federal, state, and local governments can restrict public protest during public health and civil unrest emergencies. The chapter describes how the current system of emergency powers affects public protest rights, including through curfews, limits on movement, and bans on public gatherings. It rejects the notion that the First Amendment and other rights can be “suspended” during declared or undeclared emergencies and argues for strict judicial review of measures that ban or severely restrict public protest during emergencies. The chapter also addresses the role of the federal government, including U.S. armed forces personnel, in policing civil unrest and prosecuting protest-related offenses. It advocates a minimal federal presence and function at public protest events and urges federal cooperation with states and localities.

In the twenty-first century, scientists and the media track the health of the planet in the polar regions. Shrinking sea ice in the Arctic and Southern oceans, melting ice shelves in Nunavut, Greenland, and West Antarctica, and thawing permafrost in Alaska and Siberia are signals of global warming. This has led people to refer to these regions as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ or the ‘ground zero’ and ‘epicentre’ of climate change.1 Such metaphors impart an abstract quality to the polar regions, with rising temperatures and loss of ice serving merely as numbers on the dashboard of Spaceship Earth. This view of the polar regions as integral yet neutral – transparent indicators of a global system – has an intellectual and political history. Created by the scientific context of the Cold War, it provides a powerful, panoptic perspective of the planet while obscuring the heterogeneity and pluralism of beings and places.

The winds howled as the members of the First Combat Intelligence Platoon mushed their huskies through the darkness of an Arctic January day. Temperatures reached −43 degrees Celsius as the men scouted the river valleys and mountain passes of Alaska’s Brooks Range. This was no ordinary mission, and these men were no regular infantry. The platoon, comprised of soldiers from the Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG) – a military reserve force of Alaska Natives known as the ‘Eskimo Scouts’ – was the vanguard of the first reconnaissance survey of a petroleum pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope. In the early winter of 1945, three ATG patrols totalling eight men spearheaded a survey of a potential pipeline route from Livengood, north of Fairbanks, to Umiat on the North Slope. The men travelled over 3,200 km by dogsled in the middle of Arctic winter, battling snow deeper than a metre.

Humanity’s ascent into space began in 1929 when the German Army tested its first rocket, the A-1. But while militaries have always accounted for a large portion of human space activity, their use of the space environment has been constrained by a mutual self-interest in preserving access to it for communications, navigation, reconnaissance, weather forecasting, arms control verification and early warning. In 1962, the ‘Starfish Prime’ nuclear test demonstrated that nuclear explosions in space pose a major and indiscriminate threat to satellites. This prompted the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in space. This chapter addresses such tensions between the expansion of military capabilities in space and the need to keep space free of direct conflict. The chapter highlights the growing need for a treaty to ban the testing of ‘kinetic’ anti-satellite weapons, i.e. weapons that rely on violent impacts to destroy a satellite and thus create space debris. Although Russia tested such a weapon in November 2021, the very next month the United Nations General Assembly created an ‘Open Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats through Norms, Rules and Principles of Responsible Behaviours’. The chapter concludes with an examination of the potentially destabilising effects of an imminent extension of military activities to cis-lunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon, including special Moon–Earth orbits.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

Despite their diplomatic function, the Residents in office between 1798 and 1818 often preferred intimidation to accommodation. To some extent, their interventionist attitude reflected wider assumptions about the prevalence of ‘tyranny’, ‘inhumanity’, and misgovernment in India. These moral imperatives, combined with the supposed ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness of Indian allies, led Residents to argue for the necessity of unequal alliances backed by force. These convictions shaped the Residents’ relationships to the military, leading them to try and assert control over subsidiary forces in the region, and to panic when forces were disordered or insufficient. Subsidiary forces might have posed problems for the Resident, not least in the form of open mutiny, but they were also seen as essential to his control. Residents explicitly equated military and political power, and were determined to make a show of strength, contrary to the governor-general-in-council’s emphasis on conciliatory conduct. These differences of opinion become most apparent in the controversies that occasionally erupted around the Resident’s acts of judicial violence. Whereas superiors in London and Calcutta worried about undermining the Company’s claims to civilizational superiority through brutal acts of corporal punishment, in the Residents’ view civilization was instead a hindrance to be cast aside.

This chapter illustrates the disputes around the revolution frame discussed in Chapter 6 and the impact of these contests. Supplemented by interviews with government officials, police officers, soldiers, and other ex-combatants, this chapter examines the long-term effects of government framing strategies that demonize rebel actors who may later become political figures. In particular, this chapter looks at how the “narco-terrorist” framing utilizes women guerrillas in particular to discredit the FARC and ELN and positions the government as the savior for these women. But upon demobilization, decades of stigmatization from these framing contests mean that ex-combatant are in constant fear of being discovered and have to hide their pasts. Indeed, many of them have lost homes and jobs once “outed” as former rebels.

There is a tension in military culture between the growing acceptance of moral injury and an idealized view of Stoicism that leaves little room for the guilt and shame, mercy and forgiveness characteristic of moral injury and repair. Does that emotion-lean view do justice to ancient Stoic doctrine? I argue that it does not. The emotions of the Stoic moral aspirant, such as shame and moral distress, bear striking similarities to the negative self-reactive attitudes that P.F. Strawson famously discusses. Notions of mercy and forgiveness speak to the positive reactive attitudes. I develop my argument by turning to Seneca’s essay, On Mercy and his play, the Trojan Woman. Mercy, Seneca insists, makes good on the gentler side of Stoicism. Learning from the mercy others show us, and that we would show them, is one way that soldiers can begin to show mercy towards themselves.

Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco must have felt a deep and unbearable contradiction whenever they reflected on their lives. From birth, each could claim many of the essential traits of honorable men. In theory, all three murderers possessed the ideal masculine qualities of their era. All of them enjoyed the honorific title “don,” as did members of their families. Even for poverty-stricken Spaniards, the titles don and doña suggested status above the plebeian mob. But in 1789, in contrast to their inherited status, each of these men lived as a poor and dishonorable criminal. The escalating daily tension that they experienced between their privileged birth as white male Spaniards and their experience as outcasts ramped up in the summer and fall of that year as they struggled to find money and to defend themselves from the repercussions of their previous crimes. Finally this painful internal conflict motivated them to kill. From their point of view, only a windfall of cash could end their struggle between who they believed themselves to be and their actual existence as rogues.

Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.

Chapter 4 traces the wartime emergence of undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus by the Moreno Network. It analyzes how the Moreno Network was forged by an elite clique of military intelligence officers granted extraordinary discretion while infiltrating the state apparatus to combat Guatemala’s insurgent groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the heightened sense of threat, this counterinsurgent elite introduced a series of predatory institutional arrangements to capture customs revenues. The chapter also examines how the illicit customs procedures were enforced by the Moreno Network, both through the use of violent and nonviolent coercion and through the co-optation of security forces and other state agencies.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

Chapter 5 examines the wartime origins of undermining rules governing extrajudicial killing by Guatemala’s National Police (PN). It argues that the development of such procedures is rooted in the specialization of the police force and the broad discretion granted to concentrated groups of police elites amid the late 1960s period of perceived threat escalation. Specifically, with the creation of highly insulated elite investigative units like the Detective Corps [Cuerpo de Detectives], previous extralegal violence waged by right-wing death squads was institutionalized as routine state activity. The new rules were sanctioned by top military intelligence officials, who devised clear procedures for how to frame the resulting killings to the public.

In the post-Waterloo era a large body of military tales were published in Britain that recounted veterans’ experiences of the Napoleonic Wars for the general reading public. Chapter 5 examines Thomas Hamilton’s The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827), a fictionalised treatment of the author’s military service. This chapter argues for the central importance of Cyril Thornton not only in inaugurating the genre of military novel, but also for its formative role in the rise of modern war novels more broadly. While war novels are traditionally associated with soldier-authors of the First World War, Hamilton’s novel was nonetheless the first to offer what Paul Fussell views as the basis of all modern war stories – the reformulation of the romance of war around the physical survival of the soldier. By narrating the traumatic tale of the junior military officer, the novel may have quite literally enabled a subaltern to speak, but the novel also simultaneously reduces the officer to a suffering body in ways that reveal the total hold of a militarized biopower over discourses of war, a bio-aesthetics that has continued to reverberate across modern war writing.