The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

The independence of Latin America was intrinsically connected to broader Atlantic processes and networks of the Atlantic World. Throughout the process that resulted in political autonomy and republicanism in most of Spanish America, strong networks of trade and nascent diplomatic relations with Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese empire and later Brazil, Haiti, St. Thomas, Curaçao, and the United States allowed revolutionaries to resist, escape, return, persist, and ultimately prevail. Rather than seeing foreign countries as outside the scope of the confrontations, this chapter integrates this international sphere into a broader geography of conflict. The commercial negotiations and diplomatic confrontations with foreign powers in the Caribbean, in the Atlantic, and in the Pacific oceans were crucial to determining the outcome than the military confrontations throughout Spanish America. The chapter focuses on the commercial networks and formal and informal diplomatic relations at play during the independence period; thus, decentering the state as the focus of analysis and paying closer attention to merchants, seafarers, envoys, and other border-crossing denizens of the Atlantic.

Relations between different regions of Anatolia and Etruria show main movements from east to west, but they also reveal some objects going the other way, from west to east. Exchange was made in several ways, including trade in goods and substances as well as immigration of skilled workers. The idea of a monumental funerary landscape developed in Etruria, probably influenced by North Syria or Anatolia. Tomb- and vase-painting show intense East Greek activity in Etruria, and East Greeks returning home brought goods from Etruria and gifted them as votive offerings to divinities: Bucchero – the national Etruscan pottery – has been found at Miletus and Samos, and Etruscan wine amphoras have been found at Miletus and Phocaea. Through East Greek cities (especially Miletus), Etruscan bucchero also arrived at the northern Black Sea coast. Such imports show that Etruscan goods were appreciated in East Greece and that some reflections of their knowledge may be identified in Greek and non-Greek handcraft. In Anatolia Etruscans also had connections with other non-Greek peoples, such as Lydians, and Lydian imports are known in Etruria.

Anatolia and Etruria have been separated by scholarship as much as by the Mediterranean itself. Although Anatolian archaeology has rested in the preserve of Near Eastern scholars, with Etruscan studies falling more within the domain of Classical-oriented scholars, neither sits at the center of Near Eastern or Classical Archaeology. Recent theoretical developments that seek to connect communities more effectively have begun to emphasize the links between these cultural groups and thus bring together their respective scholarly disciplines. This contribution examines the history of interest in the relationship between Anatolia and Etruria, and it reassesses our evidence for it within a Mediterranean-wide context. To do this, it considers historical interpretations of these connections and presents a new perspective that balances shared practices with localized differences, which increasingly is preferred to characterize this period of Mediterranean history.

This paper compares how ideas of power, rank, and status were communicated in Etruria and Anatolia in the Orientalizing period by the use of material items and images. By employing and exhibiting specific objects, elites used a non-verbal language to communicate with each other across frontiers in the Mediterranean area as well as to show their wealth and their sophistication in their own surroundings. Trade networks have been discovered, analyzed, and exhibited on various occasions in the last decade. However, we now have to deal with the significance of the selection, collection, and use of certain luxury items to the ostentation of accumulated wealth that are better known from the courtly societies of the Near and Middle East. The desire for possessing these items can be perceived in personal or private as well as social terms. As many of the items belong to the sphere of banqueting, it is mandatory to link the two worlds in question vis-à-vis this praxis of consumption and social events.

This chapter argues that the conflict at sea was an important and frequently overlooked part of the Napoleonic Wars. Focusing primarily on the Royal Navy and French maritime forces, but also mentioning the navies of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and United States, it outlines the manifold ways in which maritime warfare shaped wider events on land, and helped determine the conflict’s final outcome. It demonstrates that French attempts to invade Britain were successfully rebuffed by the Royal Navy, ensuring that Britain remained in the conflict. The chapter then offers a more modern take on the commonly misunderstood Battle of Trafalgar, arguing that it was far from decisive and did little to change the course of the war. The naval conflict continued in earnest after 1805, and the war of trade became all-consuming, particularly after the inception of ‘Napoleon’s Continental system’. Here the navy offered a stubborn resistance to the French Emperor’s objectives, helping to encourage illicit trade with the European continent while also expanding Britain’s empire and mercantilist reach elsewhere in the globe. Finally, it demonstrates that maritime support was crucial to the land war, not least Wellington’s Peninsula campaign.

This chapter aims to analyse the interactions between Jews and Christians in sixth-century South Arabia, offering some reflections on the broader Late Antique socio-economic and political map. The first part reconstructs the spread of Christianity in South Arabia and the events leading to the massacre of the Christians of Najrān in 523, presenting a comprehensive analysis of this period through a reading of literary and epigraphic material. It argues that economic reasons were the main motivations behind the negus’s invasion of South Arabia and that faith was exploited as a casus belli. Conversions tended to be the cumulative result of socio-economic networks and migrations, as the exchange of ideas followed that of resources. As such, the depiction of the massacre of Najrān as a ‘religious slaughter’ reflects more the ‘religious’ character of the available literary sources than the actual unfolding of the events. The second part of the chapter focuses on the Red Sea Christianities. It examines the religious allegiances of the Aksūmite negus Kālēb and the Ḥimyarite king Abraha, shedding light on the several stages involved in the Christianisation of these two regions and reconstructing the events that led to the collapse of Ḥimyar.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

Chapter 5 examines how considerations of coherence manifest in the use of analogical reasoning by investor-state tribunals. In particular, it demonstrates through concrete examples and case studies that the persuasiveness and correctness of an arbitral award based on analogical reasoning depends on the degree of its internal coherence. It is argued that coherence in an analogical inference manifests in two ways. Firstly, in a methodological sense, coherence manifests itself in the way the adjudicator frames the legal question at issue and in the degree to which the analogy, as drawn, satisfies the elements of similarity, structural parallels, and purposiveness. Secondly, in a substantive sense, coherence manifests itself in the normative contextualisation of the legal question and in the moral appeal of the proposed interpretation derived from the analogy.

Chapter 1 takes the long view of regional development in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands, from prehistory through Veracruz’s foundation in 1519 and its refounding as Nueva Veracruz in 1599. It examines geography, environment, and how human societies mediated coastal spaces before the seventeenth century. It culminates with Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, which followed an extended battle between powerful merchants in Mexico City, Seville, and Puebla and Veracruz’s own cabildo. While metropolitan merchants and administrators wanted to locate the city closer to port facilities at San Juan de Ulúa, local officials resisted the move, arguing the coastal climate was “unfit for the sustenance of life” and proposing to relocate it further into the mainland interior. By the end of the sixteenth century, metropolitan forces had won out, moving Veracruz closer to the port and securing the primacy of coastal climates and maritime commerce and migration in its social and cultural development in the seventeenth century.

Chapter 3 examines regional trade networks, drawing on archival records of import and export tax duties assessed in the ports of Veracruz, Havana, and Cartagena. Contrasting regional trade with transatlantic trade—which was larger than regional trade by volume and value and has thus occupied most scholarly attention—I show that ships moved between Veracruz and the Caribbean Islands and mainland littoral with greater frequency than they did between Veracruz and Europe. Shipping within the Mexican-Caribbean was also not entirely a byproduct of transatlantic trade, as we often imagine, but a distinct circuit following its own seasonal patterns. Focusing on seasonality and other “soft” factors, I argue that rather than seeing regional trade simply as a secondary consequence of transatlantic trade, we can see it as a primary means through which people in the Mexican-Caribbean world created material links to one another and participated in a common commercial system.

The visit by the US table tennis team to China in April 1971 famously helped break the ice between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. Less well known is the second leg of ping-pong diplomacy, in which the US and Chinese teams faced off again – in the United States. This was nonetheless an historic exchange: The Chinese team was the first official delegation of visitors from the PRC to ever visit the United States. This chapter shows how this successful sporting exchange helped transform Nixon and Mao’s secret diplomacy into a broader rapprochement between Chinese and US societies. It reveals how the success of the ping-pong return leg underpinned the successful effort by the hosts of the table tennis players – the National Committee on US-China Relations – to convince both the US and Chinese governments to recognize their organization and their allies at the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC as the foremost US conduits for managing exchanges with China. The chapter concludes with a connected development: the 1973 creation of a third private US organization to manage Sino-American societal interactions, the National Council for United States-China Trade.

Chapter 8 argues that any steps or program can be effective only if they adopt a justice lens and reject proposed technical and market fixes that threaten to perpetuate the same inequities, corporate agendas, and extractivist mentality that created the climate and ecological crisis in the first place.

The invention of money was one of the major factor that allowed governments, corporations, and individuals to consolidate power. This chapter reviews the history of money and its various forms. The globalized economy depends on the free flow of money, and trade is an enormous source of wealth and power. Trading economies have proven to be stronger and more flexible across history, and is the source of various power centers throughout history: the Mediterranean Middle East, the European West, modern China, etc. have all been made powerful through trade, whereas isolationists have found themselves at strong disadvantages. The pursuit of trading wealth has been the source of wars and social conflicts, as well as the spread of colonialism and chattel slavery. Disparities of power and wealth due to the economic power of the global economy continue to this day. However, globalization has also created enormous benefits for many populations around the world. Worldwide, literacy has increased and longer lifespans are the result of access to modern medicines and health care.