Chapter 3 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly prosperous (and sometimes increasingly populous) parish churches of larger communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the city of Norwich as well as clusters of related buildings in York and London.

Chapter 4 examines how the open-plan type was adopted in and adapted to the increasingly populous (and sometimes increasingly prosperous) parish churches of smaller communities across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Examples include a tightly connected group of churches in the county of Suffolk as well as clusters of related buildings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall.

The Introduction sets out the central question that this book aims to tackle: when, why, and how did we evolve the peculiar and paradoxical inclination for both war and peace that characterises our species? The book argues that the inclination for both intergroup coalitionary killing and peaceful cooperation have deep roots and that they co-evolved through a gradual, incremental trajectory over millions of years. This co-evolution unfolded in a mosaic-like pattern, with distinct but interacting components emerging at different moments and becoming integrated over evolutionary time.

With rising incomes, population growth speeds up and then slows as incomes climb. This demographic change is driven by economic growth, not the reverse. That was the case in northwestern Europe in particular, and its precocious economic growth did not result from any other demographic advantages such as an unusual family structure. Northwestern Europe did benefit, though, from highly productive agriculture that allowed northwestern Europe’s peasant farmers to feed a larger urban population than in China. They could do this from roughly 1500 on because unlike peasants in eastern Europe they were free of serfdom and their property rights that were secure. They also enjoyed a favorable natural environment. With the food they produced, northwestern Europe early on developed clusters of cities that were unknown elsewhere in Eurasia and that proved crucial for economic growth. These urban clusters helped circulate new technologies and ideas. Such urban agglomeration effects were critical to the Industrial Revolution.

This chapter asks how two subjects defined in the terms of ‘religion’ – the ‘Muslim’ and the ‘Jewish’ subject – became recognizable as such in the decades prior to the independence of the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Pakistan and the ‘Jewish National Home’ of Israel, which aligned the recognition and formation of the religious minority, the nation, and the state. It addresses the recognition of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their colonial pasts and analyses the role of demography, the claim for political representation, and the work of two international commissions that shaped the borders of their statehood. It shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and cemented very particular understandings of ‘religion’ and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of religious difference, the chapter illustrates the costs that come with the recognition of ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ in the transition from empire to state. The double face of the imperial recognition of the ‘Indian Muslims’ and the ‘Palestinian Jews’, in other words, worked both as a condition for legitimate government and power and as a resource for the future challenge against them.

This chapter provides a general overview of World War I, including the scale and character of the military campaigning; the depth of societal mobilization and the transformation of state–economy relations; the consequences for personhood and citizenship; the normalizing of mass killing and genocide; the war’s demographic catastrophe and the pervasiveness of violence and death. “Total war” is distinguished as a main theme for the early twentieth century, whether in the shape of popular experience or the impact of the interventionist capacities of states. Empire, colonialism, and the war’s globality are also marked.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.

Introduces the unresolved issues of the demographic history of Europe’s early modern cities. Introduces the Sharlin thesis, which challenged the demographic graveyard thesis. Describes the case study of Würzburg and the methodology used to address the unresolved issues.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

The chapter discusses the opposition faced by population control advocates within the United Nations from Socialist and Catholic states in the 1940s and 1950s. It outlines early discussions on population issues within the UN, the roles of organizations like UNESCO, FAO, and WHO, and challenges faced by proponents such as Julian Huxley. The document explores debates on overpopulation, humanitarian framings of birth control, and progress in anchoring population discourse in international institutions despite setbacks. It reflects on reframing birth control within a politically complex landscape shaped by the Cold War, decolonization, and economic development agendas. Additionally, the chapter delves into the emergence of interventionist population policies in the 1950s, focusing on initiatives by the Population Council and IPPF. It highlights the humanitarian and human rights arguments used to advocate for population control, discussing conferences and influential figures such as Margaret Sanger and Frederick Osborn in shaping the discourse around population control, eugenics, and individual rights in the Cold War era.

Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.