The Seventh Crusade – the forces of which left Europe in 1248 and would go on to wage campaigns in Egypt, 1249–50, and Palestine and Syria, 1250–54 – stands out from other crusades as the product of the singular efforts of King Louis IX of France (r. 1226–70). He could take primary responsibility for the achievements of this project and, certainly in his own mind, an equal responsibility for the miserable failures for which it is primarily remembered. In Latin Christendom, news of the collapse of the Seventh Crusade in Egypt was greeted with distress, and the failure would mark a turning point in both the crusading movement as a whole and in Louis’ reign. It would also prove, when Louis was canonised in 1297, to be a central episode in narratives of his sanctity. For the Muslim world, Louis’ campaign in Egypt marked a far-reaching change, since the Seventh Crusade was a crucial factor in the overthrow of the Ayyubid sultanate of Egypt, and the establishment of the Mamluk regime.

“Behind the Deadline, April 1864–April 1865” examines the “second” Camp Ford – the prison camp after it swelled in size to become the largest Confederate camp west of the Mississippi River. The chapter provides a rich and textured cultural, environmental, and social history of the Union prisoners and how their increased numbers and the subsequent increase in the camp’s physical size from five to ten acres shaped their experience within and outside the new stockade. This chapter explores in detail prison life and death during Camp Ford’s most cramped and dangerous time.

“Paths to Captivity, 1863” provides background and context for the construction of Camp Ford and for those Union soldiers first imprisoned there. It describes how and where Confederates captured the first wave of Union prisoners in 1863, and it traces their journeys from Arkansas, Louisiana, or the Gulf Coast to the new prison outside of Tyler. Chapter 2 offers a framework for those early prisoners, guards, and civilians who intersected at Camp Ford.

“Influx, April 1864” takes the story outside Camp Ford to track down the next influx of Union prisoners – most of whom were captured in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana during the Red River Campaign of 1864. While much of the chapter takes place beyond the camp, the story remains focused on the future prisoners – their capture, transit, and ultimate incarceration. The chapter provides readers with a more conventional military context that culminates in a convergence of thousands more prisoners in what soon became an overcrowded prison.

“Imprisoned, July 1863–April 1864” is devoted primarily to the “first” Camp Ford from 1863 to 1864 – the prison camp before it was contained by a wooden stockade built by local enslaved people. This chapter examines the daily existence of the early federal prisoners and how they interacted with camp guards, local civilians, and enslaved people. It includes detailed discussions for how the natural environment shaped the prisoner experience and how prisoners shaped their environment.

The First World War both established and altered norms for the treatment of prisoners of war across the globe. In the Pacific, Japan had already been internationally celebrated during the Russo-Japanese War for its supposed exemplary treatment of prisoners, a practice which continued, albeit with some notable alterations, when the Japanese took some 4,800 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in 1914. The other main holder of prisoners of war in the Pacific was the British Empire, with camps dotted around its various colonies and dominions, many of which would be reused in the Second World War. These camps served as sites for containing undesirables, spaces to dispatch the spillover from other colonies, or, in the case of Tanglin camp in Singapore, a site of anti-imperial rebellion. This chapter looks at captivity within these two empires during the First World War, not only to highlight differences and similarities with captivity in Europe, but also to trace how a camp network in the Pacific region was developed and modelled on broader patterns of internment.

At the crossroads of international law and global military history, this chapter revises the traditional story of violent encounters between Japanese guards and American prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War. It resituates those relationships within the shifting contours of international humanitarian law, highlights their position within a broader transnational dynamic of captivity that evolved between the two nations, and recontextualizes them within the Japanese Empire’s management of prisoners throughout the wider Asia-Pacific region before and during the conflict. It shows that there was nothing inherent to “Japanese” character or culture that led to the inhumane treatment of POWs. Although Japan increasingly disregarded international legal protections for POWs throughout the 1930s, it was ultimately institutional inadequacy and deteriorating material conditions in the besieged Japanese Empire that explained prisoners’ mistreatment.

This conclusion reflects on the importance of studying the two world wars as moments of interconnectedness, when societies, economies, and cultures interacted with one another across national boundaries. It insists on the importance of moving beyond solely diplomatic, military, and political histories to instead prioritize transnational and transimperial perspectives, acknowledging groups and individuals above and below the level of states. Several categories are particularly useful in this endeavor: home fronts, colonial mobilization, captivity, occupations, and neutrality. Taking stock of these helps to highlight new frameworks of experience spread across the world. Finally, there is the important question of the relationship between the world wars and globalization. By their nature and by the reactions they prompted, these two global conflicts were ultimately the agents as much as the opponents of that process.

Although children have migrated as long as people have, the child migrant story has received increasing attention in the United States since the “child migrant crisis” of 2014. At the same time that child migrants have been thrust into the media spotlight, a growing body of work in migration studies has emphasized necropolitics. As enduring symbols of vitality in literature and culture, children are supposed to be the antithesis of death. Focusing on descriptions of nine-year-old Javiercito/Chepito’s body and language in Javier Zamora’s 2022 memoir Solito, this chapter shows that efforts to contain the unaccompanied child migrant physically, temporally, and linguistically call attention to the necropolitics of migration, undocutime (the slow violence of illegality), and the coloniality of migration in the Americas—in particular, the United States’ expansion of its southern border and the role of youth in its extractive relationship to Latin America.

This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

This chapter reorients readings of Harriet Jacobs’s and Harriet Wilson’s (semi)autobiographies as narratives of disability. I underscore the inextricable links between girlhood, labor, and disability began in their self-authored texts, alongside Jean Fagan Yellin’s publication of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers and other documents which detail the life of Harriet Wilson. I argue that these life writings demonstrate each woman’s post-captivity labors as a challenge to nineteenth-century extractive economies of bondage. Studying the (semi)autobiographies, public and private correspondence, journal entries, and newspaper advertisements related to Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson not only makes legible their disabled lives, but also provides a complex understanding of the interrelation between labor, disability, capacity, and resistance.