In Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedy Twelfth Night, Feste, Olivia’s jester, continually describes ambivalence in terms of imported iridescent material, describing Orsino’s mind as an opal and iridescent silk, referencing the multi-coloured Peruvian gemstone that flashes between turquoise and orange: ‘Now, the melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal’ (ii .vi.80). Valerie Traub has recently suggested that ambivalence may be a productive and uniquely early modern way of thinking through issues of race and gender. This chapter argues that the language of iridescence, coupled with the play’s multicultural setting, allows Shakespeare to explore not only what an ambivalent mind might look like, but also to champion and embrace ambivalence of identity, including foreignness, gender, and sexuality.

For contemporaries, crusading was always closely associated with the sea. Chroniclers frequently used terms such as passage d’outre-mer or passagium transmarinum to describe campaigns, and many wrote vividly about the great fleets assembled for expeditions to the East and of perilous sea crossings to the Levant. Yet despite this, comparatively little attention has been paid by historians to crusading from a maritime perspective. The primary reason for this is that few of the sources used by scholars to construct crusading history were written by contemporaries who were intimately familiar with maritime affairs, and fewer still were products of a cultural environment that was closely connected to shipping, commerce and seaborne transport. The sources most often used by historians of the crusades, in fact, provide us with an overwhelmingly land-based and often northern European perspective, which has, in turn, led to a rather blinkered view in the scholarship of the crusades from a maritime perspective.

Chapter 7 focuses on subsistence and prosperity in the Homeric world. It treats farmers and shepherds, sailors and traders, smiths and craftsmen, and the blurred boundary between commerce and raiding. By tracing how wealth is made, displayed, and lost, the chapter argues that the poems preserve a practical memory of work, vulnerability, and the precariousness of material security.

Liberalism is a foundational school of thought in International Relations with a well-established and rich intellectual heritage dating back to the seventeenth century. It seeks to address core problems in world politics, including the appropriate scope of state authority, the conditions underpinning international cooperation, and the maintenance of international stability. With liberal scholars most notably contributing to debates on the causes and limits of cooperation. Liberal scholars have made their most influential contributions by examining questions such as what enables or constrains cooperation between states, with many claiming that political, economic, and social integration between states leads to more peace and less war. However, liberalism emerged from Western historical and philosophical contexts, and while liberal scholars claim that it is universally applicable, its assumptions can be criticised for not reflecting non-Western experiences. This chapter evaluates liberalism’s applicability to the Middle East by applying liberal theory to the analysis of cosmopolitan law, examining in particular the impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on interstate relations. Thus, it applies liberalism to answer the following questions: do SEZs lead to greater economic integration between states in the Middle East? And is there any observable pacifying effect on political relations between trade partners?

In the third chapter we describe the takeoff of commercial banking in Latin America from midcentury onwards, as witnessed by the establishment of almost 100 joint-stock banks in the more dynamic economies of the region between 1850 and 1873. The creation of banks was especially notable in cities and ports of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Mexico and Uruguay, developments that have not previously been analyzed from a comparative perspective. Our text argues that the dynamics of export economies (from the early 1850s) as well as the entry of foreign direct investments (from the 1860s) generated demand for the creation of new types of financial enterprise that spurred early capitalism in Latin America. A striking feature was the growing prominence of large banks that had connections with public administrations, such as the Banco do Brasil (1853), which became a pillar of finance for the imperial government, and the Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (1854), a commercial bank that operated in Argentina as a key agency for the government and for ranchers and merchants. Finally, attention is turned to the Banco Español de la Habana, which became the main financial support for the Spanish colonial administration in Cuba during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878).

This first chapter explores the legacy of colonial credit as antecedent of nineteenth-century finance. The traditional credit systems were the lifeblood of circulation and property during the 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the New World. They were highly segmented in both colonial Spanish America and Brazil, and are comparable to those of early modern Catholic Europe, preceding the modern integration of credit and monetary markets. The increasing use of bills of exchange during the colonial era reflected the development of interregional systems of mercantile credit. Also of great interest was the creation of mining banks in Peru and Mexico in the eighteenth century. At the same time, the credit transactions supplied by hundreds of ecclesiastical institutions were of great importance for urban real estate proprietors and rural landowners throughout both Portuguese Brazil and Spanish America. In sum, the principal objective of our first chapter is to identify key aspects of the role of credit and finance in the performance of the colonial economies of Spanish America and Brazil, and to suggest how loans and debts wove complex networks of relationships between many economic and social actors before the outbreak of the wars of independence.

The fifth chapter of this book reviews the earliest banking crises experienced by different Latin American countries. The impact of the financial crisis of 1857 in Havana and Rio de Janeiro represents a clear case of transmission of a crisis from center to periphery, and allow us to speak of international financial contagion. On the other hand, the panic of 1864 in Rio de Janeiro was a notable example of financial imbalance with domestic roots. In the mid 1870s another cluster of financial crises ricocheted across Latin America. In those years, a series of bank panics occurred in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, accompanied by local stock market panics, currency crises and the abandonment of convertibility schemes. The most catastrophic financial debacle was that of Peru, where a dramatic debt default coincided with an exchange crisis and the collapse of the banking system in the years 1876–1879. The review of these early financial crises allows us to reflect on the diverse trajectories of Latin American banks and the possible causes of their relative fragility before the end of the century.

Worldwide vegetable production has increased, with onions and tomatoes being the most popular globally. Although technically a root, the potato is widely consumed as a vegetable. Unfortunately, people in rich countries are not eating enough vegetables. The types they do consume are often problematic as well – such as those in processed forms like crisps and sauces, or those that are air-freighted or grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. Emissions would be reduced if consumers changed their habits: eating more fresh, seasonal produce, being more accepting of cosmetic imperfections, and embracing traditional varieties. Though climate change adds risks, yields are unlikely to plummet in the coming decades. Production can be maintained while cutting emissions by modifying growing dates to take advantage of changing weather patterns and by improving soil health. Greenhouse production can be made more resource-efficient as well. In the long term, new varieties must be developed, but consumers ultimately hold the key to managing this transition.

Since the late 1990s, the quest for economic stability and security have been leading principles of Russian macroeconomic policies. To understand the genesis and influence of these building blocks of Russia’s macroeconomic policy choices the chapter first provides a chronology of macroeconomic policies from the early 1990s to the aftermath of the global pandemic thirty years later. The second part of the chapter describes how the full-scale invasion on Ukraine, Western economic sanctions and the emerging war economy have fundamentally changed Russia’s fiscal and monetary policy and international trade patterns since the early 2022.

Global fruit production has been increasing, but, as with vegetables, people are not consuming enough fruit. Bananas, watermelons, apples, grapes, and oranges are the most popular fruits. The impacts of climate change will vary because each fruit requires a specific climate to grow; however, an increased risk of pest attacks is likely to be a common theme. Despite this, overall production is unlikely to plummet due to climate change – at least for the next few decades. Among the top five fruits, bananas are more vulnerable to disease than apples. This is because only one commercial variety is cultivated worldwide, creating a lack of genetic diversity. The stagnation of orange production illustrates how devastating pest attacks can be. Managing the risks posed by climate change will involve cultivating local and traditional varieties, which in turn requires a shift in consumer preferences. In the immediate future, global production volumes may not decline, but there will be local bad years, and companies should consider diversifying their businesses.

Chapter 7 examines Gulliver’s Travels Parts II and III, with particular focus on the role of ideology, namely religion and sectarianism, in the context of global politics and trade. Swift saw modern Europe as a once-unified constitutional and ideological system (Christendom) that fell into a state of decay – a process accelerated by ideologies and policies motivated by hubris and aggression, such as absolutism, militarism, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. In doing so he illustrated essential dynamics of modernity, science, technology, and globalization and implied that their unrestrained development would lead to conflict rather than cooperation. He painted a picture of Asian governments, namely Japan, as foils to European governments: while they were despotic at home, they followed rational self-interest abroad, enabling cordial trade relations and a balance of power. By contrast, modern European colonial powers are satirized as being blinded by the pursuit of commercial monopolies and hence objects of foreign manipulation.

Chapter 2 explores how networks of power both reinforced and blurred social and occupational boundaries for non-Muslims. It examines which professions they were barred from, which they were pushed into, and which they came to dominate. In some instances, demand for goods and services such as music, dance, and alcohol created negotiated spaces where Muslims relied on non-Muslims, illustrating how exclusion and dependence coexisted in ways that unsettled rigid divisions – a dynamic analyzed through the concept of heterotopia. At the same time, although formally restricted from certain trades, non-Muslims were entrusted with sensitive occupations such as banking and currency exchange that required significant trust. Many also became leading merchants or specialized craftsmen, using transnational networks of co-religionists to expand their influence, advocate for greater rights, and secure a stronger position in regional commerce. The chapter introduces some well-established non-Muslim trading firms.

Trade wars are a recurring theme in interstate relations, even if the anomalous period of the Cold War gave the misimpression that high and low politics were no longer connected. This chapter explains the Realist perspective on trade relations and presents a framework for understanding the perspectives and options of different types of great powers, based on their distinct levels of market power (share of global imports) and market exposure (dependence on exports). These distinctions yield three archetypes, namely commercial great powers such as Victorian England, political great powers such as the United States, and disengaged great powers such as the Soviet Union. Key to understanding the position of China is that state’s movement across all three archetypes, such that it had once been disengaged, then was en route to becoming a great power, but changed direction in 2006 to become a political great power.

Portugal, Castile, and Catalonia completed separate reconquests of Muslim territory. In 1469, Princess Isabel of Castile married her cousin, Prince Fernando of Aragón. After inheriting their respective thrones, they fought a war establishing separate areas of the world for Portugal and Castile to explore. In 1492, they defeated the last Muslim king of Granada and allowed Christopher Columbus to seek a westward route to Asia for Castile, avoiding the Portuguese route eastward. Instead of Asia, he happened upon the Americas, which had been unknown to European cosmography. That same year, the monarchs expelled Jewish subjects who refused to convert to Christianity, two centuries after England and France had done so. Isabel and Fernando established a religious inquisition to enforce Christian orthodoxy on the population as a whole, including new converts. In another decision with far-reaching consequences, they arranged marriages for their children with Portugal, France, England, and the Habsburgs of Central Europe. The unplanned consequence of the Habsburg alliance, together with a series of premature deaths, left their grandson, Charles of Ghent, heir to a large collection of territories in Europe, as well as all the lands claimed for Castile in the Americas.