This chapter explores the intertwined concepts of war and peace in the political, religious and cultural frameworks of the ancient Near East, particularly in Mesopotamia and Assyria. It traces the evolution of warfare from early city state conflicts to the large-scale imperial campaigns of the first millennium BC. The text examines how war was legitimized through divine sanction, ritual practices and ideological narratives, portraying kings as divinely mandated warriors. It also details the organization of armies, military technologies and intelligence strategies, especially under the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Peace is presented not as the absence of war but as a condition imposed through treaties, vassalage and imperial control, often following conquest. The chapter highlights the theological and ritual dimensions of both war and peace, including divination, purification and treaty ceremonies. It concludes by addressing the human cost of war, the role of deportations, and the post-war integration of conquered peoples. Through a multidisciplinary lens, the chapter reveals how war and peace were central to statecraft, ideology and societal order in the ancient Near East.

The story of a trader introduces the historical actors who made and transformed Mexico City during the seventeenth century. A tour of the landscape situates their lives in an American metropolis – a capital and commercial city sustained by working people. A discussion of residents’ economies underlines the focus on individuals and their economic goals. An overview of the city’s governance explains how and where people acted politically. A demographic profile confirms that this history is about people from all over the world: Native Americans; free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia; colonists and migrants from Europe; and all their descendants. Their experiences, their urban history, affirm archival reconstruction as a way to chart change over time from the perspective of people who made a living doing essential work, selling food, transporting goods, providing care, and valuing silver, the city’s money.

The chapter reconstructs the previously untold history of the rise of the central market food complex over the course of the seventeenth century, a space that straddled the Main Square and Volador Square. Nahua market women defended their privilege to sell what they called fruits of the earth. Recent migrants paid rent at city hall to secure a stall at the food court. African-descended poultry vendors obtained trading licenses at the Viceroyal Palace. They all convinced officials to support their businesses because they provisioned the city.

Although liberty has been valued in various ways in many times and places, only in Europe did it become a central preoccupation before the nineteenth century, and a subject of widespread public reflection. Appeals to liberty and concerns about it found expression in two idioms: a singular one that harked back to Rome and Greece, and regarded liberty as universal or innate; and a plural one associated with the overlapping jurisdictions of ‘feudal’ society that saw liberty as an assemblage of separate rights or privileges (often taken as synonyms), attributed sometimes to custom and sometimes to higher authorities that granted them. Although distinct, the two languages were seldom seen as in tension before the eighteenth century. The chapter examines their relations in different contexts and concludes by noting that the very pervasiveness of claims to enjoy, embody, or represent liberty led to a recognition of how easily invocations of it could become rhetorical tools to justify control over others, leading to Machiavelli’s incisive reflections on the dialectical relations between liberty and domination.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

The Macedonia Alexander left in spring 334 BCE was principally the making of his father Philip II, though Philip’s ‘Macedonia proper’ had been largely a recovery of the Argead realm of Alexander I more than a century earlier. Early expansion from Pieria into the central plain of Bottiaea established a core of Argead control in Lower Macedonia. Following the retreat of Xerxes’ army after 479, Alexander I took full advantage of a power void to expand into the eastern region, conquering eastern Mygdonia, annexing Crestonia and Bisaltia eastwards to the Strymon valley and gaining control of rich supplies of mineral deposits and timber. Most of the eastern territory was lost after 450 BCE, but Philip II, in addition to recovering the old kingdom and consolidating Upper with Lower Macedonia, through conquest and diplomacy more than doubled the politically controlled territory of Macedonia. His transformation of Macedonia included the subjugation of Paeonians, Illyrians, Thracians and Triballians, the opening up of trade and securing of mining, control of Epirus, domination of Thessaly and the uniting of the southern Greek poleis under his hegemony. Alexander inherited a stable kingdom, a tested army of Macedonians, subordinate allies and a secure supply line to Asia.