In addition to asking Rome for more money to defend the Mediterranean, Philip also pressed for higher taxes from the people of the Low Countries to pay for their own defense. Castile could no longer send more money there. It had already done so intensively between 1556 and 1559 to defeat France. The Castilian elites were unwilling to continue paying for wars they did not consider their own. Their Flemish subjects, however, were reluctant to accept this tax increase, especially in a context of religious repression. Various political and institutional problems prevented Philip from achieving the tax reform he intended. What began as a revolt ended up as a costly and endless war that demanded an even greater financial effort from Castile and determined the rest of the reign.

In the first two years of his reign, the thirty-year-old Philip had to mobilize as much cash as possible to fight the war declared by France and to refinance the debts of his father into long-term term juros. He did this while in Flanders and while dealing with a reluctant administration in Castile. The procedure for the refinancing was laid down in a letter of April 1557 to the Council of Finance in Madrid. The chapter shows that it was not a default but the first step of a sound policy that would be completed with the Cortes of 1560, when he had returned after the triumph of San Quentin.

A new era began in 1578. Under the effective leadership of a new commander, Alexander Farnese, the war in Flanders consisted of retaking city after city through resource-intensive sieges. Farnese had more freedom than his predecessors to sign financial contracts in Flanders that were then validated in Madrid. One example is discussed here.

This chapter examines how Russian state media adapted their service propaganda model to justify and normalize the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. Analyzing Channel One’s prime-time broadcasts from 2000 to 2025, it shows that wartime propaganda did not abandon the reaffirming and informative tactics that had built audience loyalty in peacetime—instead, it integrated them into war coverage. Ukraine-related topics came to dominate broadcasts, accounting for nearly 40 percent of segments, but Channel One preserved reaffirming narratives about Russian heroism, military might, and the anti-Nazi struggle, as well as signals of journalistic credibility. The chapter also investigates whether propaganda prepared Russians for the war. It argues that deliberate pre-invasion priming for the specific conflict is unlikely: state media personnel were almost certainly unaware of invasion plans, and the Kremlin expected a swift victory rather than a prolonged war. Instead, years of anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian messaging had cultivated a general disposition that made the invasion easier to accept. Wartime propaganda represented a calibration of the established service model rather than an overhaul—preserving audience trust while selling a costly and unprovoked military campaign.

In Chapter 5, the development of industrial power and its influence on government reveals the strong impact of technological determinism, which favors the protection of industry as an inapt proxy for human well-being.

The origins of British official history can be seen in its function as a means of serving the educational and professional needs of army officers. Initially, official history was produced for specialists within the military, such as staff officers and engineers. As it was intended to assist them in the planning and conduct of future campaigns, especially on the imperial frontier, it focused on providing information about logistics, not tactics. Given the growing press coverage of British operations, between 1879 and 1903 official accounts of campaigns placed a greater emphasis on defending the army and senior commanders from criticism. The controversial nature of this new approach not only resulted in the suppression of one official history but led to the government’s insistence that this type of work should only provide a straightforward campaign narrative to provide information on tactics, as per the Prussian approach. Nevertheless, official accounts did not fully mirror the Prussian method due to the unique requirements of the British case as information needed to be imparted to staff officers on the planning of imperial expeditions and on maritime operations.

Realism is the dominant theoretical approach to international relations. The realist tradition finds its roots in a pessimistic supposition that international relations are unavoidably shaped by power politics. This chapter examines the core assumptions of classical realism. Classical realists lay a claim to a long tradition of thought going back to eminent thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Classical realism recognises that the drive to be all-powerful is inherent in human nature. States not only seek to accumulate power but also to make sure that no other state shifts the balance of power in their favour. The chapter then examines modern variants of classical realism and explores how it has been applied in the context of the Middle East. While classical realism seems to be the most fitting tradition to explain international relations in the Middle East, its application to the region has not been without limitations. The chapter then analyses Saudi foreign policy in the post-2011 Middle East through a classical realist lens. While the Saudi Kingdom played the role of regional stabiliser for decades, it emerged in the post-2011 Middle East as a regional player vying for power and attempting to shift the regional balance of power.

The political independence of the Latin American nations did not usher in modern capitalism since economic stagnation and the repressed nature of financial markets were evident from the 1820s and 1830s in most countries. This chapter focuses on the role of credit and finance during the first half of the nineteenth century in the new states. Liberal constitutions and laws were put in place but did not produce the desired economic results since fiscal reforms did not prove successful. Attention is directed to the experience of the earliest banking entities. We begin with Brazil, where a first bank in Latin America began to operate in 1808, followed by a brief summary of history of the first commercial bank in Argentina and of an early investment bank in Mexico. Nonetheless, the collapse of imperial rule, the wars of independence and extensive civil conflicts created persistent fiscal and monetary difficulties. So much uncertainty affected decision-making by both economic and political actors, reducing the availability of credit, making it more expensive and risky. Political stability and institutional transparency were required to spur early capitalism but economic and political instability created many obstacles in postcolonial Latin America during the first half of the century.

This chapter argues that intergroup lethal conflict and peaceful cooperation both have deep evolutionary roots in the hominin lineage and co-evolved over millions of years through a mosaic-like pattern. The inclination for intense male–male aggression was first inherited from Miocene apes, where it mainly functioned to threaten and deter rivals rather than to kill. The capacity for intergroup coalitionary killings was then likely present from the time hominins engaged in group hunting, an aptitude possibly already found in the last common ancestor of chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. This capacity was enhanced in the genus Homo through cultural innovations such as weapon technology and cultural benefits such as status and prestige. In parallel, the inclination for peaceful intergroup cooperation also emerged gradually, as first suggested by a relative reduction in aggression levels in hominins compared to other apes, indicated by changes in canine morphology. This shift became intertwined with cumulative cultural evolution, enabling practices such as negotiation, peacemaking, intergroup marriage, and exchange networks. In Homo sapiens, cumulative culture became supplemented by a selection against reactive aggression (also called ‘self-domestication’), enhancing prosocial intergroup relationships. The combination of cumulative cultural evolution and selection against reactive aggression further increased the scale of peaceful cooperation, as reflected in the emergence of long-distance exchange networks in the Palaeolithic archaeological record.

In the United States and elsewhere, the concepts of stress, trauma, and mental health provide an authoritative language for articulating the psychological impact of violence. This medicalized language is insufficient if we are to grapple with the moral and political dimensions of trauma, what experts now call “moral injury.” Drawing on interviews with influential experts in the US military, this chapter explores how the post-9/11 wars led psychologists to rediscover the moral dimension of trauma. Psychology has the potential to address the moral and political sources of trauma and alleviate some of war’s painful consequences, but this effort requires a complex understanding of what violence does to those who experience it, including those who perpetrate it. The challenge for psychology is to tackle the ethical complexities of war and trauma without reducing the issue of moral responsibility to a question of moral or psychological injury.

This chapter clarifies the problem that the anarchist constitution is designed to address: violence. Adopting a realist perspective, we analyse it as war and find the framing in the work of Tolstoy, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Contrary to claims of modern realist critics, who think of anarchism as utopian idealism and atavism, we demythologise the conception of anarchism as transcendent peace. We use the survey of their accounts of war to discuss the remedies each proposed to manage the violence of politics. The second section explores decentralised federation, the organisational architecture of the anarchist constitution. Using Proudhon’s conception as a template, we show how it was modified after the Paris Commune. We examine two distinctive modes of commune organisation, one syndicalist and the other municipal, and outline two strategies for change, one evolutionary and the other revolutionary. The first derives from Proudhon’s idea of jus gentium and the second from Bakunin’s internationalism. For both, federalism promotes constitutionalising ‘from the bottom up’, in local, regional and potentially global settings.

In this book, we have interpreted the long-term economic trends of recent decades through the lens of structural dynamics, based on what the available data may (or may not) reveal. Clark’s (1940) analysis of capitalist economies, which established the foundation for the structuralist approach, identifies three dominant sectors at different stages of development: agriculture first, followed by manufacturing, and finally services. This approach has also been articulated in terms of dualistic development from the beginning: Lewis’s (1954) model highlighted the challenges that can arise in transitioning from ‘traditional’ to ‘advanced’ sectors and underscores the positive and active role the state can play in facilitating these transitions. Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) explicitly discussed the need for ‘big pushes’ by public authorities to avoid vicious circles that can hinder structural change, specifically towards industrialisation.