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.

After a survey of the characteristic features of the genre of origin stories in biblical, Greek, and Phoenician sources, this chapter attempts to trace the history of the genre and the circumstances that led to its appearance in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Mediterranean literature, from its sources of inspiration in the Near East until its establishment in the eastern Mediterranean in the second quarter of the first millennium bce.

This chapter looks into the constitutions of Antiquity, notably those of the Greek city states - the (old) constitution of Dreros and Athens (the Draconian and Solonian constitutions), and Rome - the twelve tables. Aristotle claims to have had access to 158 city state constitutions: every respectable city state had on. For the first time in history we see evidence that communities (cities) try to learn from examples set by other city-states. Rome, for example, sends out envoys to learn from (and copy) the Athenian constitution before enacting the laws in their own Twelve Tables

Chapter 4 examines the political contexts of early cities. It analyzes different types of polity, and types of governance (autocratic versus collective), and then reviews the political dimensions of early urban planning.

The extent of material inequality and its relationship to economic development are central questions for historians of all periods. In recent decades, historians of ancient Greece have sought to provide the basis for answering those questions by attempting to estimate the distribution of wealth and income in Athens (and to a lesser degree in other Greek poleis) by reference to statements in ancient texts, proxy data, and simple models. While there remains much room for debate on specifics, we suggest that, for certain periods of Athenian history, very rough, but nonetheless suggestive, estimates can be offered of the distribution of wealth across the citizen population and the distribution of income across the entire population. The chapter briefly sketches ancient Greek economic performance before discussing material inequality in Greece, with special reference to Athens, and in comparison with other premodern economies. It explains how Greek political institutions and competition among individuals and states drove comparatively high levels of growth, while inequality remained comparatively low. Finally, it tests this hypothesis against some more and less familiar facts about Greek history.

City-republics have traditionally served as exemplars of participatory government. Their bottom-up organization would seem to suggest an alternative path to representative emergence. The three chapters of Part II address this challenge of equifinality; this chapter does so in two ways. First, it points out that republics are different forms of governance than representative polities, as they eschew a central executive and don't involve the integration of varied social groups. Second, despite such differences, republics and municipal governance can also be shown to reflect the basic logic of this book, as they were preceded by a period of centralized rule under conditional relations. These enabled the institutional learning that was necessary for participatory institutions to consolidate. The absence of an executive, however, also meant that they did not survive over the long term. These points are demonstrated by an examination of Italian city-states and of the Low Countries. Both Flanders and Holland had a thriving urban sector, but they retained their participatory institutions longer because the exective authority of the count was comparatively greater. The Swiss Cantons are briefly considered. The role of trade emerges as endogenous to political organization.

World history, like most academic disciplines, stagnated during the Cultural Revolution. This chapter argues that, with Mao’s death, world-historical studies witnessed a new wave of professionalization within the Marxist ideological framework. Following the liberalization of historical studies in the late 1980s, this ideological framework collapsed – even historians who were famous for their ideological correctness like Lin Zhichun abandoned it. In a series of influential debates, these historians searched for alternative paths to global modernity to replace the Eurocentric schema in Marxist historiography. Through this process, these former Marxist historians became increasingly nationalistic, which filled an ideological vacuum in post-Mao China.