This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

I introduce this volume of the New Cambridge History of Japan with two questions: How is it that Anglophone scholars have come to refer to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and immediately surrounding years as Japan’s “early modern” period? And does calling the period early modern suggest something fundamentally different from the term used in Japanese, kinsei? When the first Cambridge History of Japan was published, in 1991, the answer to the latter question was yes: the kinsei of “the Japanese” was “more feudal than modern,” whereas the early modernity of “Western historians” was “more modern than feudal.” As this introduction demonstrates, however, the term kinsei has nothing to do with feudalism. The evolution of the terms of periodization used to refer to the Tokugawa era tell us something important about the global history of conceptualizing historical time, particularly the surprising career of modernity.

This chapter briefly surveys the intellectual history of modern, western counterinsurgency theory, as conservative, high modernist utopianism. It sets out concise and synoptic evidence for the argument, which serves as context for the later case chapters. I focus on counterinsurgency manuals—applied theoretical texts written by counterinsurgency practitioners, aiming to shape battlefield and political conduct. Manuals link theory and practice, connecting idealized military and political theory to the history of on-the-ground conduct. My approach is primarily contextualist. Proceeding chronologically, I draw connections and contrasts between canonical manuals, from the early modern period to the present. While small wars or counterinsurgency manuals were conservative from early on, high modernism and utopianism emerged only gradually and incidentally, taking multiple forms. I show how ideas cross-pollinated across texts, accumulating scattershot political idealizations and military practices alike. In so doing, I link micro-level individual intellectual change with larger historical processes, at the global level.

This chapter introduces the book’s central puzzle, makes the case for considering Western imperialism through systematic comparison with its Asian predecessors and contemporaries, and previews the book’s central argument. I argue that the literature on international hierarchy and empires has neglected critical parallels between Western and Asian empire-building in the early modern period. Mughal, Manchu and British empire-builders each confronted significant barriers to conquest, in the form of cultural marginality and demographic insignificance relative to indigenous majorities. Each consequently relied on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule to mobilize the vast multicultural coalitions needed for large-scale territorial expansion. These parallels in turn yielded empires that foregrounded the management of cultural diversity – through the incorporation of difference rather than its assimilation – as the chief feature of imperial rule.

This chapter recapitulates the book’s arguments, before teasing out its larger implications both for International Relations scholars interested in the comparative evolution of international systems, and also for debates within the social sciences more broadly about the origins and character of global early modernity.

In world history early modernity is a contested category. However, it is commonly accepted that the period from about 1500 to 1800 is a distinct period, bookended by two significant periods of violence. The pattern of long-distance travel that was a feature of the fifteenth century ushered in a period of imperial conquest. The lives of millions of people across the globe were fundamentally transformed between 1500 and 1800 by mass violence, a consequence of European colonisation and enslavement. At the end of this time the Atlantic Revolutions violently overthrow the old order. But early modernity is not simply a period of time. In the period from 1500 to 1800 the problem of violence necessitated asking fundamental questions and formulating answers about the most basic forms of human organisation and interactions, such as the problem of civility in society, the nature of political sovereignty and the power of the state, the legitimacy of conquest and subjugation, the possibilities of popular resistance, and the manifestations of ethnic and racial unrest. Violence also provided the raw material for profound meditations on humanity and for examining our relationship to the divine and natural worlds.