This chapter describes the many-sided aspects of Jewish life in Imperial Germany, in parallel to its general history up to 1914. Following an economic crisis 1873 and a decline of liberal faith, a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments spread – seemingly from Berlin – across the entire country. It brought about the establishment of new political parties with antisemitic programs, just when legal emancipation had been completed. This tension would become characteristic of Jewish life in the following era. It brought about extreme achievements in all spheres of life, but also daily confrontation with antisemitism. The latter deeply disappointed many Jews, but on the whole did not stop their integration and acculturation. Their fight against discrimination, moreover, strengthened their Jewish identity, despite further acculturation. The chapter describes Jewish cultural achievements as part of the period’s academic and artistic blooming, and the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie leading some of its members to disregard the dangers inherent in their situation.

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.

Japan between 1573 and 1651 underwent massive political and social transformation. The warlord Oda Nobunaga began the process of reunifying the archipelago after nearly a century of civil war, a process that was completed by his junior ally Toyotomi Hideyoshi. More conflict, both domestic and international, led to a third warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, positioning himself and his family as the new dynasty of military leaders who ruled a thoroughly pacified Japan beginning in 1603. His son, the second shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, and grandson, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, successively overcame diverse barriers to Tokugawa hegemony and incrementally established the early modern system that is often anachronistically assumed to have begun with Ieyasu. Their emphasis on pageantry, political immobility, strict control of borders, persecution of independent religion, and the constant threat of violence defined Tokugawa rule and allowed a fragile peace to persist until the mid-nineteenth century.

The end of the nineteenth century heralds in the age of nationalism, national unification (e.g. Italy and Germany), colonialism and globalization. A fifth generation of imperial constitutions accommodate this by pooling government power through mass-political organization, an increase in parliamentary competence and party-political organisation, thus increasing inclusivity. Throughout Europe, as Chris Thornhill writes, the imperial period brought both an extension of national franchises and a correlated consolidation of domestic statehood

The Risorgimento focused on independence from foreign powers and the state’s unification. This perspective is of interest today in a global interdependent context. Economic revival was largely frustrated during three decades after unification. GDP growth fell short of catching up with the more advanced countries. Relative if not absolute decline continued but its causes were different from those prevailing before the mid-nineteenth century. Growth acceleration required institution building, monetary unification, the creation of a single market, physical infrastructures, all of which could not be created overnight. The chapter emphasizes a) widespread uncertainty, in the first decade after unification when the survival of the new kingdom was in doubt, b) the long process of creating trust in the state, particularly in the southern regions.

This chapter examines the potential impact of Brexit on the future of the Union, providing a snapshot of public opinion and attitudes as the full implications of the UK’s departure start to become clear. In the first section, an overview of devolution in the UK is provided. In the second section, data on public opinion are provided from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as consideration of attitudes to the Union in England and to Irish unification in Ireland. In the third section, the case of Northern Ireland is examined in more depth. In conclusion, it is argued that the future of the Union depends upon a combination of factors: the UK government’s policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; the economic impact of Brexit; demographic change in Northern Ireland; and attitudes in Ireland to unification.

Chapter 2 considers and critiques a number of rationalist explanations for these developments, including geopolitics, financial necessity, administrative capacity, principal-agent problems, and potential collective action issues. It argues, first, that some combination of these factors is largely capable of explaining the Qing’s approach to nonagricultural taxation, which grew whenever the state faced significant fiscal pressure, but was subject to a number of political economy and administrative constraints that became increasingly apparent in the nineteenth century. The chapter then argues that these rationalist theories are unable to fully explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, which suggests that ideological factors should be brought in to complete the picture.

This chapter examines the chain of events that led to the utter ruination of Ichijōdani in 1573, arguing that the Asakura were not mere roadblocks to the glorious process of unification, but central political actors exploring an alternative vision of prosperous, provincial rule. Their decimation at the command of Oda Nobunaga, part of larger campaign of genocidal violence, meant more than the elimination of a warlord family or even a provincial city. A “small universe” of meaningful lives, unique spaces, and powerful creations that is key to understanding the rich diversity of medieval Japan was, in that act of destruction, erased.

This chapter discusses the tension and synthesis between uniform law and legal pluralism. This is done by highlighting aspects of the production and circulation of uniform commercial law, using the example of international sales law and the law related to electronic transactions. It is argued that uniform law is of increasing importance in the production and circulation of legal models. Given so, it is desirable to make the uniform legislative process more efficient and effective than it currently is. Solutions are proffered.

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union renders a united Ireland more likely than before. Unification, if it occurs, is likely to be accompanied by significant constitutional change or a new constitution. This chapter explores how the structure of governance could be adapted to make a newly unified state more sensitive to the concerns and aspirations of those from the Ulster Scots and Ulster British traditions. The chapter considers how consociational government for Northern Ireland could continue within a united Ireland, and assesses how a divergence of interests could lead to significant tensions between the national institutions and the devolved institutions, and within the national institutions themselves. The chapter identifies the many provisions of the current Irish constitution that posit a notion of Irish identity exclusionary of those from the Ulster Scots and Ulster British traditions. But their removal—at least without detailed consideration of how the constitution might be amended to respect multiple identities—risks reducing the sympathy of existing citizens for the unified State. The chapter concludes by exploring how the various constitutional changes considered would be interpreted and amendable after unification.

Emil Stanisław Rappaport took part in the major international debates concerning criminalization of international crimes and at the same time he had an opportunity to introduce all discussed concepts in law of the reborn state. The first part of the chapter focuses on the early years of Rappaport’s academic career and the influence on him of the sociological school of criminal law. Rappaport’s work as a defence attorney and its impact on his further research on criminal enforcement law is discussed. The second part is devoted to Rappaport’s contribution to the development of a legal system and court system in the newly independent Republic of Poland (he considered the Codification Committee as a laboratory of modern legislation, a belief shared by the Association internationale de droit pénal). The third part presents Rappaport’s efforts in various international associations of criminal lawyers, and his work towards the unification of criminal laws worldwide and towards the establishment of the foundations of international criminal law. The final part discusses the period during and after World War II, when Rappaport had to face the challenges of bringing Nazi criminals to justice while dealing with the spread of Soviet influence across the Polish judiciary and academia.

The second chapter distills three distinct understandings of belonging through corporal union. All are based on the biblical principle of “one flesh,” according to which corporal unification of individuals transforms them into a single entity. Two of the approaches developed during the early centuries of the ecclesial tradition, while the third appeared toward the end of the first millennium of the Common Era in Karaite circles. The ecclesial approaches understand the performance of belonging in physical terms as a fixed and irreversible unification, whereas the Karaite approach conceives it in spiritual terms as an elastic phenomenon of shared selfness. Each of the discussed readings of the biblical principle exhibits a different comprehension of the meaning of corporal union and its legal implications.

This chapter examines China’s diversity regime which buried its political and cultural diversity in history. For most international relations scholars, China appears as an exception to this volume’s argument on cultural diversity. What is unique about China is not its unity but its precocious capacities for direct rule and military-fiscal extraction which began under the first two unified dynasties: the Qin and the Han. China’s seeming unity is the product of the mutually reinforcing processes of coercive political unification and cultural homogenization. Political unity achieved by military victories produced and reproduced cultural homogeneity. Successful unifiers equated cultural diversity with political troubles and thus sought to level their subjects. A flattened cultural landscape, in turn, legitimated unifiers’ claim to rule ‘all under heaven’. This chapter first outlines China’s cultural plurality in its formative era. It then examines how unified dynasties forged a singular Han culture with an extreme homogenization regime that included mass killings and migrations, standardization of weights and measures, erasure of intellectual diversity, and monopolization of history writing.