This is a general introduction to the book, explaining that the purpose of the book is to provide a concise but detailed explanation of the core rules of international humanitarian law. The contents of each chapter are summarised. It explains that the book looks at the major areas of IHL, putting them in historical context, so as to better understand how the law has evolved. This book also examines the current challenges for and pressures on the existing law, as IHL rules adopted in the time of cavalry and bayonets must adapt to deal with issues like drones, cyber warfare and autonomous weaponry. It notes that the third edition has been updated to reflect new developments in the law of armed conflict up to May 2023.

Chapter 5 looks at the detailed rules regarding the protection of the wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of the armed forces, and those who care for them – medical and religious personnel. It also looks at the law regarding what is perhaps the most recognisable emblem in the world – the Red Cross – and its affiliated emblems, the Red Crescent and Red Crystal.

Emblematic gestures (or emblems) have several denominations in the literature (for instance autonomous, quotable, semiotic, folkloric or symbolic gestures). Emblems are culture-bound gestures; they differ interculturally and intraculturally, both among different cultural and linguistic areas, and among individuals and social groups within the same culture. These gestures are easily translated into verbal language, they are quotable; they are equivalent to utterances, and in many cases, they have names. Typical emblems are used – alongside or without words – for greetings, insults or mockery, to indicate places or people (deictics), to refer to the state of a person (to be drunk, to be asleep …), to give interpersonal orders or to represent actions (to eat, to drink, etc.). Many emblems show a clear perlocutionary component (to offer, to threaten, to promise or to swear …). The tradition in the study of emblems has always emphasized their autonomy from speech (they are interpretable with a high level of context independence). Moreover, emblematic capacity can be regarded as associated with illocutionary force, which is one of the most characteristic features of these units.

The chapter begins by differentiating between two English preconceptions of the American environment, wilderness and waste, and characterizes first-generation colonization as a pastoral retreat supported by English georgic assumptions and practices. The chapter then compares puritan and Algonquian conceptualizations of the natural environment, notably including differing conceptions of property, and discusses the influence of puritan justifications of colonization on John Locke’s theorization of land as alienable property. The chapter goes on to trace environmental changes wrought by colonization, including transformations effected by nonhuman agents as well as human agents, and locates these transformations in the climate context of the Little Ice Age. Domestic animals created environments in which certain English plants flourished while indigenous plants declined. Because English grain crops did not prosper in New England, however, the colonists adopted the indigenous grain, maize, and scaled up the indigenous forest-fallow cultivation system to unsustainable levels. Unsustainability in turn invited frontier expansion. The essay concludes by briefly investigating the tension in puritan thought and practice between worldly engagement and spiritual transcendence on both a national level, where it is evident in millennialism, and an individual level, where it shaped puritan poetics.