Until recently, Gaza attracted little attention in historical scholarship. This volume innovates by examining late Ottoman Gaza’s diverse society, its built environment, and its political dynamics. The introduction sets the stage to better understand the vital contexts impacting the role and status of Gaza as compared to other cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, provides analyses and new resources for the study of late Ottoman Gaza, and presents state-of-the-art methodology in urban history as applied to Gaza.

A summing up, touching upon the role of the state and nationalism both in creating central institutions for the study and preservation of medieval manuscript material and in pursuing increasingly destructive warfare that often annihilated that same material.

Despite historians’ rediscovery of the ‘DP story’ since the late 1980s, the French zone has remained understudied, for France was a second-rank occupying force, one whose zone and DP population was significantly smaller, and its wider political influence more limited than those of its Western Allies. And yet, the French zone offers an ideal site in which to trace how relief approaches and practices were coloured by domestic concerns, with France facing specific material constraints resulting in part from its experiences of Nazi occupation. Contributing to a recent expansion of scholarly literature that focuses on Allied administration of DPs, this book unearths how discussions about how best to serve the interests of DPs resonated with broader national debates about the immediate past and the fate of France after Vichy. It argues that humanitarian aid became a component of French efforts at restoring France’s international prestige against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its international standing. It also reveals the fragmentation of visions for relief work within international organisations, beyond their claims to the embodiment of a ‘new humanitarianism’.

The introduction develops a history of Nigeria’s role in World War II that allows for a meaningful understanding of the conflict as multidimensional and instrumental to critical transformations in empire–colony relations nationally, transnationally, and internationally. It shows how Nigeria’s participation in the war as a colony of the British Empire profoundly transformed the relationship between metropole, empire, and colony, created a new sense of shared view and ideology, and shaped new cultural and political ideas in the postwar period. It addresses a major gap in the historical literature, including the dearth of information on the historical contributions of Africans in the Nigerian colony as participants and victims. It presents the thrust of this book as a significant contribution to the history of the Second World War in general that explores in detail the contributions of an African society and the impact of the war on that society. It surveys the history of the war by laying out the key features of local conditions (especially on the eve of the war), the war’s impact, and local responses. This chapter concludes that the impact of the Second World War cannot be generalized or the European experience equated with the experiences of Africans in European colonies.

Chapter 2, “Daidu’s Fall,” traces the fate of Mongol political and military power in eastern Eurasia during the decades following the Yuan ruling house’s flight to the steppe in 1368. This chapter examines the Yuan court’s efforts to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of former subjects and allies, which included Chinese, Mongol, Turkic, Jurchen, Korean, and Central Asian populations, by drawing on political emblems developed during the empire’s glory years. This chapter also explains the Yuan’s military and administrative strategies to come to terms with its new position in eastern Eurasia. After 1368, the Great Yuan court remained a powerful actor on the international stage; the Ming court was never the sole political patron available to ambitious individuals and communities.