This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

This chapter discusses the subject of archives: what they are, how they are uniquely constructed and preserved, their importance for creating historiographies and scholarly traditions, how they are subject to human error, the consequences of said error, and alternative sources of historical records. These topics are explored primarily through the case study of Nigeria’s Colonial and National Archives. The chapter will explain how the Colonial Archives were used as tools to extend colonial power while also springboarding African historiography through consequential and highly problematic methods. Next, it will explore the transformation of the Colonial Archives into Nigeria’s National Archives, pioneered by Kenneth Dike at the University of Ibadan. This transformation fostered significant changes in Nigeria’s historiography, the details of which will be examined. The chapter will also address the many issues present within Nigeria’s National Archive. Finally, it will explore the alternative voices to the domineering Eurocentric frameworks in “modern” (colonial) African historiography. They include but are not limited to written documents from Northern Nigeria, such as the Kano chronicles, oral traditions from the Yoruba and Igbo peoples from Nigeria’s south and east, rituals, customs, festivals, and much more.

The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

The conclusion situates this volume in its wider historical context and assesses the gains derived from the methodology it employs. Unlike its situation after 1948, during the last decades of Ottoman rule Gaza was in no way an anomaly but rather an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. This contrast helps better understand depictions of Gaza in current day discourse: it was never integrated into any modern nation-state, and more closely resembles a relic of the pre-nation-state period. Countering the widespread fallacy that Gaza does not fit into any meaningful historical narrative, this work reimagines Gaza without the cumulative effects of the successive catastrophic events since WWI and the strictures of the Gaza Strip, but rather in terms of its multiple connections in time and space as they evolved over the centuries. Its reliance on an empirical, source-driven GIS-supported methodology constitutes a major advance that highlights the centrality of political factionalism for the city and its region and sheds light on the lifeworlds of Gaza’s commoner population. Overall, this work provides a rich terrain for formulating new hypotheses on social strategies in Gaza’s society and examining the strategic constructedness of claims found in contemporary texts.

In Carl Lavery and Rezvan Zandieh’s chapter Artaud is afforded further examination. By adopting a hyphenated notion of a ‘re-turn’, Lavery and Zandieh challenge a historiography that would describe Artaud’s impact as being on the medium or discipline of theatre alone. Their ‘re-turn’ is not predicated on restoring an originary Artaud, nor does it aim to provide yet another reading or interpretation of his artistic work. By proposing a particular mode of arranging bodies and objects in time and space, Artaud’s theatricality overspills its disciplinary enclosure and informs other artforms. They posit Artaud as a performance theorist whose ideas allow for a unique take on the indeterminate borderline existing between theatre, conceptualism and installation art. To investigate that liminal fold, they place Artaud in dialogue with artist Christian Boltanski, whose relationship with theatre and performance they tease out.

The sixth chapter covers the origins of Roman historiography. As usual, they are in Greece, and as usual the Romans do something rather different with their model. From its origins in Cato down to what many considered its perfect form in Livy, the Romans were deeply interested in their own pasts. But history-writing was not as it is in the modern world: the ancient historian did little of what we would consider research. Here again, therefore, literary elements were to the fore: choosing the right kind of story to tell and telling it in the right way were the important things. Discussions of Ennius, Cato, Caesar, Sallust, Asinius Pollio, and Livy.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

This chapter begins with the contrasting narratives of the Third Indochina War from the perspectives of Singapore and Cambodia which serves as the springboard to the study of the Cambodia conflict. It then proceeds to describe the debates on the war in Cambodia, following which the chapter outlines the objectives of the book and provides a historiography of the existing literature.

The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

This chapter concerns Lucian’s presentation of the contemporary display of literate knowledge and the practice of criticism and scholarship. That presentation is often obviously satirical, but Lucian’s tone and purpose also often remain elusive; Lucian’s voice is never easy to capture. Examples include Lucian’s account of the art of reading in On the Ignorant Book-Collector, and the posturing philosophers and ignorant grammarians of the Symposium; this latter case illustrates how Lucian’s concern with ‘the culture of criticism’ is always part of the ever-present negotiation with classical models which is a hallmark of his work, as of any major figure of the Second Sophistic. The same is true of the satire on Atticism in Lexiphanes. The final part of the chapter considers Lucian’s presentation of artistic technai, whether that be that art of writing history or the treatise on pantomime, On the Dance.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.

Traditional study of Roman military communities has ignored or erased women and their families from daily military life. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveal the inescapable fact that residents of extended military communities interacted inside and outside Roman forts through habitation, commercial endeavors, and social obligations. As a result of having been segregated by historians into external communities women have been acknowledged as existing, but otherwise ignored. Not only have their social and economic contributions been disregarded, but even their identities have been overlooked. This chapter reviews the basic reasons historians have removed women from our conception of life in military contexts and then discusses the evidence for the presence and contributions of military women. The chapter closes with discussion of how the volume is organized. As becomes clear, the presence of women, children, and families within the forts and in the extramural settlements of the Roman army is beyond doubt, thanks to the diligent and sometimes contentious work of scholars over the last thirty years.

The topic of women in Roman military communities (i.e., military women) did not suddenly appear in the late twentieth century. One could say its emergence is the result of the novel idea that women were present in most aspects of life in the ancient world. Women have been around the military much longer than the general or professional reader might realize. As a topic, military women have not generally been a group to which anyone paid sustained attention until the last decades of the twentieth century. The topic gained interest as social and cultural history became welcome components of historians’ toolboxes and as archaeological fieldwork has yielded new evidence and innovative methodologies have led to updated analyses of old artifacts. This chapter reviews the historiography of the debate over the long duration of Roman studies. In particular, the authors focus on how research into these military women and their families has slowly diversified and grown over the last three decades. The field is strong and growing to provide a more complete understanding of the Roman military.

Chapter 1 introduces the problems to which this book responds and proposes alternative pathways for understanding the archaeology of the Roman Empire. It shows how particular colonial ways-of-knowing continue to shape the stories told of North Africa’s people and their traditions of worship under the Roman Empire, setting these within the binary of “Romanization” or “resistance.” While approaches to the archaeology of other parts of the Roman Empire have begun to embrace New Materialism as a way of moving beyond “Romanization,” this chapter argues that semiotic approaches offer a more productive means of engaging with and explaining the material dimensions of imperial hegemony.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

As the recovery of the rich history of the expansive Byzantine Commonwealth pushes forward, we must renew our emphasis on the sturdy multi- and cross-cultural foundation upon which it was constructed. Christian Caucasia was a charter member of the Byzantine Commonwealth, but its social fabric and cultural orientation remained locked on the Iranian world for centuries to come. The fundamentally Iranic, or Persianate, nature of Christian Caucasian society is a reminder of the intense cross-cultural connections of Rome-Byzantium and Iran across late antiquity and into the medieval period.