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This chapter discusses how, throughout its first century, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association-Organization of American Historians contributed in major ways to the development of diplomatic history as a field of historical study. The opportunities the organization offered included the publication of articles in its journals, and the story the many articles have told is dominated by two big themes: the development of a continental empire and the rise of a global power, two of the major features of American history.

Following the end of the American Civil War, former slaveholders turned not only to new sites of empire outside of the continental United States but more generally toward projects to continue the dispossession of formerly enslaved people within the continental empire, engaging in new land struggles against freedpeople. This chapter examines how the white supremacist legal and economic ordering of Black enslavement through white real estate also justified land ownership through the rule of law and practice of settler empire that enabled and protected the settler as slaveholder.

This chapter focuses on the merchants and local culture in the Pearl River delta in Guangdong, China. It suggests that the merchants of the Pearl River delta were no more engaged in Republican politics than Tianjin professional elites and explains that the leading merchants were able to create vigorous dialogues with the state by engaging in a language of orthodoxy. It argues that the mercantile cultural cosmopolitanism of maritime China rose in tandem with the decline of the foreign sovereign power of the old continental empire.

This chapter examines the relationship between Henry III and Hubert de Burgh. In January of 1227, with the lifting of the last restrictions on his power, the whole nature of Henry's kingship changed. With his authority enhanced, he might lead the campaign to recover his continental empire. Within England, he could reverse the damaging inroads made since 1225 into the royal forests. There was also money to be made from those seeking confirmation of old charters and fresh concessions in new ones. All this took place within a framework set by the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. Such was his dominance that unpopular policies were often blamed on the minister not the monarch. With the king's emancipation in 1227, Hubert had another ambition, one, beyond a certain point, less commendable. It was to direct the flow of Henry's patronage towards himself.

This chapter describes how, before his departure from Gascony in the autumn of 1243, Henry III had worked hard to set the province to rights. He had toured the duchy, reconciled competing factions, maintained his rights, and bolstered the defences against external attack, or at least tried to do so. But, as a would-be conqueror of Gascony had once said, it was like trying to plough the seashore. For the next ten years, Henry was never free from Gascon worries. They led him in 1248 to place the duchy under Simon de Montfort and, when that ended in disaster, they forced him in 1253 to go there himself, despite being now pledged to go on crusade. Henry's concentration on Gascony and commitment to the crusade reflected the more general international situation, which left him with little else to do. There was no chance of attempting to recover the lost continental empire. Indeed, the ten years between Henry's two sojourns in Gascony in 1243 and 1253 saw a significant shift in the European balance of power towards the Capetian kings of France.

This concluding chapter outlines the considerable achievements of Henry III's personal rule. Within England, Henry's personal rule was a period of domestic peace. That created favourable conditions for the building of churches, the work of the friars and pastoral-minded bishops, the explosion of the money supply, and the development of a new network of markets and fairs. It provided the conditions too for the expansion of the common law. If Henry had achievements to his credit, he had also clearly failed. He had not recovered the continental empire and acknowledged his condition would be ‘worsened’ by the forthcoming peace with France. Within England itself, Henry faced vehement criticisms of his rule in parliament and demands for reforms which would virtually strip him of power. The feeling that Henry was handing England over to grasping and lawless foreigners was a major factor separating him from his people. Up to a point Henry here, in his generous way, was simply trying to do his best for his foreign relations without any wider strategic purpose. To set in the balance against his failings, Henry had one golden weight; it was, of course, his piety.