World

Topics represented

Roman Empire (81) · World history (71) · British Empire (59) · Politics (57) · Law & constitutions (48) · Culture (42) · Resistance & colonized agency (38) · Colonization & sovereignty (35) · Law & imperial government (33) · War & military technology (29) · Decolonization & independence (26) · Self-government & Commonwealth (17)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. 1215

   Magna Carta

   Rebel barons compelled John of England to accept a charter in 1215 that put in writing that the king and his government were not above the law. It responded to specific political conflicts and did not create democracy or universal rights; its constitutional influence developed through later reinterpretations.

2. 1231

   Constitutions of Melfi or Liber Augustalis

   In 1231 Frederick II promulgated a collection for the Kingdom of Sicily regulating relations between public powers and inhabitants, administration, and social matters. It strengthened royal legislation in one kingdom without implying status equality or eliminating local legal pluralism.

3. c. 1235–c. 1400

   Mali Empire and trans-Saharan networks

   The Mali Empire consolidated power in West Africa and contested or controlled Sahelian towns connected to trans-Saharan exchange in gold, salt, and other goods. These routes depended on intermediaries, ecologies, and local powers; they were not a circuit uniformly controlled by one state.

4. 1256–1265

   Composition of the Siete Partidas

   Under Alfonso X, the Libro de las Leyes, later called the Siete Partidas, was composed between 1256 and 1265. The compilation sought greater coherence in Castilian law and had a long reception, but effective application consolidated gradually and coexisted with fueros and other norms.

5. c. 1270–c. 1350

   Merchant practices and the debated lex mercatoria thesis

   Markets, fairs, and urban courts document procedural privileges and expedited avenues for some mercantile disputes. The idea of a universal, autonomous, uniform medieval lex mercatoria is debated: known evidence places the phrase in late medieval England and often refers to procedural variations, not a complete transnational code.

6. 1295

   English assembly of 1295 (“Model Parliament”)

   In 1295 Edward I summoned a broad assembly of barons, clergy, knights, and town representatives, in part to obtain resources for war. “Model Parliament” is a later label: the institution did not yet have modern two chambers or parliamentary sovereignty, and representation was limited.

7. c. 1347–c. 1353

   Black Death

   The great plague pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century affected parts of western Asia, North Africa, and Europe and caused extreme demographic losses. Dates, routes, and mortality rates varied greatly by region and source, so this record avoids a single total figure or a simplified transmission narrative.

8. 1356

   Golden Bull of 1356

   The Golden Bull regulated election of the King of the Romans by seven prince-electors and aspects of imperial political order. It gave durable shape to Holy Roman Empire procedures, but was neither a modern national constitution nor an end to the empire’s territorial and jurisdictional diversity.

9. c. 1387–c. 1495

   Academic and practical reception of Roman law in Germany

   University chairs and jurists trained in the ius commune extended study of Roman law in German territories from the late fourteenth century. Reception was gradual and selective and coexisted with territorial, urban, and customary law; it was not an instant replacement of all local norms.

10. 1405–1433

    Zheng He’s seven maritime expeditions

    Fleets dispatched by the Ming court under Zheng He made seven expeditions through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa. They were state diplomatic, commercial, and military projects; their end does not prove a uniform Chinese retreat from the sea or the end of private Asian navigation.

11. 1414–1418

    Council of Constance and conciliar authority

    The Council of Constance sought to end the Western Schism and issued Haec Sancta and Frequens, central texts for conciliarist formulations. The authority and reception of Haec Sancta remained contested; this records an ecclesial constitutional dispute, not an uncontested rule for the whole Church.

12. 1453

    Ottoman capture of Constantinople

    The Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453 and made it their capital, ending the Eastern Roman Empire. The event reorganized regional political and commercial relationships, but it did not by itself close all exchange between Europe and Asia or solely explain later maritime routes.

13. 1478

    Spanish Inquisition as a crown-controlled tribunal

    Sixtus IV’s bull Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus established the Spanish Inquisition in Castile in 1478. Unlike other inquisitions run by mendicant orders at papal behest, it operated under crown control; its scope, tribunals, and practices changed over time and should not be reduced to one image.

14. c. 1492–c. 1600

    Columbian Exchange and Atlantic conquest

    Encounters after 1492 durably connected the Americas, Europe, Africa, and later other regions through crops, animals, people, knowledge, and pathogens. It was not an exchange among equals: conquest, forced labor, and epidemics without prior immunity caused catastrophic losses among Indigenous peoples, alongside diverse resistance and adaptation.

15. 1494

    Tordesillas draws an imperial line across the ocean

    Castile and Portugal agreed on a pole-to-pole demarcation line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde to divide spheres of expansion. Without a reliable way to determine longitude at sea or consent from affected peoples, a cartographic and legal abstraction claimed authority over territories and oceans unknown to both crowns.

16. 1495

    Reichskammergericht and imperial judicial order

    The 1495 Worms ordinance organized the Reichskammergericht with rules on judges, appeals, oaths, and procedure. The court promoted reception of Roman law, but also had to consider particular regulations, statutes, and customs; it did not create homogeneous jurisdiction across the empire.

17. 1496–1497

    Henry VII’s patent and John Cabot’s Atlantic voyage

    Henry VII authorized Cabot and his sons to sail, occupy, and monopolize lands the patent described as unknown to Christians; Cabot reached North America’s already inhabited North Atlantic coast in 1497. This is a legal antecedent of English expansion, not the empire’s instantaneous birth

18. c. 1500–c. 1867

    Transatlantic trade in enslaved people

    For more than three centuries, commercial networks and states forcibly transported millions of Africans to the Americas. The trade was a system of violence, dispossession, and resistance that linked Atlantic economies; its chronologies and forms changed by empire, port, and community, and legal abolitions did not immediately end either slavery or clandestine trafficking.

19. 1507

    Waldseemüller names America and separates the Pacific

    Martin Waldseemüller’s world map was the first known to use the name America and to show a Western Hemisphere separated from Asia by another ocean. It fixed a new European conception of the globe, although the cartographic sources behind its depiction of that ocean before Balboa and Magellan remain uncertain.

20. 1512

    Ordinances or Laws of Burgos

    The ordinances promulgated on 27 December 1512 regulated Indigenous labor, religious instruction, and treatment in Hispaniola within the Castilian colonial order. They articulated limits and duties, but did not abolish encomienda or establish an effective, uniform improvement in Indigenous living conditions.

21. 1519–1522

    Magellan–Elcano expedition circumnavigates the planet

    The Spanish expedition begun by Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano made the first documented circumnavigation. It joined the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans in one route at enormous human cost and within an imperial contest over spices and sea lanes.

22. 1532

    Constitutio Criminalis Carolina

    Charles V’s and the Holy Roman Empire’s 1532 criminal ordinance brought together rules on investigation, evidence, and penalties. It sought to regularize judicial practice, but operated subsidiarily alongside territorial and local laws; it did not create a uniform criminal code across Europe.

23. 1533–1603

    Elizabeth I

    Queen of England from 1558, Elizabeth I authorized ventures in exploration, privateering and trade that preceded the British Empire. Her 1600 charter created the East India Company as an English trading monopoly across much of the Asian world. Her profile does not turn those fragile projects into an already formed empire: it shows how the Crown delegated capital, risk and violence to companies and private actors

24. 1537

    Sublimis Deus bull

    In 1537 Paul III declared that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of liberty or property or reduced to slavery because they were not Christians. It was a normative papal intervention, not general civil legislation: it did not by itself halt conquest, coerced labor, or other forms of colonial domination.

25. 1539

    Francisco de Vitoria’s relectiones on the Indies

    The De indis and De iure belli lectures, delivered at Salamanca in 1539, examined title, communication, war, and conversion in Castilian expansion. They were scholarly arguments in theology and natural law, not enacted legislation; their later uses do not remove their colonial and intellectual limits.

26. 1542–1543

    New Laws of the Indies

    Charles V promulgated the New Laws in 1542–1543 in response to reports of abuse and to strengthen Crown control over encomienda and colonial government. Their provisions met resistance and were amended or unevenly applied; they did not end colonial exploitation or constitute universal rights.

27. c. 1550–c. 1551

    Valladolid debate

    The Valladolid controversy set arguments by Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda against each other on conquest, war, and the status of Indigenous peoples. It was a political-theological junta and debate, not a court issuing a final, binding judgment that by itself transformed colonial law.

28. 1583

    Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland for England

    At St John’s, Gilbert proclaimed English possession of Newfoundland and adjacent seas within a multinational fishery and the homelands of Beothuk, Inuit, and other peoples. The act did not immediately create an effective colony and should be shown as a contested imperial claim

29. 1602

    VOC charter and delegated authority

    The States General created the Dutch East India Company (VOC) by charter in 1602. The trading company received a corporate form and delegated public powers to act in Asia; those powers depended on the charter and Dutch authorities and did not simply make it an independent sovereign state.

30. 1603

    Personal union of the English and Scottish crowns

    James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown as James I. England and Scotland retained separate parliaments, laws, and colonial projects, while sharing a monarch who promoted a “British” identity