It remains surprising to never see Heidegger pose the question What is literature? In this sense, our interrogation will revolve around why Heidegger never applies the “fundamental question” to the very specific form of logos at work and in play in literature. And thus, why Heidegger never overtly enquires into the heading which literature could provide for and in the “History of Being.” Does something lie in literature – a secret – which impedes its grasp in the ontological horizon of the “History of Being”?

This chapter sets the scene for the Institutional Diagnostic exercise by presenting the main geographical, demographic, and recent historical features of Tanzania, emphasis being put on the latter aspects. It proves crucial in understanding where Tanzania’s development stands today, as well as the recent disruption in Tanzanian politics caused by the presidency of Magufuli and his premature death.

Reading Byron's dramas through the conceptual framework of modern play theory helps us appreciate the works of 1820–2 as a unique experimental project. If we focus on Byron’s transgressive playfulness both in terms of genre expectations and the ethos of his original sources (ranging from the Bible and the apocrypha to historical accounts and popular fictional narratives), we may disambiguate some of the more persistent critical quandaries, such as Byron's unsystematic thinking or lack of dramatic rigueur. Rather than aloof carelessness, these dramas clearly attest to Byron’s critical insight into the limits of the authoritative, be it religious or historical, and form a key part of his lifelong exploration of liberty, where the personal is inextricably linked to the political. Play, and playing, for Byron, is one of the key concepts of cultural history.

This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

This chapter offers a historical overview of the governance of irregular migration as a key element in the construction of the post-war European state. It explores four moments, each of which represents an evolution of state capacities in relation to the control of (irregular) migration. The first moment is the immediate post-war period, in which large-scale population movement and displacement led to the emergence of a set of legal frameworks that were designed to regulate these social realities at a collective level. The second moment corresponds to the end of the European colonial empires in the 1950s and 1960s, when contests over citizenship, residency and movement rights reshaped the political framework of 'irregularity'. The third moment corresponds to the 'closure' of West European borders in the mid-1970s, after which both regular and irregular migration emerged as a social problem. Finally, the fourth moment runs from the 1990s to the present-day. This period has been characterised by a radicalisation of the politics of immigration, as well as processes of Europeanisation that have sought to monitor individual migrants.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

The revolutionary processes that led to the dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas formed an entangled process. The states that emerged from these processes built their new national identities around the heroes and the deeds of the independence period from roughly 1760-1830. These hero myths are still important markers of identity today. The chapter explores the main interpretations of Spanish American independence, presents conflicting periodizations, and then discusses the events from the crisis of the empire, colonial reactions to the different phases of independence (1810-1814 and 1814-1830). Finally, it demonstrates that many revolutionary promises remained unfulfilled. Everywhere in the Spanish possessions the motivation for revolution was the problem of legitimacy arising from the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The individual experiences of revolution, however, were very different and ranged from popular uprisings to elite-led exchanges of ruling oligarchies. The ethnic dimension, which overlapped with the social problem, was a unique feature of the Spanish American revolutions of independence. It contributed to boosting the ideas of freedom, equality and self-determination. Until 1830 and long after, this explosive force could not yet unfold. What remained was the promise of the revolution.

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

Chapter 11 looks at the much smaller World War II reparations to the Allies. The Allies had learnt from previous reparations disasters and focused on the de-industrialisation of Germany and Japan. Only small reparations were actually paid, and the transfers were offset by US loans from the Marshall Plan. I show how even though reparations were agreed, they were not necessarily paid, using a case study of German reparations to Denmark.

Chapter 6 studies the case of Franco-Prussian War indemnities of 1871. France paid the indemnity of 25 per cent of output in three years to Prussia. The years following the end of the war featured several default-like characteristics (output contraction and high debt levels) but saw neither a devaluation of its currency nor a fall in real wages. France had easy access to loans at reasonable interest rates, with high investor participation from both foreign and domestic sources. The most important factor was that France had accumulated a high stock of foreign assets, meaning its net debt was essentially zero, which incentivised a settlement that did not include sanctions or confiscations. In this case, enforcement of sovereign debt played a positive role, in that a default would have been more costly than repayment. It is also likely that military enforcement was not needed, because France was incentivised to repay because of its easy access to debt and stock of foreign assets. The macroeconomic situation was, crucially, one in which the current account was positive, meaning that while France repaid the indemnity it did not do so by indebting itself.

Chapter 12 is the story of Iraqi reparations imposed after the Gulf War. The rise in Iraqi indebtedness was a consequence of global geopolitical trends in the 1980s, when political lending trumped solvency concerns. It allowed Iraq to obtain financing on terms more favourable than offered by the US government. Reparations were a consequence of the end of the Iran–Iraq War when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Reparations were imposed by a UN Resolution with a direct enforcement mechanism to take money from oil revenues. I use oral history sources to trace how Iraqi debt was restructured after the US invasion in 2003. The restructuring was permeated by politics to inflict harsh terms on creditors at the Paris Club, at a time when creditor-friendly restructurings were the norm. Despite its apparent success, however, in going for a politically expedient deal at the Paris Club, I argue the restructuring missed an opportunity to enshrine a doctrine of odious debt in international law. All debt was written off, except war reparations, which were paid in full through sanctions and war. They proved to be senior to all other debt and did not enter the sovereign debt restructuring.

Chapter 4 studies the Napoleonic Wars reparations. France lost the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, ending decades of revolution and counter-revolution. After Napoleons final defeat at Waterloo, France was forced to pay just under 2 billion francs in reparations, around a quarter of output in 1815, over the following five years. With French government revenues of around 700 million francs in 1816, the transfer represented almost three times the annual budget. That was a big transfer, even more so as France faced significant credit constraints because earlier defaults prevented it from tapping sovereign debt markets. Not until 1817 did France manage to borrow large amounts of money, paying back reparations with two years to spare. How did the country manage to pay the large reparations transfer? I argue that France benefited economically from a positive shock to its terms of trade as the war wound down. The French peacetime economy was structurally different in terms of its imports and exports, which had changed during many years of war and blockades.

Chapter 8 looks at the famous case of German World War I reparations. Had Germany defaulted already in 1929, it would have saved two years worth of interest payments and entered autarky at the same time, as market access was by then de facto gone. At this point, the European nations did not have the ability to enforce debt contracts and the United States agreed to a de facto cancellation of reparations. The German sovereign default in the 1930s was on debt issued to pay reparations, but it also had several effects on other state liabilities, with loans offering different kinds of creditor protection. Germany in the 1920s had high levels of reparations, but was able to borrow, because it offered de facto seniority to new loans. Creditors were willing to lend into a large debt stock because they thought they would rank senior to reparations. The German default on its sovereign debt was special because it was allowed by its politically weak creditors, who were unable to enforce debt contracts in the 1930s.

Chapter 7 is a brief overview of the Mexican–American War reparations (1848–1881), Cretan War reparations (from 1897), and Chinese reparations following the Sino-Japanese War (1895–1901) and the Boxer Rebellion (1901 and 1939). The chapter is a tale of how reparations can be so small as to be meaningless for the economy (in the American case) or long, painful, and enforced by political and military power (Greek and Chinese cases).

Chapter 9 is the brief story of the lesser-known World War I reparations of Bulgaria and Russia. Both reparations were large in terms of each countrys output but were subsequently negotiated away in political treaties. In the Soviet Unions case, it is one of the examples of how you can repudiate debt completely but under the cost of exiting the global trading system.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

What happens when countries cannot default on their debt? This history of war reparations shows that state survival trumps economics. This chapter introduces and summarises the book.

Romantic relationships occur within a larger social, political, and historic context. Although family historians have attended to the changing social meaning and role of romantic partnering across historical time, few scholars have considered that the psychosocial meanings individuals attribute to historic events may shape romantic relationships dynamics. In this chapter, we consider how linkages between historic events and shifts in the socio-political environment of the United States may influence romantic relationships. We begin by reviewing the work of family historians before discussing theories and concepts relevant to examining romantic partnering within a historical context. We provide illustrative examples to highlight the overlap between cohort and historic effects across relationship initiation, maintenance, and dissolution. We conclude by reflecting on the conceptual and empirical challenges and possibilities associated with examining relationships from a historical perspective.