This chapter explores the projection of passions and feelings in master–enslaved relations and the role of this projection in the development of body politics and power relations in the empires of the Atlantic world. The chapter recognizes links between ideas about emotions and the genocidal violence of Atlantic slavery. Particular attention is paid to the representation of enslaved resistance as a “passionate transgression,” focusing on the Haitian Revolution as a case study.

This introduction sketches a cultural history of dinosaur palaeontology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicating how the book addresses the lack of literary work on the understanding of dinosaurs in this period. While dinosaurs were a British area of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, American palaeontologists took clear pre-eminence in this field from the 1870s. American research transformed dinosaurs from giant lizards into a far stranger and more heterogenous group. Fallon argues that literary scholars have not yet grappled with this cultural shift in perceptions of the dinosaurs, an omission made all the more striking by the fact that it was during the decades around 1900 that ‘dinosaur’ first became a household word. Built into this word were important ideas about imperialism, progress, romance, and the practice of science. Fallon explains how exploring this subject provides wider insights into the relationships between literature and science and between popular and specialist science writers, in addition to its value as a case study on the transatlantic nature of literary media at the end of the nineteenth century.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.

Which elements of tyranny are paramount wax and wane across eras, but tyranny itself remains a consistent concern. In Western political thought, defining tyranny in one or two sentences is rare, and when undertaken, it is often embedded in a specific political context. Defining tyranny may appear straightforward; nonetheless, diagnosing and remedying it, enabling recovery and inoculation, requires more than a rigid definition. All governance orders display a range of features. For instance, no two democracies are alike, and the political, economic and social realities they serve must always be considered; the same is true of tyrannies.

Hugo Grotius is considered one of the paradigmatic figures in international relations theory. His thought is often contrasted with that of Thomas Hobbes, who is portrayed as the standard bearer of political realism, and the universalist orientation of Immanuel Kant. The centre piece of the so-called Grotian tradition is the theory of international society, which accommodates the claims of independent states without granting them absolute justification. The pursuit of advantage is subject to common standards that oblige rather than merely counsel moderation and restraint. The chapter proceeds in three parts. Part one examines the legal and political narratives that account for the emergence of the Grotian tradition. Part two examines revisionist scholarship that considers Grotius’ thought in the context of relations between Europeans and non-European ‘others’. Neither the standard nor the revisionist narrative provides an adequate account of obligation, without which the theory of international society collapses in confusion. Part three responds to this problem by exploring a part of Grotius’ thought that has been excised from international relations theory: theology. This illuminates an account of obligation that rescues the Grotian tradition from the coarse world of moral scepticism and power politics.

This essay considers modernist internationalism and formal mutation in light of the globalized media ecology brought about by imperialism’s capitalist monopoly of the world-system. Since imperialism and colonialism constituted the first ever properly global system of control and circulation, modernism’s global imaginary and technical innovations cannot be understood outside of a world economic and technological frame. Building on scholarly narratives of modernism’s global vision and its metropolitan incorporation of the colonial periphery/“other,” this article shows how new media technology allowed for the rounding of the world and the advent of new literary forms such as the montage. Media discussed include cinema, photography, magazines, and the phonograph, while poets considered include but are not limited to Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Blaise Cendrars.

Romantic music has often been seen as an exploration of ideal, disembodied realms of spirit and feeling. It has also been presented as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity. Yet technical inventions and adaptions, such as new and improved instruments and new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: these included the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences. Romantic music was bound up with industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperial expansion. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon technology’s consequences, Romantic music was an exemplary manifestation of its age.

When the Bush administration launched the War on Terror after the attacks of 9/11, Gothic responded through complex critiques of the discourses and the violence this entailed, but also by unapologetically energising the endeavour to maintain US global hegemony. Noting a number of geopolitical, economical and cultural similarities between late nineteenth-century Britain and the US at the turn of the millennium, this chapter observes that a dominant strand of American Gothic in the early twenty-first century is in fact effectively imperial. The chapter then discusses the interplay between what can thus be termed an ‘American Imperial Gothic’ and the post-9/11 period, paying particular attention to the ideological and affective work that Gothic performs. Located at the intersection between postcolonial and decolonial studies, and international relations and security studies, the chapter furthermore explores how a union of various entertainment corporations and government institutions is involved in the production and dissemination of often deeply reactionary Gothic texts. These rehearse racists and sexist tropes central to the neocolonial project, but also reveal how the anxieties always tied to vast imperial and capitalist projects rise to the surface during moments of sudden upheaval and transformation.

This chapter explores the political, social, and economic conditions that have shaped the turn to history since the 1990s. Those conditions include the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ‘end of history’ narrative that accompanied a decade of ambitious liberal expansionism, the crisis of liberal internationalism triggered by the war on terror and the financial, energy, food, asylum, and climate crises of the early twenty-first century, and the shift in geopolitics caused by the rise of the BRICS and particularly of China as an economic power. International lawyers in practice and the academy have drawn on past events, practices, records, and cases as argumentative resources in adjudicatory settings and in broader debates over how to understand, justify, or resist the transformation of international law. The turn to history eventually began to be understood as a project that should be distanced from the argumentative practice of international law and measured against the empiricist protocols of academic historians. This chapter returns it to the context of international legal argumentation from which it arose, in order to gain a better understanding of the turn to history as an intervention in present struggles over the meaning of international law.

International lawyers are very familiar with the claim that international law has taken a turn to history since the tumultuous decade of the 1990s. As debates over the interpretation of past texts, events, and practices have intensified in the context of a rapidly changing field of international law, history has been presented as offering a silver bullet. While international lawyers are criticised for instrumentalising or mythologising the past in ways that are biased, partisan, and political, professional historical methods are presented as offering an objective, impartial, and evidence-based alternative. This chapter outlines the cross-disciplinary hermeneutic of suspicion that has structured the resulting debates over how the history of international law is understood. It sets out the assumptions underpinning that debate and explores its consequences for the way lawyers and historians represent the nature, functions, potential, role, and limits of international law.

During Wallace Stevens’s lifetime, imperialism was already a global institution, but parsing Stevens’s relationship to imperialism was never an entirely transparent procedure. Siraganian’s chapter explores imperialism and colonialism through brief readings of some key poems, revealing how Stevens’s poetry investigates its relation to the competing imperial and colonial projects of his age. Throughout his poetic career, he closely followed geopolitical events, including Mussolini’s colonial invasion of Ethiopia, the invention of modern warfare, and the rise of totalitarian regimes. Various poems reflect this awareness. While Stevens’s views on the imperialist fantasies of his age were at times sympathetic, poems like “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Owl’s Clover,” “Life on a Battleship,” and “A Weak Mind in the Mountains” also provide alternative, more complicated accounts that question and sometimes oppose colonizing modes of cultural domination. Above all, imperialism, especially in its cultural variety, intrigued and worried Stevens as a particular variation on the question of knowledge that continually fascinated him. Contextualization of his poetry enables us to sort out Stevens’s competing allegiances at a chaotic historical moment: to anti-imperialism, to an embattled Western culture and ideology, to a unifying world of art and poetry.