The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisingly recuperative. The high modernists used the stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the evanescence and meaninglessness of present action. Transferring that technique to the past tense, Beckett records dissipating practices of everyday life. What’s more, Beckett’s garbled lists provoke readers to impose sense by drawing upon a shared cultural grammar. Beckett’s verbal hoarding makes conceivable a collective bound by shared axioms that reduce abstract multiplicities into knowable situations. Beckett thus posits infranational communities that are consolidated not by institutionally underwritten concepts such as nationality or ethnicity but by remembered practices of everyday life.

Continuing the volume’s first thematic strand (Home and Away), this chapter is dedicated to eleventh-century England and the insular world. It begins by studying England, before analysing England’s connections with the territories and peoples of Wales and Ireland. This is followed by specific discussions of William the Conqueror’s dealings with the Welsh and the relationship between the Danelaw and northern England. The chapter then shifts its focus beyond Northumbria to investigate the history of the Normans in the north and their contacts with the Scots.

The conflict that can arise when rules on competition law and the right to bargain collectively intersect has been a live issue amongst those interested in employment relations in Ireland for more than two decades now, as a series of conflicts has arisen in this space. When collective bargaining rights and competition law clash, the parties involved have generally swerved the issue through a mixture of negotiated ‘solutions’, and, more recently, a controversial legislative measure. Increasingly, however the issue is becoming one that requires to be addressed head on. This chapter examines how the Irish ‘voluntarist’, common law, system of employment relations has responded when competition law and collective representation rights are at odds. It will focus, particularly, on some paradigmatic disputes and reflects on how Irish law generally views the restriction on ‘economic freedom’ inherent in collective representation rights.

Although there is no concrete surviving evidence that the Acts of Paul or the Passio sanctae Theclae circulated in Ireland, there are a number of references to Thecla in medieval Irish martyrologies and devotional literature. These sparse references to the proto-martyr are too few to reconstruct the true extent of her cult in medieval Ireland or to assess her possible impact on Insular hagiography. However, one curious uniting feature shared by these fragmentary references to Thecla is that they are all in versified form. Thecla is also venerated in litany-like verse prayers in both Old and Middle Irish where she is included in groupings of significant apostolic figures. Late antique and early medieval continental Latin sources in which Thecla is referred to in a similar context may provide the likely roots of transmission. These possible Latin sources, however, are not all in verse form. Therefore, the choice of a poetic medium coupled with the use of the vernacular may provide precious evidence for the intended audience and reception milieu of such popular hagiographical texts.

Chapter 4 connects the emergence of transformative demographic governance to changes in natural philosophy, in particular to Francis Bacon’s works and their influence among projectors associated with the Hartlib Circle in the mid-seventeenth century. The problem of managing the qualities of populations in an empire raised the question of natural constraints on the power of policy to “improve” populations; the chapter examines Hartlibian projects concerned with this question on a large scale, including some in which putatively immutable racial boundaries and the enslavement of Africans indicate both limits to and paradoxes of demographic governance. It then turns to Cromwellian Ireland, showing that opposed arguments for either Irish transplantation or English –Irish mixture proceeded from a similar centering of demographic governance. Mid-century projects fed into William Petty’s “political arithmetic” in the Restoration. This fused Baconianism, alchemical ideas and quantification, treating the control of the numbers and of the economic, political, religious and cultural qualities of populations in England, Ireland and the empire as essentially similar problems for the state.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

Chapter 2 considers the archipelagic impact of the 1688 Revolution by examining the the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688–91). It analyzes how Irish events were mediated in newspapers such as the Orange Gazette and the London Gazette, both in the news stories and in advertisements for printed works such as maps, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (1689) and James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras (1689). It focuses on how the media event surrounding the relief of the siege of Derry shaped English perceptions of the rest of the conflict in Ireland. The importance of Derry was amplified by the visit of George Walker to London and by thanksgiving services held in churches in London. By examining the representation of the siege in John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (1705), this chapter also assesses how Ireland was subsequently erased from the memory of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in Britain.

This chapter introduces the theme of mental illness in prison, situating it in the broader historiography of crime and punishment and the history of psychiatric care and institutional provision. It explains how our book redresses the neglect of prisons as a locus for the management of mental disorder, a major oversight given the number of mentally ill people confined in them during the nineteenth century. The introduction elucidates our particular methodology, with its emphasis on individual prison archives that provide a rich counter-balance to the sifted and mediated accounts of official inquiries and published annual reports. It outlines the potential of drawing on examples from England and Ireland, which, while sharing ideologies and with similar systems of prison administration, varied in interpretation and implementation. We summarise the expansion and remit of prisons in the nineteenth century, including the importance of the prison cell as a carefully curated space for reform and rehabilitation.

This chapter concentrates upon the military experiences and political ambitions of Ralegh as a soldier, political adventurer, courtier, author and long-term prisoner in the Tower. What Ralegh describes as the ‘Theme and Argument... of War’ not only dominates his historical writings, but also haunts every aspect of his textual output and political engagement. In his many and various textual meditations on war as a cultural driver, Ralegh insists that armed hostilities remained the inevitable consequence of any evolution in political society. Butchery and slaughter were recurring features of the Elizabethan participation in European politics, whether it was in Ireland, the Low Countries or the Atlantic World. Like the Earl of Essex, Ralegh served in military campaigns across the Channel and the Irish Sea, but also looked further abroad to the New World to establish an imperial future for his nation. This chapter concentrates upon the obsessive need of the seasoned soldier and author to revisit and re-experience scenes of conflict on the page and in person in order to try to forge an English empire for the future.