This chapter shows how the material and ritual legacies of apostolic Rome provoked debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and imperial Rome. We demonstrate how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how anglophone travellers constructed their modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Italian Other. Yet critics have paid insufficient attention to how religious difference and sectarian identity shaped such attitudes. Catholics had a special commitment to validating the early history of the Roman Church, but Protestants also had an active interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the splendour of medieval Catholicism – Protestant commentators vindicated their faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. Yet if British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, some Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, combining the aesthetic appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicizing emphasis on the material legacies of apostolic antiquity.

Italy is not often featured as an important actor in the geopolitical map of the Cold War. And yet the country played an important role in breaking up a number of strictures that had kept the Soviets at bay from Western Europe. Italy’s fast growing businesses were often the first to reach out to the Soviets for large deals. Fiat very prominently sold a factory to the Soviets in the mid-1960s, representing that decade’s largest turnkey project. But this chapter argues that the more historically consequential initiative was ENI’s suggestion of a gas pipeline running from Ukrainian gas fields to the north of the Mediterranean country. This would have somewhat of a novel payment arrangement: the pipeline would be paid in gas. This arrangement effectively expanded repayment periods well beyond previous, Bretton Woods–era practices, which usually involved short-term loans that covered the time required for barter arrangements to transact. The Soviets saw an opportunity to change the temporal order of Bretton Woods, and suggested a much larger gas-for-pipes deal that would link their newly discovered gas reserves in Western Siberia to Western Europe. Italy balked initally for lack of industrial and capital resources, but others would literally capitalize on the new possibilities Italy had opened.

Italian state and business agents, having initiated the changes in East–West relations that this book follows, then proceeded to stall on the gas-for-pipe deal. This coda documents how it was only after West Germany jumped on the project that the Italians followed, as junior partners, through the door they themselves had opened many years before. As they did so, they entered a world of proliferating finance, debt creation, and market integrations. Closing the door behind them, they left behind the world of exchanges politicized in a Cold War key, a kind of politicization they had skillfully used throughout the 1950s and 1960s to negotiate better terms from the Soviets because of the risk to the American–Italian relationship that used to entail. What they entered was precisely the world the Soviets had fought for, one where market logic and discourse was overriding.

Chapter 9 argues that Staël saw a Faustian bargain in Corinne ou l’Italie, took it, and paid the price; its triumphs and failures thus stand or fall together. What Staël gained was mythic power; what she lost was the ability to control its fate. Corinne’s political impact in Europe and America, standing as it does at the birth of modern nationalism, is both real and unquantifiable – witness the coinage nationalité, part of the larger impact of Staël’s ideas on national genius, reflected in Blackwood’s praise of her in 1818 as the creator of the science of nations. The novel’s esthetic impact on a century of readers is both fascinating and somewhat easier to assess, an invitation to future study already made in 1825 by Stendhal in a remark from Racine et Shakespeare: “Je ne vois réellement que Corinne qui ait acquis une gloire impérissable sans se modeler sur les anciens.”

In this opening chapter, I attempt to situate Plato’s philosophizing and literary production in its historical context. The evidence external to the dialogues that such an enterprise can rely on is either scrappy or suspect, or both. So what I offer here is a series of snapshots. They follow a chronological sequence, from Plato’s relationship with Socrates and the Athens that executed him; through his momentous first visit to Italy and Sicily and its impact on his thinking about politics and philosophy; to the founding of the Academy, Plato’s rivalry with Isocrates, and the birth of the theory of Forms; and ending with the worlds of the late dialogues.

Italy’s Romantic debate was literary in name only: In Napoleon’s aftermath, Italy had to be reinvented. Chapter 15 reviews Staël’s 1816 Italian articles, which cut to the heart of this debate – hence an immediate impact that dwarfs that of her friends Schlegel and Sismondi. The shape of Europe underlies this discussion, and Staël, with firsthand knowledge from London to Moscow, is in large part responsible for that scope. This chapter retraces the impact of Staël and her writings on every major Italian Romantic, in the highly charged atmosphere of Austrian-occupied Milan after Waterloo. Stendhal’s career as a writer begins in this matrix, a European architecture unthinkable without Staël’s visit. How sweet to see that grand architecture resurface.

This concluding chapter discusses the findings of the study and its contributions to the analysis of populist radical right parties and their impact on (local) government. It goes into further depth regarding the novel perspectives it offers regarding the study of three topics in particular: the policies of populist radical right parties in government, party politics at the local level of government and the threat to liberal democracy from populist radical right parties, as well as the restraints imposed upon them at the local level of government that mitigate such a threat.

The entry of populist radical right parties into positions of power has generated anxieties regarding the potential consequences for liberal democracy. Yet while these parties have also gained control of local governments, activities at that level have been largely overlooked. This longstanding neglect is surprising when we consider the development of populist radical right parties in Western Europe, which has been a provincial phenomenon from the beginning. Prior to their breakthrough on the national stage, crucial strategic innovations and electoral successes took place at the local level of politics. This chapter introduces the topic of populist radical right parties in local politics and positions the book in existing debates on their impact on government and strategies for governing. It provides a clear conceptualization of impact, in both indirect and direct forms, and summarizes the various strategies that they have pursued in government. It then outlines the various forms of populist radical right-led local government, distinguished by the radicalism of their impact and the involvement of the central party. The chapter ends by presenting a plan for the chapters to follow.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.

The chapter describes the main nature conservation challenges in Italy, its main policy responses and actions, and their achievements and lessons, primarily over the last 40 years. This covers the country’s natural characteristics, habitats and species of particular importance; the status of nature and main pressures affecting it; nature conservation policies (including biodiversity strategies), legislation, governance and key actors; species measures (e.g. regulation of hunting and poaching, and species recovery and action plans); protected areas and networks; general conservation measures (e.g. development planning, and management of High Nature Value farmland); nature conservation costs, economic benefits and funding sources; and biodiversity monitoring. Likely future developments are also identified. Conclusions are drawn on what measures have been most effective and why, and what is needed to improve the implementation of existing measures and achieve future nature conservation goals.