This chapter focusses on the importance of conspicuous generosity to the emperors and their heirs. Euergetism describes a performed relationship between rulers and ruled, where exchanges of goods, money, and clout are transacted. The expectation of such generosity is important for the stability and legitimacy of an emperor’s reign, which makes the question of succession a secondary focus of this chapter: how did the Roman emperor secure the future legitimacy of his position?

This chapter examines the effects that individual leaders have in shaping foreign policy, including decisions for war. It first presents general international relations debates about whether international structure makes leaders irrelevant, or if instead leaders can make a difference. It then examines regular and irregular processes by which leaders can come to power. Then it describes how differences among leaders might translate into different patterns of foreign policy decisionmaking, including differences regarding beliefs and ideology, background experiences, sex and gender, personal health, and age. It also examines how variance in domestic politics – including the role of political parties, bureaucracy, and the firmness of a leader’s hold on power – can affect how and whether leaders can affect foreign policy choices, The chapter also discusses other concepts and debates, including the diversionary theory of war and whether reputation resides in leaders or in states. It then applies several of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether leaders who are former rebels are more likely to acquire nuclear weapons, and a case study on leaders and the causes of World War I.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

This chapter introduces compound sentences, as the components of these complicated sentences have equal importance. Four types of common compound sentences are examined: coordinative, successive, incremental, and alternative. Each type is introduced in terms of specific correlative markers and their meanings and uses.

This chapter explores how the term sympathy was co-opted into political discourse in the first part of the seventeenth century, and how Jacobean literary and dramatic texts debated the political aspects of pity and compassion. Focusing on responses to the crises of succession and the plague, the chapter discusses the representation of sympathy in William Muggins’s Londons Mourning garment (1603), William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Croesus (1604), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). It argues that King Lear exposes the ethical and philosophical problems involved in emotional perspective-taking, and points to the ways in which concepts of sympathy in this period were complicated by an individual’s class and status. The chapter then turns to royal elegies from the 1610s and 1620s, including poetic responses to the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. The chapter also explores several religious works that express concerns about a decline of sympathy during this period, and proposes that the increased bleakness of the 1623 Folio text of Lear may reflect wider social anxieties about what Thomas Medeley calls ‘this iron and flinty age’.

In a hereditary monarchy, kinship mattered; yet, royal family members are too often relegated to the background in contemporary scholarship on the princely states. This chapter shows that royal family members could muster significant social, political, cultural, and economic capital in support of their various personal and political projects, and often figured prominently in the records as the Resident’s greatest allies, or greatest foes. Residents developed a range of strategies for co-opting or side-lining younger brothers, uncles, and nephews, who, despite being useful informants, were also destabilizing forces in regional politics, and a drain on the Company’s time and resources. Women played an even more important role at court, one that has been obscured in previous accounts of the Residencies. This chapter shows not only how the Resident sought to mobilize royal women for his purposes, but also how royal women themselves laid a claim on the Resident’s services through the idiom of kinship and protection, often with significant consequences for the Resident’s political strategy at court. Rather than simplifying their job, the Residents need to work through royal families in fact introduced significant complications.

Chapter 2 argues that the early modern theater’s techniques for the production of narrative suspense emerged from its cultivation of spectators’ phenomenological uncertainty. Attending to moments of temporal suspension in history plays, including Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, William Shakespeare’s Richard II, and John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, the chapter shows that theater practitioners regularly aimed to resist the unrelenting forward momentum of live performance by grinding dramatic time to a halt. Narrative suspense was especially hard to come by in the history play, which emerged as a new genre in the 1590s by dramatizing well-known chronicles of English kings. But the playgoers who flocked to theaters to see these stories of succession were living through a succession crisis of their own, for Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir rendered England’s dynastic future crucially opaque. The theatrical invitation to unknow England’s past trained spectators in speculative thinking oriented toward their own politically uncertain future. History plays transformed the anxious wait for Elizabeth’s successor, that is, into the pleasure of theatrical possibility.

In the Middle Ages, the dismemberment of Agrippina, Emperor Nero’s mother, was not simply a gruesome family affair, but it had links to the emerging practice of dissection and the anatomical difference between the sexes. According to classical authors, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt involving a self-sinking boat, Agrippina was slayed by Anicetus upon Nero’s orders.1 In Roman History, Cassius Dio added that Agrippina opened her dress and asked Anicetus to strike at her womb “for this bore Nero.”2 Nero wished to see her corpse to verify the death, “so he laid bare her body, looked her all over and inspected her wounds.”3 The emperor examining the wound of the womb is transformed in the Middle Ages into the image of the ruler ordering the dissection of the female body.4 Jacobus de Voragine described such episode in the Golden Legend (c. 1260).5 Jean de Meun, in his continuation to The Romance of the Rose (c. 1275), wrote that Nero “had his mother dismembered so that he might see the place where he was conceived.”6 Jean de Meun is documented between 1265 and 1269 in Bologna, where post-mortem medical examination was practiced from the thirteenth century onward.7 Giovanni Boccaccio reports the story at length, including the wound of the womb, and mentions that in some sources “after her death Nero inspected the corpse, criticizing some parts of her body and praising others.”8

This chapter considers the importance of royal heirs in the process of militarising the monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. It gauges the significance of the crowns’ military performance for their attempts to generate loyalty and popular endorsement. Royal heirs, and crown princes in particular, had a significant part to play within this context – if only as military actors, but even more so if they could demonstrate real military achievements. The chapter culminates in an assessment of the experiences and contributions of three royal heirs who assumed military roles during the First World War.

This chapter investigates the political effects and means of royal heirs in constitutional systems. It asks how they contributed politically to the process of monarchical persistence in the Long Nineteenth Century and concentrates in particular on instances where they were opposed to the course championed by their predecessors and on the process of generating ‘soft power’ for their dynasties by committing themselves to visibility, mobility and ‘civic publicness’.

The introduction engages the reader with the central question of the survival of monarchies within an age of dramatic change and makes a case for exploring succession as an important political resource available to monarchical systems under pressure.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

This chapter assesses the importance of educating royal heirs in the nineteenth century. It traces the development of ideas of princely education and explains how this topic moved from being an internal, dynastic matter to being a political issue of public concern and public debate – another weapon in the arsenal of monarchical adaptation and self-defence. The chapter leads to a comparison between the educational programmes imposed upon the several generations of royal heirs in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia/Germany.

In Ilott v. The Blue Cross, the UK Supreme Court restated the centrality of the principle of testamentary freedom in English succession law. This chapter considers the principle’s application in the context of will and trust disputes in Hong Kong, an English common law jurisdiction that is not only influenced by Chinese culture and traditions but also serves as a hub for mainland Chinese entrepreneurs who may be subject to the forced heirship laws of civilian China. The chapter has two objectives. First, it reviews recent notable family inheritance cases pertaining to the application of the testamentary freedom principle in Hong Kong to examine how the balance between personal autonomy and familial obligation is struck. Second, as the preference for testamentary freedom also informs the law of private express trusts, the chapter discusses the use of trust and family trust litigation involving some of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families to highlight the most attractive features of the trust device for managing Asian wealth, as well as the corresponding theoretical issues raised by such features.

Chapter 2 offers an introduction to the history of Islam and Muslims with a focus on events and processes that influenced and remained important for the origin and development of the Muslim firaq. It examines the period of late antiquity, what the Qurʾan has to say about sectarian splintering, the Prophetic era, and the period after the death of the Prophet. It focuses in particular on the events of the Saqīfa, the first Muslim fitna (civil war), and the establishment of the early Muslim dynasties. The shift from the Umayyad to the ʿAbbāsid eras offers an introduction to the idea of a Muslim school of thought, while the notion of caliphal power is examined using the examples of Umayyad persecution of “heretics,” as well as the miḥna. The Turkic invasions, including the Mongols, offers an opportunity to examine the nature of political and military power, and to see how such configurations change with the introduction of gunpowder and the establishment of the “gunpowder empires.”

Close relatives of the emperor were assumed to be members of his court, unless he took conscious steps to exclude or expel them. A male relative’s position at court could be bolstered with traditional markers of authority including magistracies; female relatives relied on their access to, and relationship with, the emperor to build influence. The scandalous accounts of imperial women in the literary sources attest to the resentment their high status provoked, at least among the elite men who produced such narratives. For the emperor, his relatives were both living symbols of his rule and valuable aides in governing the empire. To wider court circles, Roman society as a whole, and even Rome’s foreign neighbours, members of the imperial family were intermediaries between ruler and subject, sources of patronage and protection, but also active participants in court intrigue. They could secure the dynasty – but they could also destroy it.

The intersection of childhood and rulership has a long history. This chapter compares examples of child kingship across Europe before 1050 with cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It illustrates how structural developments in society, culture, politics and law brought greater political stability to a child’s rule during the central Middle Ages. Over this period, cultural attitudes towards violence were changing, practices of succession and inheritance were evolving, and ideas around marriage, illegitimacy and queenship were shifting. Such developments fundamentally altered the court environments into which royal children were born, the political context within which they succeeded, and the practicalities and precarities of their early experiences of rulership. This chapter examines aspects of violence, succession and queenship in turn before, in the fourth and final section, arguing for the need to revise claims of Germany’s exceptional ‘rejection’ of child kingship. While there are meaningful differences in how children were incorporated within systems and practices of kingship, this chapter suggests divergences between kingdoms should not be exaggerated.

Turning to more ceremonial, less habitual actions in which a young heir’s active participation could be vital, this chapter stresses the political community’s wider investment in children as political actors. Royal children were both enablers and facilitators of diplomacy rather than merely pawns in the diplomatic and political games of adults. Children’s participation could be decisive to acts of association and diplomacy, and thus vital to readying the realm for their succession and rule. The chapter first examines attempts to secure magnate loyalty to children through oaths of fidelity and performances of homage. The earliest stages of the male life cycle had unique attributes in regard to demonstrations of loyalty, and there were substantial benefits in securing oaths to children when they were so young. The chapter then turns to focus on children’s incorporation within performances of cross-kingdom diplomacy, an important aspect of children’s education. The final section foregrounds the chanson de geste Le couronnement de Louis to examine the importance of children’s dynamic contribution at coronation and the wider political community’s investment in boy kings.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.