In his popular novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was first published in Istanbul in 1943, Sabahattin Ali wrote that “for some reason or other people prefer to investigate what they feel sure they will find. It is without doubt easier to find a brave man to descend to the bottom of a well where it is known that a dragon lives than to find a man who will show the courage to descend into a well about the bottom of which nothing is known.”1 This view applies nicely to research into nations and nationalisms, for the bottom of the well is already known: the Ottoman Empire collapsed and was replaced by new nation-states. This collapse has often been taken as the “inevitable” triumph of nation-state over empire, the victory of national identities over other identity constructions.

A few brief reflections on the timeliness and importance of rediscovering moderation in our age of extremes following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also comments on the fragility of civilization and makes a strong case for moderation conceived of as a fighting faith.

This chapter begins in Paris in 1919, a year in which prognostications of the collapse of civilization became widespread. By the end of that year, the largely imagined crisis of civilization had become a tangible one; the ongoing conflicts in central and eastern Europe presented a material threat to the lives of intellectuals and institutions, reports of soaring prices and starvation in central and eastern Europe became widespread, and the spectre of Bolshevism threatened the new democratic order. The chapter explores how intellectual reconstruction was framed – but mostly not acted upon – at the Paris Peace Conference and that it was not until early 1920 that intellectual humanitarianism began to take shape.

The book opens with an exploration of the cultural violence of the First World War and sets this in wider historical and historiographical contexts. It explores three key themes which inform the monograph: cultural destruction, humanitarianism, and the role of the intellectual. While none of these themes began with the First World War, the conflict transformed them in significant ways. Cultural destruction was a key component in how the First World War was presented to belligerent and neutral populations and intellectual sites were particularly important in this process of cultural mobilization. The introduction argues that because cultural destruction was crucial to popular understandings of the war, its opposite, cultural and intellectual reconstruction, would in turn be an important part of the process of post-war stabilization.

This chapter argues that the relationship between sound and sense is to be historically understood, and that cultural soundscapes emerge from the accrued meaning that historical actors give to items that may have been there since a long time, but were not previously considered as relevant. The specific case to be discussed here is the practice of collecting (and publishing) ballads: as ballads acquired a new cultural meaning, collective popular interest incorporated them as an active element of the contemporary soundscape. Changes in the way of conceptualizing history and development, in perceiving the divide between oral and written culture, political events and a refashioning of the values attributed to ideas of naturalness and simplicity have all been crucial factors in the process of attribution of meaning to ballads. As cultural identity came to be defined by sounds and music, ballads acquired a new meaning and – of course – this process did not leave the genre unharmed: ‘elite minds’ selected and purged the material that was destined to represent marks of Britishness and proceeded towards the ‘civilizi+L10ng’ of ballads.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.

In this address, which Du Bois delivered in London at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, he uttered the famous phrase, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Co-signed by fellow organizers of the conference, the address makes clear the global nature of the color line and argues that human progress requires that the opportunities of modern civilization be made available to the “darker races.” Appealing specifically to Christian nations, the address calls on them to refuse to draw distinctions of color or race; to resist exploiting and repressing Africans for the sake of greed; to govern their African and West Indian colonies justly and give them, “as soon as practicable, the rights of responsible government”; to recognize the Congo Free State as an independent Negro State; and to respect the integrity of the independent states of Abyssinia, Liberia, and Haiti.

Du Bois delivered “To the World” as an address at the Second Pan-African Congress in London in August 1921, and the conference delegates approved its resolutions, as well as those of a separate manifesto addressed specifically to the League of Nations. Both were published in The Crisis in November 1921. “To the World” declares racial equality to be the “founding stone of world peace and human advancement and insists on the world’s duty to assist in the advancement of the “backward.” It projects a vision of “interracial contact” based on democratic political institutions and mutual respect and argues that poverty and class conflict in developed countries (“culture lands”) can be truly solved only when white nations stop perpetrating even greater poverty and injustice among “darker peoples.” The manifesto to the League makes three key demands: that the International Bureau of Labor establish a section to deal with Negro labor in Africa and the “Islands of the Sea”; that a man of Negro descent be appointed to the League’s Mandates Commission; and that the League attend to legal and cultural bias against “civilized persons of Negro descent.”

Chapter 8 examines how millennia of accrued technological know-how, experimentation and curiosity enabled humanity to develop the first metallurgy, exploring the founding of important trade networks. The key role of symbolic communication networking is discussed as an influencing factor in the emergence of writing as a breakthough that finally enabled ideas to transcend time.

The capital-exporting states of the North Atlantic long insisted that the standards of civilised justice mandated that capital-importing states respect the property rights of their nationals engaged in commercial enterprise abroad. Only a single North Atlantic conception of civilisation qualified to provide content for this purported international standard, even as that content was contested by capital-importing states from the Global South. This chapter turns to a methodology that is dominant in investment law scholarship that operates to produce an outcome functionally equivalent to the standards of civilized justice. International investment lawyers and scholars, it is argued, deploy simplistic comparative methodologies that reproduce historic domination by powerful capital-exporting states. The choice of country models is highly selective and productively so. By preferring to conscript the easily retrievable law of the Global North into general principles of international law, scholars reinforce extant power relations rather than realigning them in new directions.

Chapter 5 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the relationship between cities, knowledge, and power, arguing against the casual link scholars often make between cities and “civilization,” a concept with too many congratulatory overtones. Referring to cities around the world, the chapter shows how urban monumental architecture and the mass processions and ceremonies that monuments were designed to accommodate repeatedly served to disseminate state-sponsored propaganda glorifying authoritarian rule and violence. It also traces the role of smaller spaces in cities in generating “Axial Age” knowledge that was skeptical of state propaganda, noting that authoritarian rulers sought to coopt or contain such knowledge to support their continued rule by building universities, libraries, schools, and temples and other spaces of worship while censoring ideas they deemed too critical. In this way, cities did help spread new knowledges and technologies, making it possible for smaller-scale cults and schools of philosophy to become the kernels of later “world” religions and secular knowledge systems. Throughout the pre-modern era, however, the spread of knowledge was subject to sharp boundaries delimited by the urban-centered infrastructure of basic literacy, even as city-based technologies often acted as a force in expanding the human population on Earth.

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

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.

The Soviet Union’s official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was universal, aspiring to explain all humanity’s past and future. It claimed to be a science, applicable to social relations, economics, and international politics. Culture, religion, and traditional social structures, Marxism-Leninism taught, would be swept away by economic and social change. This was true in Soviet domestic politics, where "feudal" practices such as religion and patriarchy were supposed to be replaced by the Party and the State. It was also true, experts in Marxism-Leninism taught, in international politics, where class not culture would determine the future. In the 1970s, however, Soviet experts, analysts, and officials began to question the supposed irrelevance of culture, religion, and tradition. In foreign policy, culture seemed of enduring relevance in explaining how countries in Asia and Africa interacted with the Soviet Union. In domestic politics, "traditional structures" in regions like Central Asia and the Caucasus seemed to persist generations after Soviet power had been established. This paper traces Soviet and later Russian belief in the importance of cultural, ethnic, national, and civilizational factors in politics from the 1970s to the present via several influential intellectuals who drove the shift. It connects the rising Soviet belief in the importance of clashing civilizations to declining faith in Russia in universalistic politics in general. In the West, the Cold War’s end was associated with Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis. In Russia, the Cold War’s demise corresponded with a rejection of Marxist-Leninist universalism and a new emphasis on cultural and civilizational difference.