This chapter explores the ways in which conservative politics and patriotic sentiment circulated in the literary culture of the 1890s, tracing the reactionary and jingoistic positions of a range of writers. From the counter-decadence of Marie Corelli and Hugh E. M. Stutfield, to the conservative critiques of modernity by Arthur Machen and Lionel Johnson, the chapter demonstrates how literary radicalism and political reactionaryism coexisted in the 1890s. It explores debates around patriotism, looking at the passionate support for imperialism in Michael Field, Algernon Charles Swinburne and John Davidson, alongside George Gissing’s conservative critique of the emerging jingoism of the period, and argues that responses to the Second Anglo-Boer War should be placed front and center in literary histories of the 1890s to ensure attention is paid to the conservatism that became ever more pervasive after the Wilde trials. It notes the variety of conservatisms that circulated in the 1890s and the necessity for literary critics to read these responses with care to better understand the complex cultural politics of the decade.

Concludes the volume and draws the essays together

The British constitution has always been an imperial constitution. To deny this is a common, if mistaken, position in the civil war over its true nature. The institutional structure and ideological discourse of the British constitution always extended beyond the pale of England and the English people. For nearly a millennium the British imperial constitution has expanded and contracted across the globe to govern millions of disparate peoples as subjects of a common Crown. The Norman reconstitution of the English nation began by fusing the multiplicity of local laws into a single common law for English people. Over the seventeenth century the rise, demise and then compromise of the Crown against Parliament was played out in a long civil war fought across the Atlantic and fuelled by novel political arguments drawing on new colonial knowledge about Indigenous peoples. A second civil war in the following century saw most American colonists break free from the imperial constitution, which was then reconstituted to satisfy some remaining subjects and to suppress others. In the nineteenth century a third civil war of sorts erupted across the empire as Hindu and Muslim, Métis and Māori, and Black men and women from Jamaica to the Gold Coast rose up in armed resistance to British imperial governance. Each rebellion drew on a global discourse on the British imperial constitution that justified or rejected competing political visions of collective life.

The British constitution’s global historical resonance is in no small part due to the extent and might of the British Empire, which touched the lives of more of humanity than any other in history. The imperial factor compelled the wide international importance of the British constitution and its history, which would otherwise be disproportionate to the clouded hills of an archipelago in the north Atlantic. In fact, Britain’s constitution, history, law and politics were analysed by all manner of people abroad in far greater numbers than those at ‘home’. Different lessons were learned. Gandhi, for example, who was admitted to London’s Inner Temple in 1888, in his early political career, looked back at Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation as ‘the Magna Charta of the Indians’1 and, till the end of his life, retained a certain ‘romantic veneration’ towards the British constitution and what it might do for India.2 On the other hand, his close follower Subhas Chandra Bose, who had also spent time in Britain as a student, in his 1938 presidential address to the Indian National Congress, warned, as in Ireland and Palestine, that ‘British ingenuity’ would ‘ruthlessly’ find a ‘constitutional device’, which he foretold would lead to the partitioning of India, ‘thereby neutralising the transference of power to the Indian people’.3 These two divergent reactions give some sense of the diversity of ideas the British constitution and history generated even among two familiar colleagues in the same country, both wanting freedom.

If internet platforms experience similar governance problems as weak states, as this chapter argues, then it follows that one possible solution to resolving the social harms they cause is to do the same sort of thing that developed companies do when real-world states are unable to govern their territory: help them build institutions to govern more effectively. This chapter defends such an approach against criticisms related to the risk of overly empowering private companies or developed western countries.

Japan is ringed by a number of remote oceanic islands whose economic, strategic and symbolic significance is entirely disproportionate to their tiny size. Yet today they are uninhabited, populated primarily by birds. Historically, these islands and the oceans that surround them have formed a borderland between Japan, Hawai‘i, the United States, Britain and China. First targetted for their supplies of plumage and guano, they later became launchpads for empire and landing strips for bombers. Many have now been transformed into nature reserves.

What chain of events led people to set foot on such remote spots in the first place? How did they go about claiming the islands and the birds that nested on them? What kind of human settlements once existed there, and what happened after they were abandoned? What does the history of bird islands say about Japanese imperial and post-imperial power, and about the web of political, economic and ecological connections between insular and oceanic space? And what does all this say about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and environment in the modern world?

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

This overarching chapter offers a comprehensive overview on how history is dealt with in International Relations (IR) and presents a conceptual framework for the study of history in IR based on the concept of historicity. The chapter also makes the case why looking at imperialism – the cross-cutting theme addressed in every chapter in this book – is a particularly fruitful way for both tracing the role of history in international politics and making use of the concept of historicity. The chapter introduces in particular six modes of historicity which shape its core argument on the centrality of history for a better understanding and better analyses of international politics.

This chapter examines how the double historical experience with imperialism is incorporated into the collective memory of Ottoman and Post-Ottoman societies and to what end. While collective memory – sociocultural narratives and practices of collectively remembering (and forgetting) specific aspects of the past – and its cultivation reflects to the past it is a product of the respecting present. Using the example of the Battle of Kosovo and the Status of Jerusalem and focussing on the linkages between memory cultures and national identities this chapter highlights how different actors at different points in time have made use of the Ottoman past to shape the Post-Ottoman present according to their respective agenda.

The relationship between imperialism and international organizations is a close one. This chapter charts three stages in this relationship since the early nineteenth century: first, the use of international organizations as a means of coordinating imperialism and containing or, preferably, preventing inter-imperial conflict; second, the global expansion of international organizations as a means of stratifying polities initially via a ‘standard of civilization’ and, later, through quotients of ‘modernization’; and third, the use of international organizations as a means for various forms of interventionism. Taken together, these three stages mark a shift from a limited realm of international organization to a virtually universal condition of international administration. Over the past two centuries, the rationale and competences of international organizations have been reconfigured, rearticulated and redistributed. This narrative demonstrates that international organizations in particular, and forms of international administration in general, owe core aspects of their origins, development and legacies to imperialism.

Critical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular adventure fiction often focus on novels about forays into Africa. It is the aim of this chapter to show that the Arctic provided an alternative arena for such stories. In the first half of the chapter, the notion that the European settlers migrated from Greenland to other locations is discussed. Based on geophysical and geoclimatic theories that a navigable sea with habitable islands existed near the North Pole, it was hypothesised that the vanished settlers could have found a new home furhther north in the Arctic. The second half of the chapter examines how fiction writers drew on contemporary science to create what can be classified as the ‘lost colony’ story. In this type of popular fiction, it is imagined that descendants of the old Greenland settlers or other Norse explorers had survived in a hidden land. In some of the tales, the ideas of imperialism and exploitation of the Arctic become pronounced, thereby returning us to the fantasies discussed in the early chapters of the present book.

The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.