English critics know Mary Queen of Scots as a foreign, Catholic threat to England. Yet Mary’s deposition in 1567 was a Scottish constitutional crisis. It resulted in a war from 1567 to 1573 managed by William Cecil, who appealed to the Galfridian overlordship arguments of the 1540s invasion to justify England’s right to decide the Scottish succession. Chapter 4 traces English government involvement in Mary’s deposition and English military support for the King’s Men versus the Queen’s Men. It contrasts Scottish nationhood as portrayed in George Buchanan’s anti-Marian writings with the poetic collections and compositions of the Maitland family of Lethington. Buchanan’s justification of Mary’s deposition and forensic proof of Mary’s tyranny implicitly ceded an English jurisdictional right to decide Mary’s fate and Scotland’s succession. By contrast, the poetry of the Maitlands – both Thomas Maitland’s neo-Latin poems and Scots vernacular poems in The Maitland Quarto – articulated a commitment to Scotland’s sovereign autonomy and gave voice to the suffering of the Scottish commonweal and people through the wars of 1567-1573.

Both the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue encouraged White male colonists to consider themselves “enlightened” “American” citizens devoted to advancing the public good through reasonable means. This chapter focuses on the Affiches, which flourished into the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. It situates its founding in the rise of similar metropolitan publications while showing how the colonial context informed its objectives. Like metropolitan editors, its founder Jean Monceaux was confident in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies; created forums for debate within it; and believed that a press served its public by furthering the collective good. Constrained by official censorship, the Affiches nevertheless expressed colonial discontent with the postwar order by publishing extensively on the British Stamp Act Crisis. In the process, it exposed readers to a robust assertion of colonial “rights” in the face of metropolitan “tyranny” and implicitly connected Saint-Domingue’s political troubles with that of British North America and the Brittany Affair in France.

The Journal de Saint-Domingue joined the Affiches Américaines in encouraging White male colonists to consider themselves members of an “enlightened” and distinctively “American” citizenry devoted to reason and the common good. While acknowledging metropolitan precedents for a general-interest publication, its editors trumpeted their publication’s novelty, claimed all of “America” as their journalistic jurisdiction, and stated their intention to generate original content, not just reprint metropolitan articles. The monthly Journal fostered the creation of American “taste” by publishing reviews and critiquing poetry by colonists. With strong ties to the local Chambres d’Agriculture and strong support from planter subscribers, it also published extensively on agriculture (Chapter 11). With the Affiches, it created a forum where colonists could appropriate the intellectually respectable terms of “political economy,” combining them with a robust rhetoric of citizenship to respond to criticism from merchants and metropolitan chambers of commerce; debate the reimposition of the trade restrictions of the Exclusif and proposed limitations on sugar refining; and seek to redefine the colony-metropole relationship.

Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s,” begins at the end of the Seven Years War. An era of deep colonial discontent, many colonists were also confident that their colony had turned the page on an earlier tumultuous history to enter a future of civilized amenities and cultural achievement. Part II explores their cultural aspirations through the colony’s new periodicals: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. Together they advanced a coherent, gendered Enlightenment project that urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens, and connected those identities with the Enlightenment practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. The introduction considers the meaning of Habermas’s “public sphere” in a slave society of hardening racial barriers; it concludes by briefly sketching the political, social, and economic situation of the colony at war’s end and the tensions between planters and merchants, colonists and royal governance that generated controversy and crisis in the postwar years.

The introduction identifies a generation of men and women of letters whose activities strongly influenced politics in a time of conflict, but who do not fall neatly into the categories of either Renaissance humanist or philosophe. These actors moved on the edges of official diplomacy. Often marginalized, they developed practices of self-promotion and improvisation which helped them become multi-embedded across different societies and political spheres. Vicente Nogueira (1586–1654) was one such actor, who used this multi-embeddedness to ease political communication between different powers. His trajectory parallels that of many other imperial agents and literary figures who circulated in and out of the global territories of the Iberian monarchies and especially among other southern European powers.

This chapter outlines the secular convergence of Italy’s GDP. From the mid-1890s to 1913, the centuries-long economic decline was reversed. Institution-building and time-consistent policies of monetary stability and reduction of the debt-GDP ratio were among the main causes. The convergence record of the fascist years is mixed. As growth-reducing factors, we highlight “prestige policies” leading to an overvalued currency, and autarky. Postwar reconstruction was swift, followed by a quarter-century catch-up growth and cultural renaissance. The 1970s were turbulent years, marked by terrorism and inflation. Growth however continued to show unexpected resilience. Seeds of future weaknesses were nonetheless sown. Social tensions were eased by deficit-financed benefits. In the 1980s growth continued but the ratio of debt to GDP rose from 50 to almost 100 percent.

Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.

A positive shock to a society’s supply of human capital can come from exogenous and unanticipated immigration. One such case arose from Louis XIV’s precipitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists – Huguenots – to convert or to flee. Many fled to the Protestant regions of Germany, where – owing to the Huguenots’ renowned expertise and entrepreneurship – they contributed greatly to subsequent economic development. Only some of Germany’s many Protestant cities, however, welcomed the refugees. Analysis of sixty cities’ attitudes contradicts the idea that powerful guilds opposed, or that pre-existing human capital favored, the admission of the Huguenots. Rather, a city was likelier to welcome them the closer it lay to a major trade route, or the more of its population it had lost in the Thirty Years’ War. Territorial rulers almost unanimously welcomed the Huguenots and often compelled reluctant cities to admit them. Animated by the ideas of Seckendorff, rulers saw in the Huguenots both a welcome influx of human capital and a way to undermine the craft guilds, which Seckendorff regarded as a major impediment to economic growth.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

The chapter opens the analysis of social structure in the transition from the CAPE to the modern eras by reviewing the primary institutions carried over from the CAPE era into the transition, seeing which became obsolete, and which adapted to the new conditions and survived. It constrasts the relative simplicity and straightforwardness of the material developments during this period to the complexity, contradictions and turbulence of the social structure.

The chapter continues the look into the near future by surveying the whole range of social institutions in play. It discusses the robustness of the institutions that define and legitimise the state; the ongoing strength of religion in the face of challenges from science and secular ideologies; the fluctuating fortunes of the market in relation to economic nationalism; the rather partial victory of human equality over inequality; and the rising importance within the social structure of humankind of environmental stewardship in relation to other institutions.

This chapter examines the connections between sex, gender, and violence. It gives readers a basic introduction to the concepts of the biological category of sex, and the social category of gender, and how sex and gender relate to each other. It examines whether sex category factors such as testosterone levels and upper body strength affect propensities for violence. It identifies a number of factors connecting social and political structures pertaining to sex and gender – including the first political order, patriarchy, brideprice, polygyny, marriage market obstruction, militarized masculinity and the political repression of women – to various forms of violence, including wars between states, civil wars, terrorism, insurgency, violence against women, honor killings, selective abortion and infanticide, and sexual assault. It applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study examining when peacekeeping troops engage in sexual exploitation and abuse, and also to a case study of India. Last, it considers potential policy solutions to sex and gender repression and inequality, and to violence caused by them.

Beginning with an account of a late Victorian collection of Wordsworth’s poems, and the paper and botanical ephemera that were included in a copy of this edition, the introduction assesses Wordsworth’s daisy poems to pave the way for a broader discussion of the poet’s early interest in the poetics and politics of peace and how this interest was modified over the course of his career. Works examined in the Introduction include sonnets composed during the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803) and the ‘Immortality Ode’ from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The Introduction locates Wordsworth’s poetry on peace and war within the broader social, cultural, and political contexts of the period and also outlines the book’s conceptual framework.

In this chapter, attention turns to The White Doe of Rylstone, a poem arising out of familial grief whose engagement with the melancholic afterlife of war was brought into sharp relief following its publication in the year of Waterloo. Whether encountered in the love between the human and the non-human, in the slow effacement of Rylstone Hall, or in the merging of the sacred and the profane, the chapter argues that The White Doe offered a way for post-war readers to imagine peace as a form of aesthetic play that, even as it risks jettisoning actually existing peace to the realm of transcendental inaccessibility, discovers in the comingling of absence and presence, lack and plenitude, finitude and infinitude the preconditions for a life no longer marked by the struggle for self-definition.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.