The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

Food acts as a proxy for different political agendas in the Gulf states. For governments, it is a means to reproduce nationalism and identity; it is a vehicle for citizen upgrading. Questions of environmental sustainability and consumption pervade food and agriculture, and in the Gulf, this is managed through a techno-political discourse. The development of indoor farms that utilise technology presents farming as a means to produce food that is free of its social and ecological dimensions. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the way in which boycotts provide Gulf societies with a means of expression and agency.

This chapter shows the evolution and tenuous persistence of white supremacy from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. It begins by analyzing racial terrorism and lynching in the USA. It connects these acts of violence to broader patterns of economic exclusion and political dominance across English-speaking societies. The analysis reveals deep connections between American segregation and Nazi Germany, demonstrating how racist ideologies reinforced each other globally. While civil rights movements achieved significant victories, white power structures adapted through subtler forms of oppression, including discriminatory policing, housing discrimination, and coded political messaging. The chapter shows how anti-colonial and civil rights movements worldwide recognized their common struggle against a global system of white supremacy. The election of Barack Obama marked a crisis point, triggering an intense backlash that culminated in Trump’s presidency and Brexit. These recent manifestations of white nationalism, while politically successful, may represent desperate attempts to preserve a crumbling system rather than signs of strength.

This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

The Irish at the dawn of the twentieth century benefitted from many positive changes over the previous half-century in health care, education and social provision, and were (in general, apart from urban slums) among the healthiest in Europe. The new dynamic trade unionism reached Ireland in the 1890s and formed a combustible force when combined with the non-parliamentary nationalisms and feminism of the early century. These all culminated in the 1916 Rising, which usurped the parliamentary nationalism of the Home Rule Party and rapidly assumed leadership of nationalist Ireland. Unionists continued to oppose national self-determination in all its forms. The state of Northern Ireland was set up by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which also set up a state in the ‘south’. This was superseded by the War for Independence 1919–1921, which culminated in a Treaty with Britain which gave dominion status to the Irish Free State, comprising twenty-six of the thirty-two counties. A civil war followed 1922–1923, between pro- and anti-Treatyites.

Over 100,000 Irishmen from all over the country served in the Great War, and 40,000 died. The war brought great prosperity to farmers and shopkeepers, industrialists and food processors, though rising food prices took their toll of townspeople.

The rise of community capitalism since the mid-2010s is reflected in the return of protectionism, authoritarianism, nativism, and violent conflict. European capitalism was forced to adapt by being more assertive. Europeans have embraced solutions that were previously refused as too protectionist, such as European preference, free trade contingent on adhering to social and environmental norms, subsidies to industry for strategic reasons, and competition policy decisions based on reciprocity. Some of these ideas were long defended by France. Germany previously criticised them, but has embraced some in trade since 2016, and others in foreign policy since 2022. The management of Brexit has reaffirmed the basis of European soft power, which depends on the unity of the Single Market. The Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21) forced the Union to adopt protectionist and interventionist measures. The Russo-Ukrainian War has led to very strong sanctions packages, as well as the Union’s foray into military matters. But the Europeans still remain heavily dependent on the US for defence. Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025 has forced Europe to think harder about organising community capitalism.

It has been said that countries in East-Central Europe have their own brand of constitutionalism which celebrates the idea of national sovereignty. I shall argue that, when the question of sovereignty is treated in the framework of cultural imaginaries, we realise that this region’s constitutionalism is actually much less archaic than it might seem. Despite all the diversity encountered in East-Central Europe, there is a recurring cultural theme running through it: the idea of being a small nation that has suffered great historical tragedies. Yet no political or legal position with respect to sovereignty follows from the mere observation that the nation is small and in need of protection. As the history of East-Central Europe shows, depending on the kind of threats that are thought to besiege the nation, state sovereignty may appear either as a protective shield or an obstacle precluding membership in some larger political community. Even supposing that countries in East-Central Europe share a collective mentality centred on the category of the nation, it does not follow that they should be especially attached to state sovereignty in any traditional sense.

This chapter reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a circular bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Mosteghanemi’s novel imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts a transregional geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together. A self-conscious heir to the transregionalism described in this study, Mosteghanemi retains its Arab scale to great commercial success but gently critiques its collective, male Arab voice. Through the voice of her male narrator, Arab literary constructions of meaning over Algeria are revealed as homosocial exchanges between male intellectuals, bonding them across distance and rivalries. In Memory, literature’s interpretation of Algeria emerges as an autobiographical task, revealing and narrating an Arab intellectual subject to himself and his likenesses.

The half-century prior to 1914 was not just a belle époque of world fairs and art nouveau; it was also a period of increasingly contentious international relations, characterized by the developing force of public opinion. Patriotic humanities scholars acquired a new role as public intellectuals, ‘explaining the ways of history to men’. The French–German debates over Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 were a formative moment in the longer time-frame of alternating lost wars between 1804 and 1918, marking the crystallization of French revanchism and German triumphalism. These debates became the breeding ground, paradoxically, both of Ernest Renan’s seminal and still authoritative ‘voluntaristic’ theory of national identity and of a type of chauvinistic propaganda that reached almost hysterical levels in 1914. The fervent jingoism of the Great War, fomented and rationalized by learned disquisitions from prestigious academics, marks the zenith of nationalism as a force in European relations. One committed participant, Emile Durkheim, recognized that self-righteous patriotism could lead to something like national narcissism.

The specter of demographic decline haunted many European nations as they faced mutual competition, growing geopolitical tensions, and dwindling birth rates from the late nineteenth onwards. Amid these developments, the homosexual emerged as a loathsome incarnation of decadence, effeminacy, and infertility, but it did so in some countries more than others. This chapter compares the discourse of demographic decline in France and Belgium. It shows how alarmist declinism was much more pronounced in the former following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Belgium, by contrast, was not a major geopolitical power and far less concerned with military and demographic prowess. Moreover, when the birth rate began tapering off there too, the Catholic Church rather than nationalist voices formulated the country’s response. It did so in a vocabulary specifically calibrated to avoid naming sexuality’s supposed ‘aberrations,’ including homosexuality, so as not to let the genie out of the bottle. The latter, these Catholics argued, had been the fatal mistake of countries where a scientific discourse of ‘perversion’ had been allowed to circulate freely, and where ‘perverts’ and ‘inverts’ had now begun using that very scientific vocabulary in their own defense.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

This chapter asks the first of three questions about aid projects: what happens when politics is made central to its work. Charitable humanitarianism usually promotes itself as operating outside of politics. In Southern Africa, the Clutton-Brocks practised a form of inter-racial cooperation with the politics very much left in. The Cold Comfort Farm experiment near Harare was an affront to white minority rule. Clutton-Brock was deported, and his chief collaborator, Didymus Mutasa, was imprisoned. It failed as a practical aid project. Yet the grassroots initiative inspired others to establish similar ventures elsewhere: at Nyafaru on the border with Mozambique; in Malawi; and, most significantly, in Ruvuma in Tanzania. The memoirs and biographies of many Zimbabwean political leaders mention Clutton-Brock and Cold Comfort Farm for not only alleviating poverty through cooperative self-help but also for placing the spotlight on the underlying causes of poverty: the racist legislation of the Rhodesian government, particularly in regard to land tenure and ownership.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

The current Dissent phase is characterized by four drivers: nationalism, economic statecraft, negative power, and the absence of social purpose. With the rise of negative power and unprecedented diversity among meaningful actors who disagree over global rules and norms, the exercise of power in world politics has never been more important or more frustrating for so many kinds of actors. International entropy is on the rise. Domestic politics are increasingly salient in a changing world. Sudden and dramatic national growth induces massive social and political dislocations. A world in transition is a deeply uncertain one for both structural and motivational reasons. Emergent systems encounter unpredictable and often destabilizing power shifts among the system’s most powerful actors. They also experience changing state motivations associated with relative power positions in flux. Just as we expect people who go from rags to riches or vice versa to change their personal ambitions, rising and declining powers can be expected to expand or contract their national goals.