Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

Marx’s early theory of labour and alienation originates from idealist concepts of spontaneity and formativity. His ideas of socialism and emancipation in the 1840s reprise aspects of Kantian autonomy and heteronomy and follow Fichte in linking labour with spontaneity. Marx formulates the dialectic of the will in a way favourable to the moment of particularity as membership in a social class, and sees one particular class as simultaneously a vehicle of universal interest and revolutionary transformation. Quantitative change is insufficient though necessary: a merely distributive socialism might enhance the living conditions of the workers, but would leave intact structures of exploitation which deprive workers of their agency as well as their happiness. His theory of history and emancipation, recently described as a self-actualisation account, can be more precisely identified as a variant of post-Kantian perfectionism, which, like Feuerbach’s, contains a strong admixture of pre-Kantian elements. This blending of heterogeneous elements has profound theoretical and practical consequences, notably in the absence of a developed concept of right.

This chapter explores the economy of the later Roman Empire, with special emphasis on resource management, economic structures and regional variations. It highlights how land, labour and capital functioned within a largely agrarian system, with agriculture serving as the primary economic driver and tax base. The chapter examines diverse sources, including archaeological surveys, historical texts, coinage and environmental data. It analyses the effects of political instability, regional differentiation and resource distribution on economic trends. Case studies from North Gaul, Iberia, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean reveal that economic activity was influenced by both local conditions and imperial policies. The study also incorporates ecological data, such as pollen analysis and lead pollution levels, to assess economic fluctuations. A central argument is that the later Roman economy was not a uniform system but a collection of interconnected regional economies. While political fragmentation led to economic contractions in some areas, others adapted through local specialisation and changing trade networks. This study thus challenges the view of economic collapse, instead emphasising resilience and adaptation, and calling for an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the complexities of late Roman economic life and its long-term transformations.

This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.

This chapter analyses the place of class in O’Casey’s thinking and focuses in particular on a relatively unknown O’Casey script from 1919, The Harvest Festival, which revolves around a charismatic worker-hero who dies when a strike becomes violent. The chapter also examines the rewritten version of that play, Red Roses for Me (1943), in order to explore how O’Casey’s aestheticizing of class confrontation was developed and refined. The chapter shows how O’Casey wanted class analysis to replace ideologies like religion and nationalism, which he believed to be misdirections of humanity’s important longings.

This chapter examines O’Casey’s plays in the context of Irish historical revisionism, examining whether the cynicism towards nationalism that O’Casey expressed in the 1920s can really be seen as an example of revisionism avant la lettre. The chapter situates O’Casey’s views in relation to the work of Father Francis Shaw and R. F. Foster, and looks at the critique of O’Casey offered in 1926 by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. But the chapter argues that O’Casey was not seeking to evaluate the historical record in a dispassionate way. Rather, O’Casey sought to endorse a class-conscious socialist republic, and to show in his drama the way that the existing class system might use and abuse individual capability.

Content on the physiology of pregnancy focuses on the commonly examined areas including the cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine and haematological changes in pregnancy, then the subsequent impact upon conduct of anaesthesia. We include a section on the materno-fetal circulation and the placenta, with an emphasis on the changes that occur at birth.

Obstetric anaesthesia is one of the high-risk areas of anaesthetic practice and is feared by many novices. Physiological differences of the pregnant patient are discussed.

The anaesthetist may have three main functions in the labour ward: provision of support and analgesia for the parturient, care of the patient in the obstetric theatre and care of the patients in the maternity high-dependency unit. Effective labour analgesia requiring the support of an anaesthetist may include the use of Entonox, IV/IM medications, and placement of an epidural or spinal. Remifentanil PCAs may be preferred in patients with contraindications to regional intervention and set-up may follow strict protocols and meticulous monitoring. A caesarean section may be an emergency depending on the threat to the health of the mother or fetus and may require urgent timely intervention. Regional anaesthesia is frequently the first choice, but some cases may require a general anaesthetic. Both types of interventions may carry risks and complications. Failed tracheal intubation in the obstetric patient should follow the OAA and DAS management guidelines.

This chapter is an introduction to the Enlightenment mock arts, set out in three historical hypotheses. First, early-modern writers became increasingly interested in the cognitive (rather than simply material) value in the work of skilled technicians. The mock-arts were models for the intuitions involved in skilled manufacture, related to certain ineffable components of literary production. Second, the literary framing for those investigations was invariably satirical (or oblique and critical in other ways). As specialists in literary wit, authors of mock arts put themselves forward as experts in curiosity, invention and communication. Third, writers became more subtle in their assumptions about the print trade and the suitability of books as tools that might contribute to the communication of personal knowledge. Since convention defined that sort of knowledge by the impossibility of pinning it down in books, this opened another field for irony and indirection.

This educational work was intended to inspire action. This chapter explores what some of this work catalysed, including mobilising songs by the group Akut Kuei, whose work inspired many young men to return to fight in the SPLA, to men and women sharing war news, organising fundraising and practical help for the rebel efforts, and other (often unclear or uncertain) efforts towards resistance. Not all of this work was for the SPLA; many young men organised for southern militia groups working in Khartoum or were inspired to return to family villages to fight in local militias against predation from the Sudan government and SPLA forces alike. Others (men and women) joined the SPLA’s New Sudan Brigade, or the pan-Sudanese and pan-Africanist underground organisations of the African National Front and the National Democratic Alliance, among other small political parties and ‘spying’ work. This chapter explores people’s various aims and self-justifications alongside their accounts of this work, with a close eye on the epistemological and methodological questions of these retrospective accounts of subversion.

Khartoum’s war-displaced residents had to fight for safe space to live, work, and think, and over the late 1980s and early 1990s this was a battle over bulldozers, deportations, exploitation, and exclusion. This chapter sets out this fight over the city under the al-Ingaz regime’s civilising project from 1989, from the perspective of its new residents. To them, this was a project not of forcible acculturation but of silencing, exclusion, and disciplining of an exploitable labour force. Former residents explain their choices in navigating these forces to make measures of security and neighbourhood safety, including their renaming of space in this new displaced city. The political geography that this period of state violence and popular resistance created by 1994 sets the terrain for the rest of the book.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?