The Introduction provides background on Iran and on the author, including the motivations for the book and the writing process. The book is based on ten years of fieldwork in Iran conducted from the 1990s until 2007; the Introduction explains how a study of the politics of daily life became the prism for inquiring into contemporary issues of power, freedom, and agency. For nonspecialist readers, an overview of Iran’s twentieth-century political and social history offers context. For all readers, the chapter offers a case study of an interpretative method, centered on the experience of watching an Iranian film in Chicago, and speaking about it with Iranian women in Tehran.

This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

Since the 2010s, the writing of European history – in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe and as the histories of nations in Europe – has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations and as responses to global challenges. On the other hand, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of reterritorialization.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010–14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

Chapter 2 critically approaches Skinner’s historical oeuvre and its problematic connection with his own theoretical perspective. It begins by analyzing his major work, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, and his perspective regarding the origins of the modern concept of State. In it, we can observe the tension between his theory and the teleological perspective underlying that project. This problem indeed became more noticeable in his recent works addressed to trace the remote roots of “classical republicanism,” as associated to a “third idea of liberty”: the concept of “liberty as non-domination.” It then continues by analyzing the differences between Skinner’s and Pocock’s views of classical republicanism, and its connection with their different definitions of political languages. Lastly, we observe here how the normative temptation that fuels both Skinner’s and Pocock’s proposals of recovering classical republicanism entails an instrumental use of intellectual history aimed at making it play into the present, which inevitably leads to relapse into conceptual anachronisms.

The Epilogue takes the story into the late 2000s, as another major economic crisis hit hard. It considers the cultural memory of how the 1930s touched Britain and other parts of the world. By the early twenty-first century, memories of the inter-war past had largely evaporated from popular party politics, but they retained a force in cementing both the self-identity and the entitlements of those people born in the first half of the twentieth century.