In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

This chapter emphasizes the importance of studying race and empire as dynamic, interactive processes, where race and empire are formed in relation to each other. Through a relational history approach, scholars historicize the complex nature of racialization within various imperial and colonial contexts. The chapter further explores how scholars engage with relational histories by examining intellectual and disciplinary genealogies, engaging in deep contextualization through critical archival research, and incorporating diverse sources like oral histories and local colonial records into their historical narrative. Additionally, the chapter discusses the ethical considerations and historiographical challenges inherent in researching race and empire, encouraging scholars to acknowledge their positionality and the implications of their findings. By employing relational history, the chapter concludes that scholars can offer deeper insights into how race and empire have co-constituted each other in the past and augment our contemporary understandings of power and resistance.

This introduction argues against analyzing the Democrat Party in terms of strict binaries such as liberal–illiberal, center–periphery, secular–reactionary, or victim–perpetrator. While the divisions that scholars emphasize are real enough to affect the lives of people in Turkey, these divides are multiple and cross-cutting. Instead, I present an account of the Democrat Party, its role in Turkey’s democratization, and its engagement with the emerging Cold War order that is mindful of the divides in Turkey but that also acknowledges the party’s ability to transcend those divides – or, at least, embody their multiple contradictions. This book presents a portrait of the Democrat Party that encompasses these contradictions while also emphasizing Democrat Party leaders’ connections to the domestic political order that preceded them and to the international order of the 1950s.

After his visa extension was denied, the mission’s leader, Cline Paden, made unsuccessful attempts to return to Italy. He moved to Denmark for a few years before eventually settling back in Texas, where he established a missionary school in Abilene – the Sunset International Bible Institute (SIBI) – and became a prominent figure in the Churches of Christ. Meanwhile, the Italian mission continued its precarious existence, never achieving the status of a major religious player as it had hoped and attracting only a few hundred members. One of the defining features of its story was the stark contrast between the mission’s limited success and the disproportionate political and diplomatic attention its activities garnered. Yet, thanks to their “Americanness” and the ability to leverage the United States’ unique power and influence over its junior Italian ally, the Texans played a significant role in advancing religious pluralism and freedom in Italy – a fact acknowledged even by other long-established Protestant churches such as the Waldensians that had little or no political or theological sympathy for the Church of Christ.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

“Bloomsbury,” South Asia and empire have always been closely interconnected. Until recently, scholarship has focused primarily on discussions of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924), Leonard Woolf’s autobiography Growing, detailing his years living in Ceylon, his novel The Village in the Jungle (1913), and Stories of the East (1921), or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Whilst revisiting the Bloomsbury group’s close relations with pre-1947 colonial India (now independent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), this chapter will open up the presence of “South Asia” within Bloomsbury to consider it as a transnational geographical and intellectual contact zone, a location that linked members of the Bloomsbury group with key South Asian writers, radicals, and intellectuals, including Mulk Raj Anand, Meary James Tambimuttu, and Aubrey Menen, and their networks. It will offer a differently articulated idea of a transnational modernity, one situated outside the orthodoxies of modernism’s Euro-American canon, and which presents a more variegated consideration of the complex and dynamic exchanges that were taking place at the heart of empire.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.

The concept of leadership has not received much attention in Assyriology as it was overshadowed by the concept of kingship and its omnipresence in ancient Mesopotamia. As the available sources mostly are written from the perspective of the leader – in the case of ancient Mesopotamia this is the king or the city ruler – also Assyriologists mostly took this standpoint and wrote ‘history from above’. Much scholarly effort was invested in the study of various aspects of kingship. Because of the scarceness of sources discussing the experience of the ruler’s leadership and the abundance of royal inscriptions, we usually do not take the perspective – to use a widespread political metaphor – of the sheep, but only that of the shepherd. Nevertheless, there are some texts that critic the leadership of kings. These texts are mostly of literary nature but they allow us at least a partial ‘view from below’, as they describe the problems of people living under a powerful king.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

Chapter 3 demonstrates the centrality of fiscal infrastructures to the action of Marlowe’s plays. His Tamburlaine plays, The Jew of Malta, and A Massacre at Paris all hinge on the agencies created by – and the violence associated with –wealth organized into treasuries. The protagonists of these plays – Tamburlaine, Barabas, and the Duke of Guise – draw attention to their own and others’ treasuries, and their stories underscore both the security and the volatility associated with treasuries in action. In each play, treasuries drive the action by creating security for some through extreme violence to others. For Marlowe, treasuries are central to his depiction of geopolitical existence. Fiscal realities, in turn, represent a primary formal mechanism impacting how Marlowe’s characters – and audiences – experience the antagonistic spaces of geopolitical existence. Marlowe’s awareness of the challenges of implementing sovereignty are thus central to his ongoing project of creating theatrical states of emergency.

In a familiar pattern, federal judges ultimately embraced their role as the architects of American sovereignty on the water. As the Monroe administration redoubled its prosecutions of South American privateers, Congress left it to judges to define the legitimate boundaries of maritime violence. The Supreme Court responded by casting doubt on the claims to sovereignty advanced by revolutionary polities, and declaring that privateers were merely pirates, and therefore subject to punishment by all – including the United States. This judicial assertion of legal authority to police the waters of the revolutionary Atlantic was transformative. It helped secure approval of a treaty with Spain that paved the way for decades of territorial expansion in North America, and it presaged increasingly expansive American claims to hemispherical preeminence. Even when federal judges denied their own power to discipline a different category of “pirates” – those who engaged in the slave trade – they did so to uphold sovereign rights that Americans had been asserting since independence. If a nineteenth century American empire was ultimately realized on land, some of its first stirrings were at sea.