Napoleon Bonaparte was never going to be an easy character to put onstage, from the initial fears under the Directory about staging a living general to the Restoration’s horror at divisive memories of the Empire. Yet theatrical versions of Bonaparte or allusions to him were no stranger to the boards and tell us much about the construction of Napoleon’s image, indeed, the Napoleonic legend itself. Although there were certainly productions we would qualify as ‘propaganda’ promoting Napoleon, not all theatrical appearances or allusions were positive, and the bureaucratic censorship system often lagged behind audience interpretations, leaving room for derision via lateral censorship at any theatre, from the Opéra and the Variétés in Paris to Lyon’s Théâtre des Célestins. In this sense, censorship offered contemporaries a space for political subversion to advance another model of France, even at the height of imperial rule or under the restored monarchy.

The chapter traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a move that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. The chapter proposes new watery co-ordinates for mapping Irish romanticism via the cases of Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.

The manipulation of risk and uncertainty by decision makers who are more or less rational and are experiencing more or less fear offers a first cut of the crisis (section 1). A second cut enriches the individual-level analysis by attending to organizational malfunctioning as a potential cause of inadvertent nuclear war. In this analysis political agency is widely dispersed across many layers of the American and Russian militaries (section 2). A symposium on nuclear politics refers briefly to “very innovative” work on nuclear issues without engaging with work in science and technology studies (STS) (section 3). Exemplifying large world thinking, it does away with dualities such as rational and irrational, politics and technology, risk and uncertainty. It integrates human agency, organizational functioning and malfunctioning, and politics across all levels. And embedding the observer fully in a world that does not exist “out there,” it acknowledges the importance of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. In the politics of the crisis, its meaning for different actors, and its effect on shaping the complementarity of risk and uncertainty language matters hugely (section 4). The analysis of nuclear politics has shaped profoundly a widely accepted rational model of war (section 5). And the conclusion illustrates the evolution of a crazy nuclear politics (section 6).

The Russo-Japanese War makes several contributions to the dialogue between the historical record and the theory of war. First, it shows how war due to commitment problems requires not only shifting power but also a state’s inability or unwillingness to control its power. In this case, Russian uncertainty over Japan’s willingness to fight explains both the outbreak of war and Russia’s expansion into Manchuria in the first place. Second, it shows how fighting can make commitments credible that weren’t beforehand: by disabusing Russia of its optimism about war with Japan. Third, the modern theory of war can explain why Japan’s share of the peace settlement didn’t reflect its dominant military performance: The deal reflected the likely outcome of a fight to the finish, pitting Japanese military superiority against Russian access to credit. Finally, the war’s outcome – Russian weakness and subsequent recovery – is a proximate cause of World War I.

We use recent theories of the politics of economic development and of economic interdependence and war to construct an analytic narrative of the events covered in this volume.  We trace the end of China’s hegemony, and the instability that attended it, to the different policies the region’s states chose toward commerce, development, and reform.  States that pursued modernization gained wealth and power relative to those that did not.  These choices had fateful consequences for the regional balance of power and encouraged modernized upstarts to overthrow the traditional order.  A more dynamic order arose as great powers competed to impose a new hegemony or at least a new stability, forming coalitions with the region’s other states and offering new ideologies to legitimize their rule.  While existing theories shed light on the evolution of East Asian order, our consideration also reveals important gaps in explanation that merit further investigation.

Instead of ushering in an era of enduring peace and partnership, the end of the Cold War was followed by a decade of turmoil, with wars in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and Chechnya, political violence in Moscow, and controversy over the eastward expansion of NATO. The disappointments and turbulence stemmed in part from the personalities and political choices of top leaders, including the erratic and increasingly autocratic Boris Yeltsin, the skeptical and stingy responses of George H. W. Bush to the reform and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the way Bill Clinton unreservedly embraced Yeltsin while also antagonizing him by deciding to enlarge NATO and wage war against Serbia. As this chapter shows, though, American–Russian relations in the 1990s were also roiled by widely shared popular attitudes, including American triumphalist mythology about how the Cold War ended, unrealistic Russian expectations of massive US aid and respect despite Russian corruption, mismanagement, and weakness. The bright promise of the end of the Cold War was marred both by arrogant American unilateralism and by a Russian slide into depression and authoritarianism.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and its aftermath presents a challenge to systemic-level International Relations theories about the relationship between economic interdependence and war. Critiquing that literature and turning instead to the domestic level, the chapter shows how Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the relationship between economics and security – first developed in response to the crisis of nineteenth-century Western imperial coercion in East Asia, and later amplified in the context of Cold War East Asia – fused the Chinese and Japanese economies in the lead up to, during, and in the decades following the Second Sino-Japanese War. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that economic interdependence between China and Japan has grown explosively during, after, and because of war, and that perceptions of insecurity have motivated closer economic ties between China and Japan.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush sought to develop a strategic and economic partnership. Yet by 2007 US–Russian relations were marked by friction, and after 2012 they deteriorated into bitter enmity. This chapter argues that blaming the degeneration of relations on the KGB background, paranoia, and imperial ambitions of Putin is too simple and one-sided. It shows that the United States also spurred the decline by supporting “color revolutions” in countries around Russia, promoting NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, pushing regime change in countries such as Syria, Libya, and Venezuela, and placing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Although Russia and the United States cooperated on a strategic arms reduction treaty, Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, conflict increasingly overshadowed such collaboration. That outcome was not inevitable. Instead, unwise policy choices led to clashes, dishonest statements eroded trust, needlessly provocative rhetoric exacerbated tensions, and media sensationalism inflamed antipathies between Americans and Russians.

This chapter examines the assumptions, concepts, and narratives historians use to study US relations with the natural world: with biological and chemical agents, environmental and physical phenomena, natural resources, and plants, animals, and microbes. Looking beyond the experiences and activities of human beings, it asks how non-human actors and forces can help explain the history of foreign relations. It surveys some of the key medical, scientific, and environmental issues that have shaped the history of foreign policy and international affairs, with an eye toward the methods scholars can employ to analyze these topics most profitably. Although studying these subjects can present methodological challenges, this chapter offers tools and strategies for overcoming those potential roadblocks. Becoming more attuned to medical, scientific, and environmental topics, as the chapter shows, challenges our assumptions about foreign relations in productive ways, offering fresh perspectives on conventional narratives and novel ways of studying the past.

The relationship between states and their militaries has long been a subject of social enquiry. Most nation-states have their origins in war, formed and reformed by external conflict and civil wars. Yet the military aspects of state power are intimately tied to all other aspects of state power in relation to its industrial, entrepreneurial and global dimensions. Having discussed the ways in which militaries shape and constrain transition pathways through innovation and their everyday conduct as well as the exercise of violence and war, the chapter explores potential to transform the military state arguing that at the heart of transforming the military state is the need to rethink security, possibly along the lines of ecological security. In conjunction with efforts to embed more ecological thinking in relation to security, a prerequisite for such a shift is a revisioning of the goal and purpose of the economy as proposed in Chapter 4, at least in richer countries in the first instance.

This chapter examines how Bloomsbury and music intersected at the figure of Edward J. Dent, the Cambridge music scholar. It offers Dent as an embodiment of which Bloomsbury and early twentieth-century musical culture in England and Europe were mutually constitutive, using him as a point for comparison to gauge Bloomsbury’s musical enthusiasm and sensibility. The chapter first surveys existing musical-literary criticism within studies of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It then explores the overlaps between Dent and Bloomsbury on issues including non-European musical cultures, sexuality, personal relationship, modernist aesthetics, music as a performing art, international politics, education, and state funding. Following a discussion of Dent’s involvement during and after the Second World War in John Maynard Keynes’ work on “national” opera, the chapter ends with Keynes by examining one of his letters to the BBC as an epitome of music’s protean role in Bloomsbury.

Chapter 7 focuses on the War Scroll, the most sustained portrait of the imagined end-time war against the Sectarian enemies. Alongside its elements of fantasy, the War Scroll simultaneously contains many prescriptive details for the eschatological war that the Sectarians believed was imminent. This chapter characterizes the War Scroll using the language of social anthropologists as a violent imaginary and argues that it functions as a propagandistic tool to prepare the Sectarians for this war.

This chapter discusses the relation of global extractivisms to global deforestation, making novel claims about the role of forests in the international system. This is a global, world-ecological analysis of why forests seem to have not mattered in the interstate system and how they are still overlooked in favor of a free flow of commodity trade and interstate competition. The impacts of the world system on forests are explored over the past 5,000 years, focusing especially on the past 550 years. “Epochal moments,” for example, wars or events like the COVID-19 pandemic, are particularly detrimental to retaining the world’s old-growth forests. One should avoid overgeneralizations of how global capitalism or humanity (as the “Anthropocene”) drive deforestation. Thus, the chapter utilizes a long-term, world-system perspective, focusing on how the current structures of the world-system drive deforestation. The chapter uncovers how the nature of the interstate system affects the efforts by global environmental governance and other means to try to curb or control deforestation. This curbing is fundamentally restricted by the lobbying and political power of RDPEs.