Wrestling with the eternal mystery of human agency, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Euro-Americans built cultures in which the idea of self-making could begin to take hold. Along the way they developed new mindsets about self-fashioning, ambition, the value of work, materialist consumption, and whether individuals or communities were the proper beneficiaries of people’s improvement. The eighteenth-century’s prominent cultural movements—the Enlightenment’s intellectual developments and the First Great Awakening’s religious revivals—were both context for and products of the growing legitimacy of human agency. In very different ways, their participants and storytellers engaged in transitions that made it possible to imagine self-making. Cotton Mather and other religious leaders struggled with witch trials, epidemics, and spiritual challenges, including how to respond to the Great Awakening’s popular enthusiasms. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin explored science and politics, invented useful devices and civic institutions. Uncertainties about human agency continued, but there was no doubt about the responsibility for self-improvement to serve God and community.

Cybersecurity and cyberwar writ large are interconnected subjects that create serious challenges for policy makers. On an individual level we are far more likely to be the victims of cybercrime than of cyberwar. But the cyber challenge spans the entire gamut of security. From state-authorized attacks against another state, such as the deployment of Stuxnet against Iran, to the targeting of private industry like North Korea’s assault on Sony Pictures Entertainment, down through to the proliferation of cybercrime that impacts the everyday security of citizens sent a phishing scam via email, any way you cut it the cybersphere has a big impact on security. Indeed, if you live in a Western democracy, the chances are that you have also been at the individual level, as well as the societal level, at best an unwilling participant and at worse a victim of cyberwar via social media.

Farmers sought relief from the 1893 recession by lobbying for an increase in the money supply from newly mined silver. Railroads sought relief by reorganizing their debt, through extended maturities and combinations of smaller roads with larger ones. The specter of bimetallism in the US added to the financial uncertainty following the Panic of 1893 for European investors who became increasingly worried that US debtors would pay them with silver instead of gold. A slow-motion run on the US Treasury’s gold began and then gained steam. Morgan’s own business was not insulated from the turmoil surrounding the Treasury’s gold reserves.

In this chapter we explore the central features of liberalism as they relate to issues of international security and how liberalism believes states can work together to achieve security. First, we examine the historical evolution of liberalism generally before going on to dissect the central features of liberalism related to security. For unlike realism, liberalism holds that the world need not be a place of continuous violent conflict; the international system can change, humanity can better itself. That said, realism and liberalism share many of the same assumptions about international relations and international security. This chapter concludes with a look at how liberalism manifests itself in international security policy.

Realism is one of many International Relations theories that attempt to understand and explain the way the international system functions in anarchy without any overarching government. It emphasizes the importance of individual states as the primary actors and decision makers within this system and argues that the most defining characteristics of all states include self-interested behavior and an inherent instinct to survive at any cost. The three main subcategories within realism are classical realism, neorealism (in its offensive and defensive variants), hegemonic realism and power-transition theories, and neoclassical realism.

The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

This chapter examines how the theological ideas discussed in Chapter 5 were successfully disseminated throughout English society. To do this it examines the religious split between the established Church of England and non-conformity. The development of the theology self-love, happiness, and interest is examined in the writings of the enormously influential philosopher and theologian Richard Cumberland. It then discusses how this evolved into Latitudinarianism, and examines printed sermons as they commented on these ethical concepts, as well as on consumption and worldly goods. The writings of the Anglican ministers Joseph Butler and Josiah Tucker are examined to show how these ideas became directly linked to economic thought. The concurrent development of non-conformist theology relating to the same concepts is traced through the writings of John Locke on the mind, and the dairy of the student lawyer Dudley Ryder. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and his theory of polite sociability is also investigated to show how it provided a less austere means to disseminate Locke’s psychology of the mind. Central to this investigation will be the process by which individual selves were able to become comfortable with trusting new institutions by using the concept of interest as a form of commitment.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Mid-nineteenth-century American stories of self-making increasingly oriented toward material ambition rather than service. Values evolved within cultural venues as diverse as advice literature, temperance advocacy, business guidance, and phrenology. Expanding expectations for “self-reliance,” for example, promoted beliefs that alcoholism and status were entirely matters of personal choice and moved mainstream Americans toward accepting self-made success and failure. After the Civil War, more stories offered some version of self-making—always judging, prodding, urging, and rewarding. But no consensus had yet emerged on what it meant, what qualified someone as self-made, or how to measure a “self-made” man’s worth. Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1872 compilation of traditional biographies praised service and disdained wealth, James D. McCabe, Jr.’s 1871 anthology embraced wealth as a measure of worth. Despite her fame, his volume sold vastly better. His often repeated “We are emphatically a nation of self-made men” glorified a materialist American exceptionalism and a social and economic system that demeaned many while it praised a few.

The New Cambridge History of the English Language is aimed at providing a contemporary and comprehensive overiew of English, tracing its roots in Germanic and investigating the contact scenarios in which the language has been an active participant. It discusses the various models and methodologies which have been developed to analyse diachronic data concisely and consistently. The new history furthermore examines the trajectories which the language has embarked on during its spread worldwide and presents overviews of the varieties of English found throughout the world today.

This chapter moves back to institutions to deal with the general decline in litigation over failed credit that began around 1690, and argues it came about largely because of changes in credit networks. It demonstrates how attorneys’ business moved away from litigation to conveyancing, and how they profited by becoming local credit. It also looks at the increasing use of local summary justice in the Courts of Requests in London, Bristol, and Newcastle to enforce the small debts of poor consumers, as well as the growing use of arrest and imprisonment in the common law courts. While the use of paper currency provided greater liquidity in credit markets, and reduced the overall level of litigation massively, those debtors who went broke began to be treated in a much harsher fashion.

We find it plausible that Morgan’s recurring ability to include subject matter experts in routine syndicates could have been applied to the task of coordinating lender of last resort facilities. This provides at least one plausible explanation for how he developed the skills to act as lender of last resort in the American setting that did not include a central bank.