This chapter places Bloomsbury at the center of the story of meritocracy in twentieth-century Britain by considering four figures: H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet and Virginia Woolf’s cousin; educationalist Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf, who critiqued meritocratic systems in Three Guineas (1938); and Angelica Garnett, who examined meritocracy in Deceived with Kindness (1984). The chapter argues that Fisher was the architect of a vision of technocratic meritocracy that sought to overcome competition through the promise of a flexible educational system that could meet the needs of every child. Russell and Woolf were critics of the mindscape of meritocracy. Both associated competitive educational systems with militarism, while Woolf harnessed her pacifist critique of meritocracy to feminist ends. Angelica Garnett explores the affective aspects of meritocracy’s ethic of individual effort, competition, and reward. As Garnett’s memoir suggests, exclusion from the meritocratic journey was as defining an experience as inclusion in its rites and rituals.

The Bank sought to deflect blame for the British slump in response to many critics, including John Maynard Keynes. Through correspondence and testimony before government commissions, its technical advisers provided an intellectual defense of the gold standard. However, as the prevailing monetary arrangements proved increasingly untenable as the interwar years progressed, economists and civil servants were forced to confront the flaws and instabilities endemic to the system. The subsequent 1931 crisis might have dealt a major blow to the authority of the central bank. Yet in its aftermath, experts began to devise new ways of thinking about the organization of the international financial system, as well as the Bank’s centrality within it.

Michael Holroyd’s claim that science was “unheard of” in Bloomsbury is refuted in this chapter. It begins by asking how “science” and the “scientific” signified in Bloomsbury: how far science was equated with facts, with theories, or with processes of inquiry; how far it was identified with dogmatic attitudes, with rationalism, or with open-mindedness. It then asks what educational experiences shaped the attitudes of Bloomsbury men towards it, with a particular focus on their formative experiences at schools such as Eton College and St Paul’s School, and where Classics dominated the curriculum, and at Clifton College, which was unusually progressive in the seriousness with which it treated science. Finally, it considers how science was treated in two Bloomsbury periodicals, Desmond MacCarthy’s New Quarterly (1907–10) and The Nation and Athenaeum in its Bloomsbury period, 1923–31.

Fourier methods for the analysis are developed and used for the analysis of the kernel of Green’s operators, the causal fundamental solution and the kernel of the fermionic projector.

The Hadamard expansion of the kernel of the fermionic projector is derived. The connection to the light-cone expansion and the wave front set is worked out.

The Bank’s transformation as a central bank in the interwar years paralleled many developments in the twenty-first century. Its operational independence in 1997 granted it the freedom to set monetary policy without direct government intervention. With the continued employment of economists, notably embodied by the appointment of Mervyn King as Deputy Governor (1998–2003) and later Governor (2003–2013), the central bank developed a reputation as a leading monetary authority. At the onset of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the Bank was able to implement a wide array of unconventional monetary policies due to its independence.

Prior to the First World War, the operations of the British financial sector primarily fell under the jurisdiction of a banking aristocracy. The Old Guard, comprising prominent bankers and industrialists based in the City of London, oversaw a system of indirect regulation, characterized by the lack of direct government intervention and the self-sustaining operations of the classical gold standard. Yet the outbreak of the war fundamentally upended the traditional balance between the state and the economy. With the abandonment of the gold standard and the closure of the London Stock Exchange in 1914, the nation faced a series of unprecedented crises that threatened Britain’s hegemonic position in the global order. By war’s end, the Bank of England had begun to reconsider its position in the City, throughout Europe, and across the empire.

From the Middle English period grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English were increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions, without however completely replacing the former. Two prominent syntactic alternations arose as a result of this development, that is the dative and genitive variations: (1) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary. (2) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king. This chapter brings together research on these alternations, tracing their emergence and development, and focusing on the role of harmonic alignment (in particular, animacy). Although they are separate alternations, one operating on the VP level (datives) and the other on the NP level (genitives), their development shows some parallels, which are attributed to analogy based on functional overlap across the two alternations.

The coda to the book reads the contemporary author Craig Santos Perez to reflect on the violence of US territory making and the role of literary language in reorganizing its effects. I provide a close reading of Perez’s from unincorporated territory and its orientation toward the modernism of Claude McKay. By reworking McKay, Perez makes a contribution to cartographic literature that helps to see the US map as a dialectical image, provisional and contingent as opposed to authoritative and final.

Adding temporal depth, Chapter 8 evaluates the influence of past golden ages on nationalist claims and conflict. It extends Chapter 7’s analysis of the nexus between nationalism and conflict by adding temporal depth and assessing whether restorative nationalism increases the risk of conflict. Taking nationalist narratives seriously, we study how the wish to restore past golden ages can be used to legitimize territorial claims and mobilize resources for action, as it did for the Polish nationalists who repeatedly rebelled against Russian occupation throughout the nineteenth century. The goal is to reconstruct plausible golden ages by combining ethnic settlement data with information on European state borders going back to 1100 CE. The analysis shows that the availability of a plausible golden age during which a group enjoyed political independence increases the risk of both domestic and interstate conflict. These findings suggest that specific historical legacies make some modern nationalisms more consequential than others, an interpretation that challenges radically modernist takes on nationalist mobilization.