This chapter investigates the cultural legacy of the “Great Epizootic”: a North American horse influenza that paralyzed transportation networks throughout the continent in 1872. Americans responded to this outbreak by recasting it in humorous ways, writing poems about horses behaving like sickened people and marvelous accounts of human laborers working as surrogate animals. Within these literary documents, the veterinary term “epizootic” began to acquire a different meaning associated with inexplicable breakdowns in human behavior. Through figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Kurt Vonnegut, and Flannery O’Connor; in media forms ranging from musicals like Whoopee! (1930) to more recent rap songs like Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “My Hooptie” (1989); and even, perhaps, in the origin of the word “oops,” these literary revisionings of the Great Epizootic left a rich but underappreciated legacy within the United States. Recovering this legacy can augment efforts within human–animal studies for renewed interspecies intimacies brought about by a recognition of our shared vulnerability to disease.

How did the abolition of slavery in the United States affect the fate of labor in the three empires examined here? It will be argued that the abolition of slavery in the United States led to a fundamental change in global capitalism. This change occurred not only in the terms already examined by Beckert (new supplies of cotton and forced labor around the world), but also in a new relationship between capitalism, labor and the state. It will be argued that the Second Industrial Revolution and the Great Transformation, as Polanyi called it, were the main outcomes of this process, although most historiographies of these topics have never linked these dynamics to the American Civil War.

This chapter examines the moral foundations of personality-based justifications for intellectual property, emphasizing the alignment of intellectual works with individual autonomy and self-expression. Unlike utilitarian or labor-desert arguments, the personality-based approach views intellectual property as an extension of the creator’s personality, granting moral claims over divulgation, attribution, integrity, and withdrawal. A central wrong-making feature of violating the rights of attribution and integrity is that, in the typical case, a form of misrepresentation or fraud occurs. Additionally, it is argued that creators have a justified right to control downstream uses of their intellectual works, rooted in autonomy, free speech, and the prevention of misrepresentation or fraud. Along with considering various challenges, a contractarian framework is adopted that promotes legislative protections safeguarding the dignity, autonomy, and expressive freedoms of creators.

Visual and textual evidence from the Mediterranean region indicates the continued significance, complexity, opacity, and versatility of veiling practices among the late ancients. For women of this era (including Christians and Jews), veiling was entwined with performances of social status, honor, shame, deference, and obligations to others and the gods. Veiling was part and parcel of the formation of religious and liturgical subjects in the late ancient imaginary.

This chapter examines the gendered structure and impact of sanctions on the DPRK, or North Korea, with particular attention to the sanctions imposed by the UNSC amidst the unresolved tensions surrounding Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile program. The gendered impact of sanctions on North Korea has largely been neglected in the literature, although the country has been subject to sanctions for most of its existence, and the UNSC resolutions passed from 2017 onwards constitute one of the most stringent international sanctions regimes in the world today. While sanctions aim to pressure the North Korean government, they disproportionately burden women, particularly in employment, caregiving, and informal market participation. Rather than focusing on the efficacy or legality of sanctions as in most sanctions literature, we argue that the North Korean case demonstrates the unrecognized ways in which sanctions can have ripple effects far beyond their intended “target” – unrecognized precisely because debates about sanctions as a form of statecraft often preclude an examination of the kind of gendered violence that sanctions impose on daily life.

When thinking about the world outside of “the West,” scholarship can fall into generalizing frameworks in which comparison with the West predominates or in which the world is divided up into somewhat homogenized “areas.” How can we reckon with the effects and ongoing histories of imperialism and occupation, uneven transnational dynamics of exploitation and extraction, and racial capitalism while not understanding those subjected to oppression and domination as merely passive in the face of those processes? How do we engage with forms of difference while understanding them as multidimensional, permeable, as opposed to essentialized expressions of local/national/regional culture? How do we attend to forms of place-based specificity while engaging the heterogeneity and diversity of the area, country, and/or population under discussion and while also addressing dynamic relations with other peoples and places – both chosen and coerced? This chapter considers how queer and trans studies have taken up these challenges.

The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

What effect do economic sanctions have on civil society participation in target (sanctioned) countries? Do sanctions help or hurt civic activism in target societies? This chapter explores the degree to which economic sanctions affect the extent of civil engagement in target countries. It is argued that sanctions are likely to contribute to the deterioration of civil society participation in target countries through making non-state groups targets of state repression and impairing those groups’ organizational capacity. To substantiate the theoretical claims, cross- national sanctions data for the period 1989–2015 are combined with data on civil society participation. Results offer robust support that sanctions are detrimental to civil society and the suggested impact of sanctions is likely to be higher in the early rather than later years of sanctions imposition.

The final and concluding chapter reflects on diasporic state-building, drawing out the implications for how this transforms our understanding of state-building under military intervention. It critiques the limitations of diasporic state-building when approached through Western military and developmental interventions and their Euro-centric positionality. The chapter discusses how the optic of diasporic state-building allows us to witness transformations in how we conceive the nation-state and transnational civil society, since diasporas are constitutive actors transforming homelands states and societies in significant and contradictory ways, which can simultaneously bolster and undermine the state. Diasporic state-building also sheds light on transformations in our understanding of concepts such as citizenship, belonging, and nationhood in a globalised world when the nation-state is unshackled from state boundaries and occupies a transnational space. Finally, the chapter ends with the significance of diasporic state-building, when we consider the persistence of conflicts and migrations and the emergence of new diasporas. It offers probing questions for future research for exploring diasporic state-building of other global diasporas in other non-Western contexts.

The trope that nature is a woman who hides or reveals herself has been around at least since the time of the presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus, who remarked: “Nature loves to hide.” This chapter introduces the allegorical representation of nature and truth as a veiled woman in diverse texts from Platonic philosophy and late ancient biblical interpretation to medieval literature and post-Enlightenment visual arts. This introduction also includes an examination of twenty-first century political contexts of veiling, and it presents an outline of the plan of the book.

The apogee of the Australian infantry’s development on the Western Front came in 1918, after its amalgamation as a five division corps under Sir John Monash. In an Australian dress rehearsal for its part the coming Battle of Amiens in August, the Australians conducted a limited offensive at the Battle of Hamel on 4 July 1918. Thereafter, the Australian Corps maintained a level of battlefield effectiveness that was in keeping with the entire fielded British Expeditionary Force (BEF). By this point in the conflict, the longest serving Australian troops had been on the Western Front for about twenty months. British enabled, using British technology and tactics, the Australian infantryman individually and collectively had undergone the same learning process as the entire British Army. Australian troops were engulfed in the ‘industrialised-scale’ combat of the Somme campaign during 1916. These events precipitated the learning process. The year 1917 was a crucible in which newly introduced training, tactics and technology were refined and endorsed. Australians took part in the ill-conceived use of armour at Bullecourt during the Battle of Arras in 1917, and in the burgeoning use of bite-and-hold tactics at Messines in June 1917.