Chen compares Chinese politeness with English politeness in this chapter, focusing on what has been called a “East-West Divide” debate. To advance the position that East and West are fundamentally different, the author argues that Chinese politeness has its own characteristics but not unique; that the speech act of request in Chinese is conducted under similar principles and are subjected to similar constraints as seen English; that persistence in benefit offering occurs in English, too; that speech acts that are assumed to carry high levels of face threat (e.g., criticizing and disagreeing) also offers evidence that there is no East-West Divide in politeness; and that – finally – even the drastic differences in the speech act of lying between English and Chinese can be shown to be motivated by similar considerations. Culture differences are often times differences on the surface: the different symptoms of similar underlying principles. With a set of principles on which cultures may converge and a set of parameters on which cultures are likely to vary, Chen believes that B&L-E meets the challenge of being a universal theory that captures the commonalities between cultures, commonalities that transcend, and therefore account for, differences.

This chapter turns to female characters whose roles in the plays are more marginal. It uncovers a pattern of interactions that recur in minor female roles across almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays. These efforts take the form of resistance to marriages and efforts to forestall political events, often wars, frequently pointing to flaws in the male leaders’ plans. It highlights such inconclusive interventions as moments that demand engagement and interpretation by the audience, inviting spectators to unbalance the supposed didactic and moral purpose of the plays by attaching their sympathies to the characters out of power, rather than the kings who command them. Such imaginative potential is seen particularly clearly in the marginalised figures of lower-class female characters, as well as the women whose scenes are dismissed as ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ – in truth, scenes whose interactions depict the types of events unrecorded by traditional history but which are essential to the history play as a theatrical genre. The presence of these curtailed or unrecorded incidents, and their thematic importance to the plays in which they appear, suggests that the relationship of the plays to their chronicle sources is less one of direct adaptation than of querying and contestation.

Chapter four argues these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not solely female, mode of storytelling by demonstrating that male characters who are disempowered in explicitly feminine terms are endowed with the same historiographical powers as female characters. I first explore characters like Hotspur and Richard II, who explicitly have their legacies relegated to the histories disseminated by women, thus posthumously becoming the stuff of feminine history. This chapter argues that Falstaff and Henry IV also trace a parallel pattern of feminised disempowerment across the course of the second tetralogy. In contrast are Henry V and Henry VIII, both of whom affirm their masculinised legacies by explicitly avoiding entrusting their histories to female voices. Turning to earlier history plays, shifting gender positions of Queen Margaret and King Henry VI complicate a clear correlation between dramaturgical gender and character gender and demonstrate how certain characters continually renegotiate their relationship to masculine history. Finally, I consider the malleable and unstable position of boy characters, whose ability to shift between identification as young men and feminine boys, and the parallels their embodied presence draws to the boy players in female roles around them, renders them particularly vulnerable to feminised erasure by history.

Chapter 6 examines the diachronic aspect of Chinese politeness. Changes are identified in all three areas selected for analysis: the marriage ritual, end-of-dinner food offering, and compliment responses. In the first, modern Chinese marriage is found to show more gender equality between the bride and groom. In food offering, dinner hosts offer food to guests much less (if at all) than what they were found to do fourteen years earlier. In complement responses, Chinese are found to accept complements overwhelmingly as opposed to reject them overwhelmingly seventeen years earlier. MCP and B&L-E, however, can account for these changes coherently: they are diachronic variations on the same “theme,” the theme that is captured at higher level of generalization by the two models of politeness.

The seventh chapter studies how Blake’s poem Milton (c.1804) reconceives key aspects of epic tradition as it refigures missionary work as a metaphor for promoting freedom from the limitations of imperial discourse. Showing how literal missionary work can assist empire by holding people in states of subjection, Blake more abstractly repudiates the limitations that Equiano addresses concretely. I argue that Blake locates in the tensions between missionary work and empire the resources to oppose imperialism. While some of Blake’s rhetoric resembles that of actual missionaries and imperialists of his day, I suggest that Blake works from within such orthodox discourses to undermine them. The unresolved contradictions in Blake’s Milton – both in his use of the epic genre and in his appeals to religious and imperial rhetoric – heighten the challenge that he poses to the stable circumscriptions of imperial discourse.

Chapter 2 augments this framework by surveying the history of the evangelical revival, emphasizing the anxious relationship between missionaries and empire. I examine the growth of missionary societies, their conflicts with empire, and their descent into the underworld of collusion with imperialists. I highlight key moments in this history, including the Vellore Mutiny, which raised concerns about evangelism among more secular exponents of empire, and the subversive work of Johannes Van der Kemp among the Khoi in South Africa. The chapter concludes with a close examination of two brief epics composed by missionary propagandists in the 1790s, Thomas Williams and Thomas Beck. These poems reveal the early conceptual friction between evangelism and imperialism, but they also indicate the assumptions that would enable the two projects to be aligned in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 2 introduces the conceptual and theoretical frameworks, as well as the study’s methodology. In this chapter I propose and defend a conceptualization of judicial impact. Then, I develop and explain the main argument: that two elements are key to shaping impact for structural rulings, namely monitoring mechanisms and legal constituencies. Deploying monitoring mechanisms allows courts (and other participants in monitoring venues) to impose costs on the targets of the rulings and to offset information and power asymmetries. Legally empowered advocacy organizations (legal constituencies) can exercise legal follow-up and mobilize around the issue in the aftermath of the ruling. On their own, the presence of court-promoted oversight mechanisms or of legal constituencies can promote some effects. However, when combined, they can configure a collaborative oversight arena and ultimately yield higher impact results. The chapter closes explaining the research design: I introduce the eight case studies (four rulings from Argentina and four from Colombia) and the logic of the cross-case comparisons.

My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.

The framework and historical overview of my opening two chapters allow me to attend in Chapter 3 to the variety of epic productions in the 1790s. Surveying these epics, the chapter underlines the ways that they promote different ideas of British identity as they support, critique, and oppose the budding ideologies of Christian nationalism and imperialism. The chapter considers conservative epics that serve practically as propaganda for Tory politics and nascent imperialist sentiment (such as Henry James Pye’s Alfred), progressive epics that challenge both epic tradition and reactionary politics while still acquiescing to some assumptions of imperialist discourse, and religious epics that envision an empire of Christ whose relationship with the temporal British empire is often uncertain. Overall, the chapter suggests that the epic productions of the 1790s often imagined conversion as a partner of empire even as they revealed and frequently attempted to conceal the inconsistencies between them.

Chapter 7 provides an overview of the book, its main findings and refinements to the theory based on the lessons learned. It closes by presenting the study’s broader implications for normative arguments against judicial intervention on socioeconomic rights, and for theories of judicial power. This book shows that high courts can contribute to the advancement of rights, though they cannot do so alone nor can they offer silver bullets. The Colombian and Argentine highest tribunals have, at times, successfully configured important new political spaces for effective pursuit of public policy goals, in conjunction and dialogue with external actors. In doing so, they have increased their power and positioned themselves as non-negligible political forces.