The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

The Afterword returns to the origin of the volume, a project conceived by the late historian David Fitzpatrick. Foster reflects on Fitzpatrick’s legacy as an historian of modern Ireland and the diaspora, examining his influence on Irish and international historiography. He traces Fitzpatrick’s scholarship from his pioneering first monograph, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution (1977) to his posthumous monograph, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925, and his plans for this volume. Fitzpatrick pioneered new methods for his historical research of the Irish Revolution and his explorations of emigrant letters, and Foster highlights the influence of his scholarship on later generations. He draws connections between this volume and Fitzpatrick’s publications, noting the enduring legacy of Fitzpatrick’s work and his influence.

Chapter 7, which serves as the conclusion, describes the important role of the “mild thesis” in obscuring the history of slavery in Dutch New York. The chapter argues that the mild thesis is largely incorrect, and that slavery in New York was harsh and violent. Yet, more than previous historians, I point to the nuance of why the mild thesis came into being, and what it is not entirely without merit. Memories of slavery in Dutch New York came from those who viewed it positively and remembered its final years, when legal protections for the enslaved had been built in to the system.

Chapter 18, The End (1931 - 2022). Since the narrative IS the analysis, there is no conclusion as such. Instead, The End provides a discussion of what a forward looking, thick description, humanistic approach to the financial crisis of 1931 have contributed to our knowledge in combination with the concepts embodied in the narrative. First, it is argued that the historical narrative provides new information exactly because writing the history forward brings out the uncertainty and need for sensemaking and narrative emplotment. This argument is discussed briefly in the context of the historiography of the 1931 crisis. Secondly, I ask what this narrative approach has contributed to our emprical and theoretical understanding of decision-making. By very briefly comparing with the Great financial crisis of 2008 I argue that uncertainty is a basic condition that requires sensemaking and narrative construction. I end by suggesting that rather than drawing lessons from history, history can be used as a way to reflect upon the past and the present.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Chapter 4 argues that varietas in Tinctoris’s usage gestures toward an esthetics of opposition. The chapter situates Tinctoris’s discussion in the context of The Art of Counterpoint as a whole, while showing how the individual components of varietas – melody, rhythm, texture, and so on – give teeth to the concept.

Chapter 1 introduces three esthetic paradigms – kaleidoscopic, alternatim, and oppositional – that can help ground discussions of musical flow. Using examples spanning Gregorian chant through mid sixteenth-century polyphony, the chapter makes a case for a shift to and from an esthetics of opposition in the years surrounding the period at the heart of the book.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

Tinctoris was among the first music theorists to back up his points with citations of many polyphonic works. Chapter 5 takes another look at these well-studied examples, not for the sake of the theoretical ideas Tinctoris uses them to support, but to ask how deeply he knew the music in question. The central claim is that Tinctoris, himself an accomplished composer, had intimate knowledge of contemporary repertoire.

Chapter 2 confronts head-on a dearth of documentary evidence about the poetics of compositional practice and practical music-making, mining extant writings for insights into contemporary thinking about music while seeking out analogies with fifteenth-century discourses about other time-bound experiences.

This chapter and the next probe genres and subgenres whose formal schemes, whether fully codified or not, afford powerful energetic templates. Chapter 9 focuses on the polyphonic mass, laying out some of the genre’s conventions while wrestling with recent discourses about the idea of musical unity in five-movement mass cycles. A concluding section explores the limitations of a holistic, genre-based approach through the example of the five-voice tenor motet.

The climactic power of melodic highpoints animates Chapter 12. The argument centers on Johannes Okeghem’s masses, paying attention not only to how melodic apices can generate or unleash energy, but also to how highpoints can be withheld for anticlimactic effect.

Up until about 1480 most French songs were cast in one of three fixed poetic and musical forms: the rondeau, virelai, and ballade. Chapter 10 presents new ideas about how each repetition scheme conditions how the music happens in time, taking further an analysis by Christopher Page about the dynamics of the rondeau while offering a fresh interpretation of the virelai’s experiential horizons.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.