What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

Chapter 4 starts with a discussion of imperialism constructed as a fact and as theory. It highlights the major disruptions in East Asian and world history. The prevailing realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist theories are not scaled to explain such dramatic transformations of East Asia by Western imperialism. Rather, a historical sociological approach anchored on evolutionary theory is a better fit. Western domination based on the rise of the West in terms of economic, technological, and military power took several centuries to complete. Some East Asian empires were also expanding after 1500. A turning point was Britain’s defeat of China in the Opium War of 1839–1842. After that, East Asian nations engaged earnestly in reform. Some, like Japan, succeeded, while others, like China, failed, resulting in a great divergence among Asian countries. To some extent, much of East Asia still lives in the shadow of that imperialist past.

The ecological thinking of the Georgics leads to intricate problems of scale, which Chapter 4 traces. The poem seeks to conceptualize humans’ place in their local environments – epitomized by the bounded space of the farm – while also imagining life at larger scales and attempting to think the world as a coherent whole. The chapter connects these issues to political, geographical, agricultural, philosophical, and poetical questions. This chapter finds in the Georgics a searching exploration of what it means to be local, and whether such a thing is even possible in the age of Jupiter and the time of Caesar. Ultimately, the poem rethinks a more nuanced concept of locality that is intertwined with the global, and is of shifting, unpredictable scale: a concept of fractal locality. At the center of the poem, Vergil places a fitting emblem for a fractally local poetry, the temple he vows in his native Mantua. This temple models Vergil’s achievement as anchored in particular place, and yet in a place that has become local, Roman, Italian, and global all at once.

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

Identified by Immanuel Wallerstein as the first true hegemon, the Dutch Empire dominated maritime commerce in the seventeenth century. Amsterdam emerged as the world’s alpha city, the site of the first true global multinational corporations. In tandem with corporate activities including the founding of New York City, Cape Town, and Jakarta, Amsterdam established the first modern stock market. It also solidified the North–South power imbalance. European powers extracted the labor and raw materials of far-flung colonies, refining them at higher value. The under-populated Dutch Empire relied on forced migration and slave labor to produce valuable goods such as sugar, tobacco, and spices. This chapter traces the emergence of a city network in the Low Countries that prefigured its independence from Spain, and the construction of its own imperial network. The Dutch city network expanded globally, establishing critical nodes in West Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Asia to manage the flow of resources and labor. Amsterdam’s place at the top of the world city hierarchy led to rising inequality, prefiguring modern urban “command centers.”

This chapter outlines the role of empire in shaping Russian literature from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It traces the persistent literary impact of empire using the concept of imperiality, developed by analogy with coloniality, which decolonial theory describes as a sociopolitical and cognitive framework that endures beyond the times of colonialism. The chapter highlights the impact of empire on eighteenth-century Neoclassical poetry and on literature of the Romantic era. It then explores the enduring presence of empire in later periods, including Realist and early Modernist writing, as Russia’s colonial practices combined with a self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation state. Finally, it presents the Soviet-era cultural system of the ‘friendship of the peoples’ as a reimagined imperiality and concludes with an in-depth discussion of critical reflections on imperial legacies by post-Soviet authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia.

G. K. Chesterton’s debut novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, promotes what he called his ‘antiquated dogmas’ and ‘dead creeds’. Pitting the vendors of Pump Street against the magnates of Kensington and Bayswater, Chesterton sides with local ownership as against capitalism; slowness instead of speed; evolution for revolution; and tradition not modernity. However, in The Napoleon of Notting Hill Chesterton tests and questions all ideas – including his own. The key takeaway from Chesterton’s novel of ideas is not that some ideas are superior to others but that all social and political creeds are bound to be vacuous (and silly) unless they are based on external, communal frames of reference: on higher, unifying ideals that should underpin them.

India experienced several turbulent decades after the official takeover by the British Crown, following the Indian Mutiny, in 1858. Becoming an official territory of the British Empire came with promises of progress. Already by the 1870s, though, the promises seemed hollow. The textile industry, once a flourishing sector that supplied fabrics to most of the world, was dwindling. The average Indian was sinking into deeper poverty. And millions died in the three largest famines of India’s history between 1873 and 1901. It goes without saying that India’s large territory, rich history and its dependent position within the British Empire rendered its context dense and complex. India was extensively linked to the global economy and had a long history of trading in the subcontinent, primarily in textiles during the Mughal period, and later as one of the main suppliers of raw materials to the growing textile industry in Manchester in northern England. This chapter aims to contextualise the first generation of modern Indian economists by identifying the major trends and events affecting India in the past four decades of the nineteenth century.

This chapter outlines a key debate in the study of the Han Empire that is currently represented by proponents of a “fictive” versus “realist” view of empire building in early China. It makes a case for the book’s archaeological approach, namely the potential for recently excavated materials to trace the emergence of a constellation of universal ideas about imperialism, cultural unity, and sovereignty in China. These ideas will be examined along four domains of Han sociopolitical life – Part i Imperial Geography, Part ii Agriculture and Foodways, Part iii Craft Industries, and Part iv Ritual – as documented in core and frontier regions.

In the 1870s, a generation of economists was born amid a troubling reality in India. The country faced many crises around this time – suffering some of the worst famines in its history, having an imperial administration that struggled to balance its budget, and the crumbling of its textile industry, to name but a few. Indian Economics, argued its founder, Mahadev Govind Ranade, in 1892, would create economic knowledge that explained India’s distinct problems and would find appropriate solutions. The first generation of modern Indian economists had been convinced that India was different. But they used their difference for other ends. By contrast, they intended to prove India’s difference in such a way as to render its economy, institutions and people visible. From the 1870s there had been an increase in the number of Indians studying and informing their imperial rulers about conditions in the country. This first generation of modern Indian economists started to study their economy from new perspectives. Ranade’s and Ganapathy Dikshitar Subramania Iyer’s founding texts of Indian Economics bundled the studies that started to come in the 1870s with a common goal of progress and placed future studies under the intellectual umbrella of Indian Economics.

Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.