Chapter 7 covers the Ottoman political measures implemented with regard to the published works of the two movements. After discussing the censorship policies of the state, which were used in all the provinces, I explore the role of the ulema in terms of censorship policies through the biographical details of scholars based in Istanbul. The selected cases demonstrate that the published works of peripheral ulema were swiftly echoed in the centre and that the central ulema not only censored works spreading “dangerous” ideas but also directly refuted the thoughts of peripheral scholars. In this chapter, I emphasize the fact that censorship was a political means of curbing the circulation of ideas via printed books by providing details from Wahhabi and Mahdist publications. This chapter shows how the Ottomans actively tried to stop “pernicious” publications from entering Ottoman lands and limit their spread in the territories through telegraphed orders sent from the centre to all the provinces.

This chapter sets out the ‘lateral censorship process’ that shaped plays’ paths from composition to reception. It is grounded in archival evidence from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration and builds on modern theoretical approaches, including ‘New Censorship Theory’. In this model, lateral censorship occurs in four main ‘sites’: the composition process, theatres (including staff on and off the stage), audiences, and critics. Each of these sites is home to a variety of agents; the sites are related; and more than one site could exert lateral censorship on a play. However, whilst such actions could halt a play in its steps, the focus here is not wholly negative: lateral censorship recognizes that censorship can be a positive force in production too (for example, critical feedback to improve a play), echoing the dual definition of ‘censure’ at the time.

This chapter explores the Spanish Inquisition’s interest in and attempts at censorship of printed texts with an eye to the steps and nuances of that process. It might appear as if the Spanish Inquisition was a formidable and relentless means of ideological control. Yet inquisitors’ implementation of censorship mandates was inevitably piecemeal because the institution’s personnel and authority were limited. Despite inquisitorial efforts, prohibited texts circulated through the Spanish empire, and bans did not apply equally to all the residents of Spanish territories. Some readers were licensed to consume prohibited texts; some banned texts escaped the libraries of those authorized to own them and circulated among the general reading public; the degree to which Spaniards were affected by the Inquisition’s textual regulations depended on their status. Scholars do not agree on the effects of inquisitorial censorship on Spanish intellectual and cultural life, and it remains a fruitful topic for investigation.

This chapter examines the historical development of the Spanish Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico), investigating its processes, targets, and ambitions. It surveys the first inquisition prosecutions there, which were carried out not by inquisitors per se, but by mendicant friars as well as the episcopal court. After King Philip II authorized an inquisition tribunal for New Spain in 1569, inquisitors quickly began to operate in Mexico City. At the same time, Spanish inquisitors in New Spain had no investigative or coercive powers over New Spain’s Indigenous populations, whose religious beliefs and practices were monitored by the episcopal legal jurisdiction. New Spain’s inquisitors prosecuted far fewer serious heretics than their counterparts in Spain itself, though the tribunal was interested in Portuguese conversos, especially when it was encountering financial difficulties.

The inquisition tribunal in Lima, Peru, has received comparatively less scholarly attention because its sources are scattered and remain relatively incomplete. This chapter examines the inquisitorial jurisdiction in terms both of geography and of the Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who attracted the inquisitors’ attention. It covers the lives and careers of prominent inquisitors, and addresses the variety of alleged offenders. It identifies different phases of tribunal activity, provides examples of the offenses that Lima’s inquisitors targeted in each phase, and delves into trials of faith for the heresy of crypto-judaism, the so-called “Great Complicity” of 1635–39. Inquisitors in Lima were interested in the same range of offenses as their counterparts in Spain. The tribunal worried about the presence of hidden Jews, Muslims, and Protestants in the Peruvian Viceroyalty and the effects they might have. They also were preoccupied with minor offenders such as visionaries, sorcerers, and bigamists.

Expanding the horizons of constitutional practice further, this chapter shows how the meanings and implications of the Cambodian Constitution – and particularly the mandate it gives the state to protect Cambodian culture and tradition – have been shaped by artists, filmmakers, and performers. The chapter begins by introducing the reader to the Ministry of Culture’s ‘Code of Conduct for Artists and Performers’, which was introduced in 2016. Then, drawing on interviews with a number of artists from around Cambodia, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Culture, I suggest that the Code of Conduct represents a profound and widely shared anxiety about the meaning of modern Cambodian culture and national identity. In negotiating this fraught terrain, Cambodian artists explain how they have either directly challenged or avoided the regulations. In so doing, this disparate group has elaborated its own interpretation of the Constitution, and offered its own definition of the ideas of ‘national culture’ and ‘good traditions’ contained therein. The result is both a micro-level account of constitutional contestation and an exploration of how art, culture, and constitutionalism intertwine, as the artists in question effectively shape the meaning of the Constitution from below, and thus effectively become constitutional actors themselves.

A little over a month after the storming of the Bastille, the royal theatre censor was keen to highlight that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have seemingly abolished censorship, but like a phoenix from the ashes, it would rise again at the hands of his fellow citizens. He was proved right. This study explores why that was the case, opening with an examination of contemporaneous definitions of censorship, an overview of the theatrical world at the time in France, and an analysis, using archival material from the regimes from 1788 to 1818, of how theatre could shape the public consciousness. The central argument here is that theatre censorship allowed contemporaries to influence what thousands of people saw (or not), and thus the internalized effects of these plays to shape the world around them.

The violence in Sasun was interpreted differently after investigations by missionaries, by foreign consuls, and by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. The Ottomans relied almost exclusively on a single legitimist report that became the state’s measure of "truth." To retain a monopoly of legitimate narrative, the Ottoman state utilized various forms of censorship – banning newspapers from abroad, forbidding any independent discussion of Sasun in the Ottoman press, preventing peasants from the area from traveling, and eventually banning all foreign journalists. At the same time, news of the massacres spread through word of mouth, and rumors of the Sasun violence increased tensions throughout the Ottoman Empire. When news of the violence reached London through missionary networks in mid-November 1894, it ignited a much larger debate about the British government’s support for the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a support understood by many as complicity. The same missionary networks in the United Kingdom and the United States that had taken up abolitionism in the early nineteenth century now focused their activist energy on the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire.

The efforts of the survivors of the Sasun massacre, and their allies in the ABCFM, to disseminate narratives of state violence were countered by the Ottoman state as it sought to maintain a monopolization of legitimate narrative. In both cases, the story of Sasun played on the global stage. Telegraph wires carried the story of Sasun, and the apologetics of the Ottoman government, to readers around the world. Like all technologies, the telegraph was a Janus-faced tool. It helped actors disseminate information, but it also helped them control it. In the Ottoman Empire, the telegraph allowed the state to centralize information. Never before had the Ottoman state possessed such control over information flows. Yet, the telegraph also disseminated narratives that largely circumvented Ottoman censors. These narratives, collected by missionaries, consuls, and journalists, contributed to protests in the United States and Great Britain. As more stories of massacres appeared in newspapers abroad, the Ottoman state clamped down to maintain its desired public image.

Representations of food in the public sphere in Europe evolved over the course of the First World War. Advertisements served as proxies for the economic situation in a given region, a rough gauge of what was available to consumers, and what at least a portion of them could hope to afford. In certain ways, what was left unsaid or unwritten spoke louder than any representations of the desperate food situation could have. In Austria-Hungary, for example, press censorship included removing entire articles relating to the food situation, shortly before a newspaper was published. The infamous “white spaces” remaining were left to be filled by the reader’s imagination and speculation, which may have had an even more damaging effect than had the situation been discussed openly. Despite the privations of war, however, humor was expressed in various ways as both a direct confrontation with reality and an escape from it. Using examples of posters, cartoons, advertisements, films, and other media, this chapter surveys how hunger – and its most extreme form, starvation – were envisioned and utilized by humanitarian groups, governments, and ordinary people struggling to survive during the First World War era.

We delve into how the digital revolution has affected the violation of, fight for, and documentation of human rights across the world. The Internet has impacted human rights in both positive and negative ways, and we discuss both direct and indirect ways this relationship has developed. The first part examines how the Internet has changed how people organize and speak up about human rights. Protesters use the Internet to organize their opposition, and new, transnational online actors are bringing together people from all over the world to campaign for climate justice, social reforms, or civil and political rights. The second part outlines ways in which the Internet is impacting media freedom and freedom of information. We present an example of how human rights movements have developed new tools to document human rights violations and to identify perpetrators to hold them accountable. In the third part we turn to the concept of digital repression – where governments use online tools to repress their citizen. We show how online censorship, surveillance, and propaganda are used to stabilize repressive governments, and present case studies on how hate speech and intrusive spyware have been linked to physical integrity violations.

This chapter covers the period between the Democrat Party’s 1955 political crisis and its greatest financial crisis (a devaluation and bailout in 1958). During this period, Prime Minister Menderes and his allies sought to sustain their economic policies while also retaining political power. Achieving these goals required illiberal tactics while seeking aid from the United States and other allies with increasing desperation. Democrat Party leaders marginalized intraparty critics and silenced the media, academics, and opposition. Unlike in previous chapters, however, we see Democrat Party leaders’ gambits either failing outright or achieving less than satisfactory results. In this period, US and European creditors took a harder line with the government; radical political movements gained popularity in neighboring states such as Syria and Iraq; and turnout in the 1957 elections fell such that the Democrat Party won with only a plurality of the vote. By the summer of 1958, a currency devaluation and bailout were no longer avoidable. Only the uncertainty caused by a revolution in Iraq enabled the Democrat-led government to secure comparatively favorable terms in negations.

Using press advisors – and, in Continental Europe, press bureaus – politicians employed repressive and proactive methods for influencing the press. The older, repressive method consisted of censorship, but politicians gradually shifted towards proactively shaping rather than preventing publicity. They wrote and edited newspaper articles themselves and ‘inspired’ content in different newspapers. In Britain, politicians relied on the papers of their political party; in Germany, the chancellor and emperor had to rely on (semi-)official newspapers. Despite Britain’s free press rhetoric, papers like the Times closely interacted with government as well. Newspaper ownership was already more concentrated in the colonies, enabling a politician to gain widespread control there – as did Rhodes in South Africa. Press agencies formed nodes in international communication, subjecting them to politicians’ interference. Politicians’ contacts with the press were smoothed through secret payments, though such secrecy was often exposed, making it counterproductive. Traditional methods of influencing the press lost effectiveness. Censorship became counterproductive, with court cases generating only more publicity for censored content. Commercialization made newspapers financially independent and less susceptible to politicians’ payments. The mass readership was less interested in newspapers that expressed political opinions, or even described politics to begin with. While politicians still managed the press, they thus needed new strategies for attaining favourable coverage.

Seeking publicity proactively, politicians needed a cooperative press. ‘Journalistic behaviour’ became a hallmark of the publicity politician. Politicians began to think and act like journalists, internalizing their media logic. To procure continuous publicity, politicians surrounded themselves with journalists. They interacted with these journalists privately, but also through the journalistic innovation of the interview. The interview evolved from casual conversation to a formal format of communication, and it enabled politicians to present themselves in their own words – without journalists’ interpretative filter. As with mass mediated speeches, this new form of communication created both possibilities and risks. Particularly for political outsiders, speeches and interviews offered an opportunity to build a non-traditional base of political support. In addition, politicians invited (photo)journalists to publicize their events to the public, regulating access and bestowing honours to control these journalists. Journalists noted politicians’ media-savviness and described them as having the instincts of a journalist or press manager – enhancing their image as publicity politicians. Through their journalistic behaviour, however, these politicians shaped new expectations for media politics, which they – and their successors – could not meet consistently. The increasing speed of international communication challenged politicians to ceaselessly feed an ever-hungrier press and to satisfy conflicting local and distant audiences.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians operated within an increasingly hybrid system of media politics. Media became a mass phenomenon, gained commercial and journalistic independence, and assertively claimed to represent public opinion. This chapter sets the scene by describing this diversifying media environment in which politicians operated. It highlights the technological advances that enabled ‘mass’ media; censorship and freedom of the press; media landscapes including political and religious newspapers, as well as regional, national, and transnational news flows; the commercialization of media; and changing journalistic cultures. These developments interconnected with social changes such as increasing literacy and urbanization; democratization and a bolstered notion of public opinion; and a reflexive modernity. Media became increasingly hybrid in terms of interacting media technologies and formats, political and commercial newspapers, and their social and political functions. This media hybridity defined the new transnational system of media politics that political figures inhabited around 1900.

This chapter examines conservative attacks on social media, and their validity. Conservatives have long accused the major social media platforms of left-leaning bias, claiming that platform content moderation policies unfairly target conservative content for blocking, labeling, and deamplification. They point in particular to events during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as President Trump’s deplatforming, as proof of such bias. In 2021, these accusations led both Florida and Texas to adopt laws regulating platform content moderation in order to combat the alleged bias. But a closer examination of the evidence raises serious doubts about whether such bias actually exists. An equally plausible explanation for why conservatives perceive bias is that social media content moderation policies, in particular against medical disinformation and hate speech, are more likely to affect conservative than other content. For this reason, claims of platform bias remain unproven. Furthermore, modern conservative attacks on social media are strikingly inconsistent with the general conservative preference not to interfere with private businesses.