The British Empire provided the context in which both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came to maturity and defined and aggravated their differences as national leaders. The chapter begins by comparing the shared beliefs and values of Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt on empire and race before showing how Franklin Roosevelt emerged from his cousin’s shadow to develop a hostility towards the British Empire inspired by genuine idealism as well as calculating pragmatism. It documents the tension between Churchill’s imperialism and his appreciation that American participation in the war was the key to victory, examining the differences between the two leaders before looking at their wartime relationship through the lens of their very different responses to events in the British Empire, especially in India. Churchill’s dispute with Roosevelt on the subject of the British Empire went to the heart of the relationship between a Democrat president who wanted to create a new world order imbued with American values and a Conservative prime minister who aimed to maintain the old world in all its glory. This disjunction threatened the stability of the wartime alliance.

The chapter sees India as a stain on Churchill’s reputation. As a young officer, Churchill spent twenty-two months in India, representing his longest concentrated stay outside of Britain, but his prejudice against Anglo-Indians meant that he engaged only with the elites of British India and remained isolated. The Empire and its permanence became the bedrock of a deep-seated conviction just at the time of India’s nationalist upsurge for self-rule and independence. He condemned the Amritsar massacre but thereafter opposed all ideas for Indian political evolution. The fact that he held no responsibility for India affairs apart from May 1940 to July 1945 did not stop him speaking about the subcontinent. His campaign against the India Act of 1935 was conducted at enormous political cost to himself and left the leaders of the Indian independence movement embittered, contributing to Hindu–Muslim polarisation. During the Second World War Churchill manipulated Britain’s response to the Indian independence movement, titling policy in favour of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. His response to the Bengal Famine has to be framed in terms of race.

Lawyers, judges and scholars often see the domain of the family as distinctive, namely as affective rather than instrumental, sharing rather than distributive, distinguished from the functioning of both the state and the market by its altruism, intimacy and sacredness. They also often consider family law as exceptional, as occupying a distinctive domain and operating differently than its private law counterparts such as contracts, torts and property law or its public ones such as criminal, administrative and constitutional law.1 We begin from the premise, however, that the law that regulates and shapes the experiences and situations of members of a family arises, too, in these other domains. Family law encompasses not just the rules and doctrines associated with the formation, operation and dissolution of families (traditional family law) but also laws of the market and the state that regulate and shape the definition and operation of families.2

In terms of gender equality, law is a fundamentally ambivalent artefact. It can certainly be a vector for progressive change, as documented in several of the contributions in this volume. Indeed, law has played a crucial role in many decisive battles and victories for gender equality globally, from the extension of political franchise to all those that were initially excluded therefrom (such as women, racialized minorities, servants, dependants, etc.),1 to the more contemporary steps in the confirmation of a principle of equality among sexual orientations, gender identities,2 family arrangements and so on. Accompanying a number of social and political struggles, law has helped tackle forms of discrimination and exclusion that were once entrenched in law and channelled claims of equal recognition and equality of opportunities relevant to the dignitarian, redistributive and participatory dimensions of equality.3

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

Churchill has become the archetypal embodiment of the modern war leader, in part as a result of his own writings, but this chapter strips away the layers of hindsight and looks in detail at the challenge he faced in 1940 and the actions he took in response. By making himself minister of defence, he united the civilian and military administrative machines and established a streamlined decision-making process at the heart of government. He led from the front, both through the projection of his image and through his distinctive oratory. His strategy was to weather the immediate crisis and then to find means of taking the fight to the enemy, even if it meant prioritising the Mediterranean over the Empire in Asia, while also courting the United States and seizing the opportunity of the Soviet alliance. The strain undoubtedly took a toll on his health and, as the war progressed, his room for manoeuvre became more limited and fractures began to emerge over the future, both within his government and in his relations with his key allies.

The present chapter studies two contemporary Algerian narratives retelling the medieval rebellion of the Zendj, Black Africans brought as slaves to the marshes of Lower Iraq, who revolted against the power of the Abbasid Caliphate. Considered as the greatest servile insurrection of the medieval Arab-Muslim world, Jamel Eddine Benchecikh’s novel Rose noire sans parfum (1998) and Tareq Teguia’s film Révolution Zenj (2013) revisit this evocative episode in the global history of slavery, merging racial and economic exploitation with religious conflict and the struggle for liberation in an age of empire. The chapter focuses on Benchecikh and Teguia’s creative responses to the silence to which the Zendj have been condemned by the Arabic sources of the time, pointing out the different stylistic paths they take to trace analogies between the Zendj Rebellion and the contemporary forms of oppression, racism, and sectarian strife they witness across Algeria, Iraq, Palestine, and Europe. Expressing the rage of the oppressed, their narratives denounce the inequalities and injustices of the postcolonial and globalized world, investigating their causes while inviting audiences within and outside the Arab World to join in the Zendj’s unconcluded struggle for liberation across the centuries.

From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.

In this chapter, Hesford examines the humanitarian imperatives of contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking campaigns and their calculated appropriations and parasitic logics. She considers in what contexts, under what conditions of visibility and legibility, and in support of what political investments are humanitarian tropes deployed? To better understand the contemporary anti-slavery movement’s perpetuation and parasitic appropriation of humanitarian tropes, Hesford turns to the rhetorical mediation of human trafficking subjects and their stories. Understanding these mediations, she argues, is important because how trafficking subjects and their stories are framed sets the parameters for public recognition and political action.

This chapter focuses on recent scholarly discussion of how the visual arts may be considered capable of “visual exegesis” (a term first coined by the art historian Paolo Berdini and now widely used). It argues that, when we read the Bible in the company of visual art, we are asked to countenance our implication in each other, in a single world full of many meanings, in the shared conditions that sustain human communication across difference and in the encompassing existential questions that the biblical texts pose.

Acknowledging the experimental beginnings of opera and expressing high hopes for its future, Marco da Gagliano (1582–1643) thus reviews the origins of ‘such spectacles’ in the 1608 preface of his own first effort in the new genre, La Dafne, itself a reworking and expansion of the earliest completely sung music drama a decade earlier. He goes on to explain how, after a great deal of discussion concerning the way the ancients had represented their tragedies and about what role music had played in them, the court poet Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621) began to write the story (favola) of Dafne, and the learned amateur Jacopo Corsi (1561–1602) composed some airs on part of it. Determined to see what effect a (completely sung) work would have on the stage, they approached the skilled composer and singer Jacopo Peri, who finished the work and probably premièred the role of Apollo ‘on the occasion of an evening entertainment’ during the carnival of 1597/8 and on subsequent occasions. In the invited audience at the first performance were Don Giovanni de’ Medici and ‘some of the principal gentlemen’ of Florence.2

The essay discusses the development of literary criticism and its various approaches, such as narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, and ideological criticism. Concepts such the implied author, text, and implied reader are also introduced, providing greater clarity of the principles employed by literary critics engaged in the narrative exegesis of the text.

Opera, ‘as every school boy knows’, started life in the 1590s; and we might well suppose that such a novel phenomenon would cry out for entirely new techniques of staging. But in this we would be wrong. Most of the elements which fused to create opera as a form were already present in other musical and dramatic modes in the later sixteenth century, and that was the case, too, when it came to putting the form on stage.