Gambling in its modern form was invented in the nineteenth century. The resort casino, built in an environmentally or politically desirable location, attracted a wide range of people from around the world to an atmosphere of luxury, leisure, and cultural cultivation. Visitors to European casinos in the nineteenth century traveled there by steamship or by locomotive; they stayed in hotels and ate meticulously prepared foods; they listened to music performed by artists on tour; and caught up on global and regional affairs by reading newspapers from around the world. And they lost money in the gambling rooms. Built upon an existing network of health-conscious spa towns in the Rhineland, and then relocating to the Riviera in the 1860s, nineteenth-century casino life gave expression to bourgeois demands for leisure, luxury, and levity.

The Philosophy of History’s search for a renewed sense wholeness originated in the paradoxes of Rousseau. He detested modern liberalism for producing the materialistic “bourgeois.” He wanted to restore the ancient concern with civic virtue and happiness to counteract this spiritual debasement. But because Rousseau accepted the modern account of nature as matter in motion, yielding appetitive individualism and identifying reason with utility, he could only promote the nobler dimension of human life as the freedom of will to oppose oneself to nature and reason altogether. This created a contradiction between nature and freedom, and undermined political authority by suggesting that no form of government could return us to our original natural happiness in a lost Golden Age, corrupted as we are by the progress of civilization. The Jacobins took this as a call to collectivist revolution and the return to “the Year One.” Alternatively, Rousseau extolled the Romantic notion of the solitary artist who seeks his happiness outside of civil society. These explosive tensions between natural happiness and political authority were grappled with by Rousseau’s successors, who sought ways of healing the division in man between his natural self and his free self.

The relation between Britten’s sexuality and his music has been an abiding fascination for biographers and music scholars in recent decades. The fact that homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, and that he and his long-term partner, Peter Pears, therefore had to live a homosexual life as an ‘open secret’ for most of their lives, often lends this critical emphasis a kind of heroic poignancy. This chapter contrasts Britten and Pears’s upper-middle-class experience of forbidden sexuality with that of the overwhelming majority of twentieth-century British men and women, to paint a more rounded picture of the politics of the closet. It shows how early twenty-first-century ideas about sexual ‘identity’ obscure the differences between class experience, and distort our understanding of the issue.

This chapter first explains how the Chinese Communist Party is organized and controls the political system. Unlike the political parties in mature democracies, the Chinese Communist Party is a Leninist party that resembles a secret society, characterized by monopolistic communist ideology, strict hierarchy, exclusive membership, and two unique party organs: the Propaganda Department, and the United Front Work Department. In such a political system, the party eclipses the entire society, including the government, creating a unique party-state that imposes absolute rule over China. The chapter further shows that, leveraging its total control, the party-state creates a low human rights environment in China that enables the party-state to achieve its objectives with few costs and little resistance. In the past four decades, China’s economy grew rapidly, creating a large middle class. However, due to its total dependence on the party, the newly emerged middle class is in no position to push for democracy and the rule of law.

Ibsen, more than any other playwright, established realism as a vital mode in the theatre. The nature of Ibsen’s realism, however, warrants careful description. Realism for Ibsen is simultaneously a theatrical technique and a philosophical stance. We find realism at work in Ibsen’s dialogue, scenery and characterization, as well as in the plays’ relentless critique of bourgeois ideals. Ibsen was not the first realist dramatist, but he remains its most influential practitioner. This legacy is somewhat ironic, given the disturbing surreality that leeches through the realist surface of his plays. And yet, the spark of recognition the plays continue to ignite bears witness to realism’s effectiveness, as audiences continue to find themselves represented, in all their faults, in his towering dramas.

This chapter examines two competing ideals about appropriate conduct for women: the lady of the court and the bourgeois woman. Interaction between courtly and bourgeois ideals of femininity had been taking place for centuries. Until the early twentieth century, courtly ideals of femininity continued to hold sway at the upper level of Thai society, although they were tempered by the rising influence of a bourgeois view of the world due to economic transformation. The declining social position of the aristocracy in the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, dealt a blow to courtly conceptions of behaviour for women while helping to elevate the bourgeois housewife as the new ideal of exemplary feminine conduct. The chapter also highlights the very influential role that many elite women played in the twentieth century in writing about manners, including in the new literary genre of novels of manners. The chapter examines the works of numerous well-known women writers on manners.

The European "modernism" of which Strauss was considered a representative in the 1890s and the "avant-garde" modernism that would exclude him in the new century differed significantly. Both are defined here as manifestations of, or critical reactions to, cultural and technological modernity. Varying shades of modernism are illustrated with reference to critical responses to Strauss and to his own 1907 essay "Is there an Avant-Garde in Music?" The length of Strauss’s career and the stylistic choices he made both reflect and problematize the once common notion that the history of the period’s music was simply one of evolutionary progress, which he first exemplified and then rejected. The varied and changing context of Strauss’s critical stance and compositional output resides not only in artistic ideas but also in politics and social practice in institutions like opera houses and concert halls and their audiences.

This chapter analyzes how and why the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires were militarily powerful but economically uncompetitive and intellectually stagnant. It emphasizes that out of the three technologies Western Europeans used effectively – the printing press, nautical compass, and gunpowder – these three Muslim empires employed only gunpowder effectively. The chapter explains this situation by the dominance of the military and religious classes and the marginalization of the intellectual and bourgeois classes in the Muslim world. In Western Europe, by contrast, the intellectual and bourgeois classes were influential; they played crucial roles in overlapping processes of the Renaissance, the printing revolution, the Protestant Reformation, geographical discoveries, and the scientific revolution, which led to the “rise of Western Europe.” The chapter critically evaluates alternative explanations to both the decline of the Muslim world and the rise of Western Europe.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.