This uninhibited book of Collingwood’s rounds off his contribution to philosophy in a fiercely personal style. Declaring his unbounded admiration for the Leviathan of Hobbes and following its fourfold structure, Collingwood offers a systematic account of man, society, civilization, and “barbarism” – the last being understood as active hostility towards civilization, or revolt against it. Collingwood’s thoughts on the meaning of “society” and “civility,” as well as on questions of peace and war, remain very much alive; of particular interest here are his distinction between “eristic” and “dialectical” approaches to disagreement, and his conception of a body politic as the scene of a “dialectical” relationship between social and non-social elements. Other discussions impose greater distance on a modern reader – among them his briskly affirmative treatment of the role of a “ruling class,” of our entry into a presumed “social contract,” and of the “intelligent exploitation of nature.”

Why have we been so quick to dismiss late nineteenth-century Haitian novels in the field of francophone postcolonial studies? What have we failed to recognize as francophone or postcolonial in these texts? And how can we now begin to revisit them? This chapter proposes to answer these questions by drawing attention to the historical predicament that led nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers to embrace the West’s narratives of civilization and modernity when such discourses were in fact integral to North Atlantic imperialisms and white supremacy. It first provides a historical overview of the Haitian novel from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its booming production in the early 1900s. It then sheds light on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Une Chercheuse, two novels that help us understand how Haitian intellectuals sought to exist in a Eurocentric, international lettered sphere. Finally, it concludes by considering some of the ethical and intellectual challenges we must face in order to do justice to such works and their authors.

What is surprising about a return to a book I wrote thirty years ago is how fresh it feels in my mind, as if I have kept writing it ever since. In my later studies, I have explored many of the same themes that I first discussed in this book, such as ethnicity, networks, and the ’small world’ effect on the rise of Greek civilization, some Mediterranean issues, the impact of myth and quasi-historical accounts on history, the validation and legitimization of conquest and settlement, the evidence of nomima and their usefulness for the ancient historian, the historical and archaeological evidence of settlement, and even the role of drawing lots in ancient Greece.

This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

This chapter includes civic signs and political banners, which seem to be particularly numerous in China. They are used to extol civic and cultural values reflecting the current social and political climate. From their contents, one can get a sense of what are considered important at a particular time. Like couplets, the rhetorical device of parallelism is frequently employed.

In his popular novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was first published in Istanbul in 1943, Sabahattin Ali wrote that “for some reason or other people prefer to investigate what they feel sure they will find. It is without doubt easier to find a brave man to descend to the bottom of a well where it is known that a dragon lives than to find a man who will show the courage to descend into a well about the bottom of which nothing is known.”1 This view applies nicely to research into nations and nationalisms, for the bottom of the well is already known: the Ottoman Empire collapsed and was replaced by new nation-states. This collapse has often been taken as the “inevitable” triumph of nation-state over empire, the victory of national identities over other identity constructions.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

A few brief reflections on the timeliness and importance of rediscovering moderation in our age of extremes following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also comments on the fragility of civilization and makes a strong case for moderation conceived of as a fighting faith.

This chapter begins in Paris in 1919, a year in which prognostications of the collapse of civilization became widespread. By the end of that year, the largely imagined crisis of civilization had become a tangible one; the ongoing conflicts in central and eastern Europe presented a material threat to the lives of intellectuals and institutions, reports of soaring prices and starvation in central and eastern Europe became widespread, and the spectre of Bolshevism threatened the new democratic order. The chapter explores how intellectual reconstruction was framed – but mostly not acted upon – at the Paris Peace Conference and that it was not until early 1920 that intellectual humanitarianism began to take shape.

The book opens with an exploration of the cultural violence of the First World War and sets this in wider historical and historiographical contexts. It explores three key themes which inform the monograph: cultural destruction, humanitarianism, and the role of the intellectual. While none of these themes began with the First World War, the conflict transformed them in significant ways. Cultural destruction was a key component in how the First World War was presented to belligerent and neutral populations and intellectual sites were particularly important in this process of cultural mobilization. The introduction argues that because cultural destruction was crucial to popular understandings of the war, its opposite, cultural and intellectual reconstruction, would in turn be an important part of the process of post-war stabilization.

This chapter argues that the relationship between sound and sense is to be historically understood, and that cultural soundscapes emerge from the accrued meaning that historical actors give to items that may have been there since a long time, but were not previously considered as relevant. The specific case to be discussed here is the practice of collecting (and publishing) ballads: as ballads acquired a new cultural meaning, collective popular interest incorporated them as an active element of the contemporary soundscape. Changes in the way of conceptualizing history and development, in perceiving the divide between oral and written culture, political events and a refashioning of the values attributed to ideas of naturalness and simplicity have all been crucial factors in the process of attribution of meaning to ballads. As cultural identity came to be defined by sounds and music, ballads acquired a new meaning and – of course – this process did not leave the genre unharmed: ‘elite minds’ selected and purged the material that was destined to represent marks of Britishness and proceeded towards the ‘civilizi+L10ng’ of ballads.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.

In this address, which Du Bois delivered in London at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, he uttered the famous phrase, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Co-signed by fellow organizers of the conference, the address makes clear the global nature of the color line and argues that human progress requires that the opportunities of modern civilization be made available to the “darker races.” Appealing specifically to Christian nations, the address calls on them to refuse to draw distinctions of color or race; to resist exploiting and repressing Africans for the sake of greed; to govern their African and West Indian colonies justly and give them, “as soon as practicable, the rights of responsible government”; to recognize the Congo Free State as an independent Negro State; and to respect the integrity of the independent states of Abyssinia, Liberia, and Haiti.

Du Bois delivered “To the World” as an address at the Second Pan-African Congress in London in August 1921, and the conference delegates approved its resolutions, as well as those of a separate manifesto addressed specifically to the League of Nations. Both were published in The Crisis in November 1921. “To the World” declares racial equality to be the “founding stone of world peace and human advancement and insists on the world’s duty to assist in the advancement of the “backward.” It projects a vision of “interracial contact” based on democratic political institutions and mutual respect and argues that poverty and class conflict in developed countries (“culture lands”) can be truly solved only when white nations stop perpetrating even greater poverty and injustice among “darker peoples.” The manifesto to the League makes three key demands: that the International Bureau of Labor establish a section to deal with Negro labor in Africa and the “Islands of the Sea”; that a man of Negro descent be appointed to the League’s Mandates Commission; and that the League attend to legal and cultural bias against “civilized persons of Negro descent.”

Chapter 8 examines how millennia of accrued technological know-how, experimentation and curiosity enabled humanity to develop the first metallurgy, exploring the founding of important trade networks. The key role of symbolic communication networking is discussed as an influencing factor in the emergence of writing as a breakthough that finally enabled ideas to transcend time.

The capital-exporting states of the North Atlantic long insisted that the standards of civilised justice mandated that capital-importing states respect the property rights of their nationals engaged in commercial enterprise abroad. Only a single North Atlantic conception of civilisation qualified to provide content for this purported international standard, even as that content was contested by capital-importing states from the Global South. This chapter turns to a methodology that is dominant in investment law scholarship that operates to produce an outcome functionally equivalent to the standards of civilized justice. International investment lawyers and scholars, it is argued, deploy simplistic comparative methodologies that reproduce historic domination by powerful capital-exporting states. The choice of country models is highly selective and productively so. By preferring to conscript the easily retrievable law of the Global North into general principles of international law, scholars reinforce extant power relations rather than realigning them in new directions.