Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

This chapter argues that by the latter half of the nineteenth century, priests, bishops, and other religious had immense latitude within the diffuse structures of the Church not only to raise money by different means but also to act as the central financial administrator and expert within their own parishes, dioceses, and religious houses, and that this power gave them an influential role in shaping the wider economic culture of Catholic Ireland in the period under review. It first explores levels of accounting and financial management knowledge among clergy and then situates their economic activity, including managing of debt and investments, within a wider transactional framework with wealthy and professional lay Catholics. It finally analyses how clergy were frequently afforded a significant role as arbiters of financial disputes and stewards of financial resources by the laity.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.

This educational work was intended to inspire action. This chapter explores what some of this work catalysed, including mobilising songs by the group Akut Kuei, whose work inspired many young men to return to fight in the SPLA, to men and women sharing war news, organising fundraising and practical help for the rebel efforts, and other (often unclear or uncertain) efforts towards resistance. Not all of this work was for the SPLA; many young men organised for southern militia groups working in Khartoum or were inspired to return to family villages to fight in local militias against predation from the Sudan government and SPLA forces alike. Others (men and women) joined the SPLA’s New Sudan Brigade, or the pan-Sudanese and pan-Africanist underground organisations of the African National Front and the National Democratic Alliance, among other small political parties and ‘spying’ work. This chapter explores people’s various aims and self-justifications alongside their accounts of this work, with a close eye on the epistemological and methodological questions of these retrospective accounts of subversion.

This chapter explores the political theory within this educational work. It draws on self-produced works, cassettes, photocopied pamphlets, song sheets, and lyric books collected from people’s own archives as they returned from Khartoum, and the interviews, group translations, and discussions of these works and photographs conducted during their collection. These texts, poems, and songs are engaged in critiques of their authors’ economic, political, racial, and social circumstances; they build competing political philosophies and set out a spectrum of ideas about the future. Together the discussions across these projects centred on the possible shape and extent of a new political community rooted in common Black experience of exploitation and marginalisation, versus a political community drawing on more specific ethnic or localised parameters, based on a more conservative and pessimistic reading of the war economy and its futures. At the same time it contains shared common critiques of the civic and moral failings of the wealthy, apathetic, culturally promiscuous, and politically ignorant.

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

This chapter uncovers the unintended trajectory of Taiwanese women’s freedom among younger adopted daughters in the Japanese colonial courts. Family-centric, gender-based physical unfreedom continued to be one of the salient administrative and legal problems in Taiwan from the precolonial period to the late 1910s. Male household heads were not ready to follow the judicial construction of women’s freedom of movement during the early to mid-1920s. However, Japanese judges involved with female litigants shifted their focus to women’s freedom of choice – defined by intent and contractual freedom among adopted daughters – as a new boundary delineating their relationships with households in civil and criminal cases in the late 1920s. Women’s choice continued to be a central point of dispute when adopted daughters became targets of their parents and strangers. These daughters’ ambiguous capacity regarding their age, class background, and sexual integrity was misrepresented to legitimize their adverse labor and life conditions, including sex work. Yet, it was within the flexible contours of choice that the courts protected women’s agency, which, in turn, became a constitutive part of colonial history.

This chapter considers the relationship between masculinity, work, and the body in Hopkins’s poetry, focussing in particular on the idealization of working-class bodies in ‘Felix Randal’, ‘Harry Ploughman’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’. It explores Hopkins’s engagement with the ‘Gospel of Work’ in the nineteenth century, situating his works alongside that of writers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. It also examines the significance of broader social developments in the period: the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’, the socialist unrest of the late 1880s, and increasing medical concerns about overwork and leisure. The final section turns to Hopkins’s journals to consider his preoccupation with forms of productive labour, especially as this relates to self-regulation and sexual continence. In closing, the chapter considers Hopkins’s fraught engagement with the poetry of Walt Whitman and its eroticized representations of the male body.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The chapter introduces the book, its main claims, and arguments. It is concerned with setting the agenda for how to take labour seriously in Gulf development discourses and the value of centring labour from the margins. The book argues that Oman’s labour market is global and that Omani labour needs to be understood globally and relationally within and beyond the segmentations that divide the labour market. The chapter situates youth and their economic dreams and experiences at the heart of the story of development, discusses how to understand labour within the rentier state, and lays out the framework and empirical analysis to follow.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

This chapter is concerned with recentring labour in regional development accounts and framing the claim of the book that the labour markets of Oman and the region are global. Most development accounts articulate Oman’s labour market as an object of development, a self-contained unit to be regulated and deregulated toward developmental ends. Development policy and academic discourse, in short, treat the labour market as a bounded, local space with enclosed, segmented social relations. In contrast to this development planning imaginary, this chapter argues that the labour market needs to be interpreted in global context and with a view of how regulation and relations transpire within, between, and across segmentations. The labour market is a place in which you can clearly see the outcomes of global market pressures and the competing poles for labour’s management and (de)regulation. These come from within but also outside national and regional boundaries. In combination, by looking from the bottom up, the labour market offers a space where we encounter humans in the economy and can more clearly visualise the human impact of economic transformations and choices.

The Yorkshire novelist Storm Jameson wrote that her work tended to ‘sag beneath my great ideas’, as she fought to reconcile her own frustrations with a world of isms and inconsistencies. This chapter explores In the Second Year (1936) Storm Jameson’s dystopian vision of fascist Britain and what this might look like. Like many of her other novels is waterlogged with dialogues and monologues which seek to unpack and explore the great ideas of the age - modernity; capitalism; materialism; individualism - and the ways in which they inform and underpin the attractions of a particularly British fascism, one fashioned in a crucible of class prejudices, the public school system and growing inequality.

This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

The Vicar of Wakefield is a tale with marriage at its core. This chapter puts that preoccupation in historical and cultural context, accounting for the importance of the Whistonian controversy and Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 as backdrops to a novel which does not merely reflect its time, but anticipates subsequent treatments of the institution of marriage in fiction.