Chapter 2 shows that Jiaozhi, the southernmost province of the Han empire was a cosmopolitan at the forefront of overseas contacts and influences. Many monks set out from here for the South Sea, India, and Sri Lanka, from where exotic plants were introduced and where they became cash crops. The aromatic economy gave Jiaozhi all the earmarks of a commercial-based economy that characterised cash-cropping of the Mekong delta. By the seventh century, Jiaozhi became the leading aromatic refinery of the South China Sea region. Production of aromatics, silk, and ceramics were organised by the hybrid Sino-Viet elite. This alone challenges the image of the ‘traditional Vietnam’, being essentialised into a rural and village Vietnam.

The introduction considers the appeal Decadence and the work of Oscar Wilde held for queer, cosmopolitan subjects in the early-twentieth century who wished to reimagine structures of kinship. Decadence’s association with sexual dissidence and curiosity along with Wilde’s reputation as a sexual martyr informed the thinking of authors and artists in the twentieth century who worked to generate alternatives to heteronormative practices of affiliation. These figures operated alongside but saw themselves as distinct from high modernist networks, turning to the fin de siècle past to express their sense of distinction from the aesthetic modes in fashion at the time. While Wilde’s capacity for reimagining new modes of kinship informed more liberatory strains of twentieth-century Decadence, his interest in age-differentiated eroticism and the more general tendency to Orientalism within the Decadent Movement also inflected the practices marked by his influence during this period. The introduction thus stresses that the kinship experiments of twentieth-century Decadents carried forward the many political valences of their source material and that their work should be approached through the framework of what Kadji Amin has called “deidealization,” a mode of queer historical practice that acknowledges that queer alternatives are not always just alternatives.

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.

This chapter contributes to the debates about Samuel Johnson’s politics by considering the inadequacy of “Tory” as a label as balanced by Johnson’s unique contribution to the British public sphere in light of his determination to oppose aggressive forms of cultural nationalism. Considering Johnson’s journalism, his critical biographies, and Rasselas, Hawes explores Johnson’s deliberate cultivation of an anti-colonial perspective that burst through the usual framework for public discussions of the Seven Years War. In opposing the “Whig interpretation of history,” Johnson set himself against the principal vector of expansionist ideology. In his ability to combine anti-slavery and anti-colonial positions, Hawes argues, Johnson is uniquely prescient – and sometimes politically quite radical. His politics need to be understood as specifically anti-colonial, often reframing discussions of supposedly national affairs as manifestations of a colonial agenda.

From the 1920s onward, James Joyce and Latin American literature have been inextricably connected. Anglo-American criticism has traditionally seen this connection as a case of influence radiating from an iconic figure of European Modernism to the periphery. However, a close analysis of how prominent writers from Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar to Gustavo Sainz and Ricardo Piglia received and engaged with Joyce’s work reveals a less centralizing literary map. In their critical and creative writings, Joyce appears not as a model to be emulated but as an irreverent Irish writer that occupied an eccentric position within the Western literary tradition. Responding to changing political and social landscapes and diverse national contexts, these Latin American authors have marshalled and refashioned Joyce’s eccentricity to express their local conditions and cultural specificity in a cosmopolitan literary style.

Premodern literary circulation resembles premodern trade in material goods in that it covers the planet less completely than does the modern world-system. Instead, different kinds of literary texts circulated on different scales and in different networks. Short, simple, easily translated and adapted texts such as beast fables and frame-tales, travelled the most widely and crossed the most linguistic borders. Religious scripture, and other highly valued texts, also travelled great distances, thanks to the huge resources occasionally invested in their transmission and translation. By contrast, denser patterns of literary circulation took place in smaller, more clearly-defined, regions. A key index of such regions in pre-modern literature is the adaptation of specific poetic forms, tied to the distinctive prosodic qualities of a major literary language, and requiring sustained investment and effort to carry over successfully into new languages, typically vernaculars culturally dependent to some degree on the source language. This phenomenon is traced through the gradual circulation of two poetic forms, the Arabic qasida and the sonnet.

Seamus Heaney had a complex relationship with English poetry. While Heaney’s essays on the canon of English poetry have preoccupied critics, this chapter looks at the ways in which his poems engage with English places and poets, as settings and exemplars. It then shows how he presents himself as both inheritor of a tradition and critical outsider, especially in his translation of Beowulf, and argues that his example has been central to similar translation projects by younger generations of English poets, including Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. The chapter concludes by looking at the more global, cosmopolitan context Heaney envisages for his England-set later poems like ‘District and Circle’ and ‘Eelworks’.

We remember Ira Aldridge today as the first black Shakespearean to achieve international professional renown. Indeed, he’s the first American actor to do so. Throughout his life Aldridge was lauded with awards. Born to free blacks in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, naturalized as a British citizen in 1863, and buried in Łódź, Poland in 1867, Aldridge’s cosmopolitan life was marked by triumphs as well as persistent racist responses to his performances. His cosmopolitan career spanned three continents and countless theatres. This essay surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: educate; emulate; circulate; nominate; innovate; disseminate; elaborate. Such strategies can still inspire us, students, performers, scholars, artists, teachers, and innovators alike.

In the previous chapter, I explained that we may need to reconsider familiar formulations of fundamental principles when we apply them in new contexts. In this chapter, I ask how we might even embark on such evaluations. A traditional and commendable scholarly reflex is that we must ‘ground’ our analysis in certain and self-evident bedrock. I will show the infeasibility of this search for secure moral foundations.

I suggest a non-foundational approach, using a coherentist method: we do the best we can do with the available clues and arguments. The clues include patterns of practice, normative arguments, and casuistically-tested considered judgments. We can work with ‘mid-level principles’ to carry out fruitful analytical and normative work.

The coherentist approach accepts that our principles are human constructs, that our starting points are contingent, and that we have no guarantees of ‘correctness’. Discussion of fundamental principles is not a matter of ethical computations; it is a conversation. It is a human conversation, a fallible conversation, and nonetheless an important conversation. I also argue that coherentism offers the best explanatory and justificatory account of the method used in most criminal law theory. In other words, it is the best theory of criminal law theory.

In this essay, Iaddress some preliminary considerations surrounding different notions of “peace” and peacebuilding and the appropriate methodologies to study the same.I place emphasis on the adoption of a moral epistemology that is overtly value-oriented and normatively ambitious without being oblivious to the structural characteristics of collective political behavior that tend to privilege the self at the expense of the other, such as that used by the World Order Models Project (WOMP). Rather than relying on one standard definition of “cosmopolitanism,” I advocate for a pluralistic conception that acknowledges different cosmopolitanisms. I provide a framework for peacebuilding assessment that frames inquiry around different “horizons” of aspirations (feasibility, necessity, desperation, desire), and I lay out my version of cosmopolitanism, which centers on the importance of peacebuilding objectives that are necessary and desirable. In so doing, I compare my perspective toother paradigmatic perspectives, concluding that cosmopolitanismis concerned with reconciling unity with difference, through mutual understanding of otherness.

This chapter explains the cosmopolitan nature of the law of peacebuilding per se and, second, identifies laws and international developments that have indirect effects on peacebuilding and peace law by creating a process of building peace. The practices of states and other actors and their expectations of appropriate conduct create a dialectic that makes legal obligations a cost that states must calculate in their decisions to comply with hard and soft law requirements, obligations, and contested or denied responsibilities. We compare international lawas cosmopolitanism to the other major paradigms used to explain peacebuilding success and failures -- realism, liberalism, constructivism -- demonstrating the ways in which our approach complements and diverges from these approaches. We next discuss the concept of a human right to peace and then address peace as an outcome of international law. We conclude this chapter with some thoughts about the importance of the development of peace law.

In this chapter, I demonstrate the problem to which the rest of this book proposes a solution: namely, the need for more careful deontic reasoning. I will focus on certain distinctive habits of reasoning that have often recurred in ICL, which have a tendency to undermine compliance with deontic principles.

All legal systems sometimes generate doctrines that appear to conflict with stated principles. However, in national systems, the clash tends to be openly between liberal principles and ‘law and order’ considerations. I argue that ICL discourse often features an additional and interesting dynamic. In ICL, the distortions often result from habits of reasoning that are progressive and appropriate in human rights law and humanitarian law, but which become problematic when transplanted without adequate reflection to a criminal law system. I highlight three kinds of such reasoning: interpretive assumptions, substantive and structural assumptions, and ideological assumptions. These habits of reasoning were more prevalent in the early days of the renaissance of ICL than they are today. It is still valuable to discern and dissect these habits of reasoning, because their legacy continues, because they still recur today, and because they help show the value of attending to reasoning.

English imperial networks in the seventeenth century connected London, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, New England, and North Africa through intersecting commercial, religious, political, and intellectual commitments. These networks were populated by scholars, scientists, and slaves, as well as missionaries, merchants, and ministers. Their connections reveal relationships – between translation and conversion, commerce and religion, and English and Native peoples – that span from Malaysia to Massachusetts. This chapter focuses on the role of companies, violence, and translation in these multilayered global contexts and brings those features to bear on the way we understand American literary and cultural history and the role of puritanism in it.

U.S. Native American literature corresponds in the first instance with the anticolonial literatures of what used to be called the Third World. As such its periodization cannot be made to fit within the periodizations of U.S. American literature, either in terms of centuries or moments (modern/post-modern). More properly, one might begin to think of this literature, if one wants to periodize it at all, in terms of pre-and post-invasion. In this paper, I look at one instance of this correspondence of resistance in Acoma poet Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the Land/ For the Sake of the People and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief. I undertake this project both to reorient our thinking about the global place of U.S. Native American Literature and to think about the way this reorientation effects the hegemony of the current periodization of U.S. American literature.