From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

The NHS, the great survivor of the post-war consensus, faced a period of considerable uncertainty. This chapter will examine if, and how, the Conservatives have changed the NHS in the face of economic pressures, technological advances, demographic change, changing expectations and the pandemic. Any analysis of the health policy of a government is incomplete without examining the wider state of social care and its relation to healthcare policy.

In 1274, a monk by the name of Primat from the Parisian monastery of Saint-Denis completed his magnum opus, a chronicle in Old French titled the Roman des rois. As its name suggests, this composition dealt with Frankish and French history from the perspective of its kings. It worked its way from the Franks’ earliest origins in ancient Troy, through three royal dynasties, concluding with the reign of the great Capetian monarch, Philip Augustus (d. 1223).

This chapter outlines the secular convergence of Italy’s GDP. From the mid-1890s to 1913, the centuries-long economic decline was reversed. Institution-building and time-consistent policies of monetary stability and reduction of the debt-GDP ratio were among the main causes. The convergence record of the fascist years is mixed. As growth-reducing factors, we highlight “prestige policies” leading to an overvalued currency, and autarky. Postwar reconstruction was swift, followed by a quarter-century catch-up growth and cultural renaissance. The 1970s were turbulent years, marked by terrorism and inflation. Growth however continued to show unexpected resilience. Seeds of future weaknesses were nonetheless sown. Social tensions were eased by deficit-financed benefits. In the 1980s growth continued but the ratio of debt to GDP rose from 50 to almost 100 percent.

In 1995 Italy’s labor productivity was above that of the USA. In the following quarter-century Italian productivity almost stagnated. This long relative decline of an advanced country has no parallel in modern economic history. The slow adaptation to the second globalization and digital technology is ascribed to financial and political uncertainty. The chapter identifies the areas in which adaptation to the new global environment was too slow (education, R&D, reliance on SME, inefficient bureaucracy, and judiciary). We also emphasize social and political weaknesses resulting in the large public debt. Uncertainty held back domestic and foreign investments. A brief window of opportunity in the early 2000s showed Italy’s potential resilience, when economic decline could have been reversed.

During the Renaissance, central–northern Italy was both Europe’s intellectual and artistic hub and its most prosperous economy. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century, the Italian economy drifted from center to periphery, in a long economic decline. During that decline, Italy was fragmented and subject to foreign occupations. Structural divides got deeper and a distance between citizens and public authorities emerged. We summarize the fruits of Italy’s “modern economic growth” since political unification through four periods in Italy’s transition from poverty to abundance: a) 1861–1896 slow growth and divergence from Western Europe’s leading economies, b) secular movement from “periphery” to the “center” of the developed world; 1896–1995 was a century of almost uninterrupted, if uneven, convergence with the world’s richest countries, c) 1995–2007 was a period of losing ground: slow growth and relative decline, d) 2008–2019 from relative to the absolute decline of the Italian economy.

The chapter is devoted to the economic, political, and social crisis of the early 1990s: a shock with long-lasting consequences. The crisis catalyzed the weaknesses of the previous political, social and economic fabric. The economic crisis had several components: a public finance crisis, an exchange rate collapse, and a fall in private investment. But the longer-lasting impact of the crisis came from the corruption scandals leading the judiciary to decapitate the main political parties that had run the country since 1945, as well as most of the industrial powerhouses. At a time when bold decisions were swiftly needed to adjust to the new economic and geopolitical landscape, the early 1990s left a legacy of political fragmentation and financial uncertainty.

The 1980s saw a revival of infrastructure as a theme in American politics. This reflected a decline in federal investment and inspired concerns about decline in the fate of America’s future. Soon after Ronald Reagan took office, politicians and experts took to the stage to make the case for renewed infrastructure investment. In the midst of our perennial debates over fiscal politics, many have looked to the New Deal as a source of inspiration, a reminder of the possibilities that lie in concerted government action in the public good. Infrastructure’s best centrist case as an object of public investment lies in economic growth and development, supplying a foundation or precursor to other activities that are considered valuable, such as innovation, trade, jobs, etc. social liberals will want to broaden the category of infrastructure in ways that fit within their vision of good government as an agent of advance. Fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, may worry that infrastructure is just a “gobbledygook” term for pork barrel, tax-and-spend politics, and a displacement of the private sector by government. The recent debate over President Biden’s infrastructure legislation reflects these dynamics.

This chapter studies the decline and disappearance of the ecumenical synods in late antiquity. As agonistic festivals were the raison d’être of the ecumenical synods, their fate was intertwined with that of the agonistic network. The fourth century ad saw a gradual unravelling of the festival circuit, due to financial problems, socio-political changes in the Greek poleis and changing mentalities and habits. As a result, evidence on the ecumenical synods declines sharply from the late third century on. Important sources discussed here are a tetrarchic rescript on the privileges of competitors, issued in response to a request of the two synods, and a long and complex inscription from ad 313 that was erected in the xystic synod’s headquarters and dealt with a donation by a rich family. This chapter refutes the opinion of some earlier scholars who argue that the synods were absorbed by the circus factions. Rather, it appears that they remained tied to the world of traditional Greek agonistics and that they disbanded when the last of the important Greek agones ceased to be held, that is by the 420s ad at the latest.

Why is the ecological potential of Sharia’not exploited for the protection of our planet today? This chapter reports the analyses of philosophers, economists and historians on the causes of the decline of one of the most important institution of the Sharia': the Waqf. From these analyses it is easy to understand why the environmental Waqf stopped functioning.

The story of the Australian light vehicle industry from the very first developments before World War I, through the era of importing vehicles, the imposition of import controls, the decision to create a fully fledged automotive industry, its growth, decline and end, as it lost control of its domestic market and never achieved sufficient export volumes in compensation. The principal reason for its demise is identified as lack of sufficient scale, compared to the global giants, rather than external factors such as labour costs. The impact of its going on the balance of trade and employment is identified as relatively modest. Some unrealistic proposals for reviving it are dismissed.

Decadence was not a word used by the historians of ancient Rome during classical antiquity, but the concepts, anxieties, and fears encapsulated by it are without question present in their works. Ancient historians such as Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Appian describe an idealized past in order to draw a contrast with an immoral, inferior present. Spurred on by literary accounts from antiquity, Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu, a political theorist, and Edward Gibbon, a historian and Member of Parliament, were particularly interested in studying Rome to learn the symptoms of imperial decline. Thus, this chapter explores the language of decadence in the early histories of the Roman Empire, up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including why later historians such as Niebuhr and Mommsen wished to challenge this language (present from antiquity) and disentwine decadence from Roman imperial history for good.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

In the nineteenth century, the concept of decadence was not solely of aesthetic interest but had a number of scientific applications. Decadence itself is an organic metaphor, extending the natural processes of decline and decay to societies and the arts. Rather than rejecting nature outright, decadent authors readily embraced new scientific theories that changed the way people thought about the natural world. The pessimism of nineteenth-century science stemmed from the brutal world of industrial capitalism in which it was developed. Decadent writers then incorporated both scientific ideas and language into a literary style obsessed with decay and decline. Finally, science returned to decadent literature to pathologize certain modes of artistic expression as yet another sign that certain types of individuals were ‘degenerate’. Three key scientific theories of the nineteenth century underpin the decadent fixation on decline, decay, and degeneration: uniformitarianism, evolution, and the conservation of energy. All three theories identify impermanence in natural structures previously believed to be permanent and stable.

“Most empirical studies on trust examine the influence of certain variables (such as age, sex, education, or ethnicity) on trust at a specific moment in a specific segment of the population. However, only data collected from a representative sample of the general population over an extended period (longitudinal data) can reasonably tell us whether overall trust has declined or not. In this chapter, the authors present the two best longitudinal studies. Both come from opinion poll institutions: one from the United States (Harris Poll®), the other from the United Kingdom (Ipsos MORI®). The results of both studies are analysed and presented in graphic form. This involves a short critical analysis as to how the seeming differences between the studies are, in effect, due to methodological differences and disappear once these differences are taken into account. Although the data are fairly limited, there is still sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that trust (albeit a folk understanding of what trust is) in physicians has declined across Western countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, since the 1960s.