Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

Part III discusses the striking triangular relationship between humanitarianism, interventionism, and colonialism and imperialism in various parts of the world. It asks to what extent the idea of humanitarian intervention solidified in international politics as a colonial and imperial practice. Indeed, Chapter 7 will show how closely the struggle against the slave trade was intertwined with the colonial and imperial penetration of Africa. In West Africa British anti-slavery measures, which for strategic reasons increasingly shifted from seaborne military operations to dry land, led to direct interference in the internal affairs of African principalities. A particularly prominent case was Lagos, which ended up being formally annexed by the United Kingdom. From the middle of the century onwards, the by now tried and tested intervention measures came to serve as an example for the suppression of the slave trade in East Africa, increasingly turning the idea of abolition into a decisive catalyst and trailblazer for European expansionism across the African continent. At two international conferences – first in Berlin (1884–85) and then in Brussels (1889–90) – the ‘civilised’ states signed treaties by which they gave themselves a mandate in international law and thereby an effective carte blanche for direct intervention, in the name of civilisation, in the internal affairs of African realms.

Chapter 3 looks at what the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia meant to soldiers. In the early stages of the campaigns, many soldiers were fed up at being ‘exiled’ from the Western Front and embarrassed not to be fighting Germans. So far from the Western Front, they had to find a different meaning for their campaigns. Some soldiers found a personal meaning in the greater likelihood that they would survive the war, while others, mostly pre-war regular soldiers, were concerned about career mobility. Strategic and moral meanings were also found. In diaries and letters home, soldiers argued that they were contributing to the global war effort and the defeat of the Central Powers. Others argued that they were liberating Arabs and Jews from Ottoman misrule and bringing the benefits of liberal imperialism to the supposedly backward peoples of the Middle East and the Greeks. In both this chapter and in Chapter 5, it is impossible not to see in the writings of soldiers and ex-servicemen an argument for Britain’s imperial project – that, to them, the war and the aims of British liberal imperialism were compatible and mutually reinforced each other.

The concluding chapter summarises the main arguments of the study. In particular the conclusions explore the following aspect of piracy and colonisation in Southeast Asia: (1) the cross-cultural aspects of different aspects of piracy and its suppression; (2) the association, in the eyes of contemporary European observers, between piracy and racial or religious characteristics, particularly with regard to the coastal Malays and their adherence to Islam; (3) the historical and cultural explanations to piracy, including the indirect stimulus that the European expansion provided for maritime raiding; (4) the reasons for the different modus operandi for suppressing piracy by the five colonial powers, including the varying levels and types of violence deployed; (5) the securitisation of piracy and its usefulness for justifying colonial expansion; (6) the anti-imperial critique of attempts to securitise piracy; (7) the relation between piracy, its suppression and sovereignty; and (8) the association between the suppression of piracy and the civilising mission.