The introduction outlines the volume’s main impetus: to encourage historians, global and not, to reflect on ‘their daily task’, as Marc Bloch put it – on their methods, craftsmanship, and conceptual basics. It is an invitation to rethink the field’s forms of inquiry and argumentation and the tacit assumptions underlying its practice, at a time when the ground under global historians’ feet – with globalisation in crisis – is moving fast.

Global history and other relational approaches to history, the introduction holds, have methodological implications and require theoretical reflection: because many of the classic analytical instruments commonly employed by historians require some reduction of complexity – to explain, to periodise, or to compare – a task naturally more difficult when scholars deal with an unusual abundance of factors; because the field’s assault on Eurocentrism requires reflection on the matter of perspective and authorial vantage point; or, indeed, because of the field’s inherent teleology, with its understanding of history inseparable from the telos of continuously increasing global integration.

William Morris anticipated a number of our present concerns about the economy, the environment, and labour; defended the value of handmade, quality products against the growing proliferation of cheap, factory-made products; envisioned a peaceful, communal society that would value beauty, practise useful and stimulating work, and achieve equality of condition; and believed in the possibility of creating a better world by rejecting corrupt institutions and ideologies. Many of the most critical challenges we now face – accelerating climate change, social and economic inequity, political division, the ever-widening reach of the market into our lives – are outgrowths of nineteenth-century issues. This essay explores the way in which both Morris’s aesthetic principles and his progressive social initiatives continue to resonate. Today, as civility, social justice, and ecological integrity erode under the pressure of divisive politics, short-sighted policy, war, nationalism, pandemic, and social unrest, Morris’s ideas and practice are especially suggestive, both about where we might go and where we have gone wrong.

Serving as the editorial introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William Morris, this chapter offers a broad outline of Morris’s life, emphasizing the historical and cultural factors that informed his artistic philosophy and wide-ranging output. The contours of Morris’s critical reception, past and present, are also sketched, and brought into dialogue with the chapters collected here. The first part of the discussion considers ‘The Making of Morris’: that is, the complex nexus of influences and events that enabled him to make a distinctive and enduring contribution in so many fields. Much of this discussion is biographical, but it also considers spatial and geographical ways of understanding the shape of his life. The second part is entitled ‘Morris Making Us’,. It proposes ways in which Morris’s influence continues to condition and enable our ways of thinking as inheritors of his legacy.

As an undergraduate Morris was enthralled to read the work of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This book would profoundly influence Morris’s thinking for the rest of his life. The Kelmscott Press would publish a chapter from it – ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – in 1892. Morris developed Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic craftsman of the Middle Ages achieved pleasure in his work as a result of creative freedom and collaborative effort denied him by the factory system of industrial capitalism. Although Ruskin’s values were deeply rooted in Toryism and Christian morality, Morris accommodated Ruskin’s ideas and simultaneously embraced socialism. In 1883, Morris told an audience in the hall of University College, Oxford that he was ‘a member of a socialist propaganda’. Ruskin, seated on the platform throughout the lecture, reportedly rose at the end to praise Morris as ‘the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend’. This chapter describes the nature of the relationship between Morris and Ruskin and considers the significance, extent and limitations of his influence.

The closing act of the story concerns the drafting of the final judgment. The final task of judicial bureaucrats is to stitch together the fragmentary instructions received from the judges to create coherent and persuasive texts. Like weaving, the drafting process is all but smooth. Every time the warp meets the weft, loose threads come out which must be ironed out. Likewise, every new paragraph added to the text of a judgment reveals logical leaps, internal inconsistencies, and gaps in the reasoning that must be papered over for the decision to wield its prescriptive and symbolic authority. Despite these difficulties, the final decision – the magical artefact that makes the pride of our lot – is somehow churned out on time. Its seamless fabric, now up for scrutiny by journalists, practitioners, and scholars, carefully conceals the infinite series of choices, confrontations, and hesitations that marked every turn of the proceedings.

Among the foundational projects in the study of childhood and culture is the “Six Cultures” survey from the late 1960s. Observational data were collected to map children’s daily activity in six village/small town settings around the world. Only in the single US middle-class community of “Orchard Town” were children not routinely engaged in chores (Whiting and Whiting 1975: 84). Nowhere are the gerontocracy and neontocracy perspectives further apart than on the issue of work.2 Indeed, “the dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity” (Nieuwenhuys 1996: 237). While we hamstring our children to keep them from working, fearing their loss of innocence and studiousness, the norm elsewhere is to open the pathway to adulthood.

In the Gorgias, Socrates famously declares that he is alone among contemporary Athenians in taking up the “true craft of politics.” But the claim is extremely puzzling, since Socrates also claims to be ignorant and lacking in any significant wisdom of any kind. Crafts, for Socrates, involve cognitive achievement. But Socrates declares that he has accomplished little of such achievement. Shows how the model of craft-knowledge can resolve this paradox by allowing Socrates to regard taking up the craft of politics as an attempt to improve his ability in achieving the goals of that craft: benefiting others. Shows how Plato’s early dialogues give abundant evidence of Socrates’ activities in both of what he characterizes as the branches of politics: legislation and correction.