The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

Riffing on the narcissism of male grooming, Devin Garofalo discusses the Romantic impulse to “manscape” – that is, to “read… a culturally specific conception of the human into the landscape such that it is invisibilized as the world’s structuring principle.” This culturally specific conception of the human, she clarifies, building on the pathbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter, is that of man as a bourgeois colonialist, a tamer, and a conqueror. He is Hannibal and Napoleon and the Wordsworthian poet all in one. The Romantic nature poem that is the hallmark of early nineteenth–century poetry, then, recruits the ecological imagination as it consolidates and eradicates all threats to whiteness.

Isaiah is resistance literature: The authors of this book knew the claims of different empires, and argued against them. Much of the first thirty-nine chapters of the book were written in the Assyrian period, when the Assyrian empire tried to force the elites of other Near Eastern kingdoms to accept the legitimacy of Assyrian domination. In a carefully-formulated program of subversive reading, passages in Isa 1–39 react against Assyrian claims of empire, arguing that Yhwh, rather than the king of Assyria, is the universal sovereign. “Isaiah and Empire” by Shawn Zelig Aster shows how passages in Isa 2, 10, and 37 react against Assyrian claims of empire. But just as these chapters react against Assyrian claims, so do Isa 40–45 react against the later imperial propaganda of Cyrus. These chapters claim that Yhwh, rather than the Babylonian god Marduk, sent Cyrus, and argue that Cyrus was sent to benefit Jerusalem, rather than Babylon.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

Part III centers on eastern Mediterranean places loosely designated as the “Holy Land” in British heritage discourse. Sites in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria were especially important within Christianity, generating new biblical historicisms in the face of geological deep time and a booming tourism industry. However, the same cultural heritage that underwrote British imperialism and articulated a mission to modernize the “East” maintained that some historically significant places should be preserved. This tension is central to the temporal forms of ruin and profanation, which I define in Part III. The desire to claim Eastern sites as the origin of Western culture conflicted with the simultaneous desire to distance current populations there as “Other.” Laying claim to the history of a place like Palmyra, an ancient Roman city in Syria still popular with Western observers, both complicated and facilitated the relationship with present life there.

Considering the sources and material evidence available from Rome, this chapter focuses on the evidence of women’s associations with these soldiers of the different units stationed in the capital. These women were often labeled as “wives” in written documentation. By analyzing the available evidence, predominantly on funerary monuments, the authors expand the discussion of the social expectations and realities of women associated with the military in the context of the Empire’s center. The evidence gives us a rich image of an aspect of society that has not yet been explored, while at the same time providing a new perspective on the life of Roman soldiers. The origin of the women and their social background is treated as a relevant factor for their integration in the military community and – as inhabitants of Rome – in the community of the city. In this context it is interesting to consider the origin of personal relationships. In some cases, it seems that women accompanied soldiers to Rome from a provincial location and other cases suggest the relationship began in the capital itself.

Scholars generally assume that Procopius, the noted sixth century classicizing historian, was a misogynist who in his notorious Secret History belittled the impact Theodora and Antonina had on the Empire’s fortunes. In that work and his Wars, Procopius highlights the plight of women in the warfare of the reign of Justinian. How, then, are we to reconcile the seeming hatred of, for example, Antonina in the Secret History with the apparent empathy of the suffering inhabitants of Italy in the Wars? In this chapter the author explores the role of women in the military of the age of Justinian at both the top (amongst the officer class – Antonina) and the bottom (amongst the civilians and the rank-and-file) ends, through the gaze of Procopius, and in the process establish the female component of what is generally assumed to have been a wholly male space. Comparative evidence is abundant and includes such materials as the Code of Justinian; other sixth century texts such as those of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Agathias, and Corippus; the papyri of Nessana (which detail the relationship between soldiers and civilians in late sixth century Israel/Palestine); and the material remains of Roman fortresses such as el-Lejjun.

A substantial collection of sources indicates that women constituted a considerable part of the travelers in the first centuries of the Roman Empire, a period in which traveling became increasingly popular with various social classes. These travelers have left traces of their experiences en route in personal letters on papyri and ostraca, in graffiti and on votive inscriptions. Classical scholarship has long ignored these sources, even though they offer us a unique insight into female experiences and self-representation. Recent excavations on and near the trade routes in the Eastern and Western Desert of Egypt, along which units of the Roman army were positioned in military outposts, protecting and controlling the area, have uncovered letters in which women – most of them of lower rank – discussed their concerns about traveling from and to the military camps of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. When combined with other sources such as papyri and graffiti, these documents give insight into the mobility of the female relatives of soldiers in Roman Egypt. They tell us something about the reasons why they decided to undertake journeys, the distance they covered (some while being heavily pregnant), where they stayed, and the dangers they encountered during the trip.

This chapter argues that a significant number of central figures shown on stelae were not the dedicants of the stelae, but instead used visual markers that identified them as children. In the first century BCE, children were most often aged and gendered in depictions by their nudity. At sites of the second and third centuries CE, by contrast, the images of children shared iconographies and conceptualizations of their subjects with funerary monuments for children from across the empire. In particular, togas, scrolls, pets, and hairstyles, as well as showing the figures older than they were, reflects how child offerings were being reconceived as social persons and subjects of empire.

Liberalism is at the heart of modern ‘Western’ history, politics, and international relations. Central to understandings of liberty, freedom, democracy, rights and the rule of law, liberalism has animated debates on abolition and empire, war and peace. This chapter provides an account of liberalism as a contested phenomena that originated at least in the eighteenth century and has had profound international political consequences ever since. To tell this story, the chapter begins by considering how to make sense of the contestations surrounding liberalism, before examining how and why liberalism matters to International Relations at key moments of its development as a discipline: in the age of empires, the inter-war years, during the Cold War and ‘new’ world which ensued, and now in this epoch of endless war.

This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, Critical Theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first part touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism, Marx’s notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx’s ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of Critical Theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

This chapter shows the essay’s troubled evolution as an academic genre in the nineteenth century, from the norms of classical rhetoric taught in English schools to the professionalising educational practices of Scottish universities and their American counterparts. Aimed to introduce meritocracy to Oxford and Cambridge’s class preferment system, the rise of essay-based public examinations in the 1850s reshaped the academic essay to sustain an informational mastery of the complexities of British imperial rule. Professors of English reacted to the new public-exam essay regime with one of two tactics. One was to strip the essay down to a managerial model that came to be known as the five-paragraph essay, shorn of classical figurality and stressing correct usage. Meanwhile, advocates of liberal education revived the teaching of the literary essay based on Victorian models, setting up a lengthy dispute in the twentieth century between literary and social-scientific protocols of essay writing.

This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.

This chapter explores the superimposition of Roman law and order on provincial and municipal politics.