It is well known that Virgil’s reference to the ‘woods of Molorcus’ in the prooemium of Georgics 3, echoing Callimachus’ poem staging this otherwise unknown figure in his Victoria Berenices, enables the Roman poet to signpost his reappropriation of the Alexandrian epinicion within the loaded context of the celebration of Octavian’s victory over Egypt. In line with this interpretation, this chapter focuses more closely on Molorcus himself and his (devastated) land as a significant theme in its own right. By alluding to the story of this impoverished farmer unable to perform his ‘georgic’ tasks in a poem centred on the countryman’s labour, Virgil retroactively constructs his Callimachean model as a failure to live according to the main precepts of his didactic poem, thus making the land of Molorcus appear as an anti-type of Octavian’s idealised rural Italy. Moreover, this failure is connected to the havoc created by a ‘terrible lion’ whose slaying by Heracles readily offers an image of the princeps’ victory over his foes, thus making the poor farmer’s land a contrasting prefiguration of the hoped-for Augustan space.

Heralded as the decade that launched the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, the 1860s saw the growth of fairy tales, fantasy, and imperial romance, and concerns about education and empire. The 1860s major children’s fantasy works, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market[GK2] [GK3](1862), Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies [GK4](1863), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [GK5](1865), share striking similarities. The trope of unstable ground in these texts offers insight into the anxieties of the era with implications for education and imperial stewardship. The unearthing of fossils along with debates over Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species[GK6] (1859) created unease about the unknown and disrupted established knowledge about the timeline for creation. Carroll’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s texts reveal uncertainties of science (especially the newly articulated domains of geology, paleontology, archeology, and geography), the inadequacies of education, and the legacy of empire. In their hands, unstable ground is not only a plot device and a metaphor, but a warning.

The second chapter touches more firmly on the philosophical debate and the arguments for human exceptionalism put forward over its course. The chapter puts Xanthus (the prophetic horse from Homer’s Iliad) as the first and prototypical speaking animal in the Western tradition in conversation with other famous speaking animals, including Plutarch’s speaking pig Grunter (Gryllus), a speaking rooster who claims to be a re-incarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras, and Kafka’s Red Peter. The chapter shows that the figure of the speaking animal is central to Western conceptions of the human. In classical antiquity, it features in stories that confirm the vertical relationship between humans (at the top) and animals (below). And yet, at the same time, right from the start of the conversation in the ancient world, the apparent anthropomorphism of the speaking animal was also used to critique the very idea of human exceptionalism. There is a direct line between how some modern animal fables point to man’s animal nature and the concept of the human explored in parts of the ancient evidence.

Chapter 3 considers the underlying narrative structures of Corippus’ epic and how the poet positions the campaigns of John Troglita in their wider context. The Iohannis surveys the events of circa 530–46 in a series of analeptic ‘flashbacks’. As a succinct verse history of North Africa between the late 520s and 546, these surveys differ wildly from contemporary imperial propaganda. This chapter argues that these accounts must be considered as meaningful responses to the recent past within Byzantine Africa and as functional parts of the Iohannis. It is argued that Corippus’ presentation of these counter-narratives created a space for the interrogation of a complex past which would otherwise have been unavailable to him.

The second part of the chapter looks at the prolepses in the Iohannis, where Corippus’ narrative moves from the narrated time of John’s campaigns to their anticipated resolution and the composition of the epic itself. This teleology is not only explored through many direct references to the coming Roman triumph, but also to the counterfactual ‘futures’ anticipated by the Moors. Corippus’ resolution of these accounts through authorial interjections help to underscore the inevitability of imperial victory while emphasizing the sense of crisis within the historical narrative.

This chapter explores the emperor as a temporal figure who inhabits time as a person and a symbol that gives time its shape. Different forms of temporal thinking are included here, such as describing the age of an emperor as golden and its concomitant images, using the emperor as a way to mark time, and the Roman concern with oblivion and being remembered in the future. This chapter also wrestles with the emperor as a focus of cult and devotion for the present safety and prosperity of the empire, how biography and history encounter the emperor as a figure for historical study, and how emperors can be resurrected to haunt current rulers and question their legitimacy.

This essay reads the Roman de la Rose as taking up Ovid’s playful association of sex with the origins of human society. Jean de Meun’s Rose returns repeatedly to the narration of political origins – the fall from a Golden Age – imagining an idyllic communal past before it was shattered by conflict over wealth and women. These stories frame erotic desire as inevitably linked to the law and to possession, associating eros with desire for private property. I argue that Aristotle’s Politics functions as an unacknowledged literal referent that troubles the poem’s allegorical treatment of justice and social origins. Whereas Golden Age fables typically speak in unmarked terms about human comity and common possessions, Aristotle and medieval Aristotelian commentaries speak in terms of gendered power dynamics, masculine ownership and the fate of women as property. The Rose reveals the literal truths of scholastic philosophy to be in conflict with mythic truth, while anatomising the necessarily gendered dynamics of human sociality. In a political sphere in which women are considered in the same category as property, the heterosexual desire for possession will always be political. The Rose also leads us to consider whether the political, in turn, is always erotic.

During the ‘Disaster Year’ (Rampjaar) of 1672, the French, the English, and their allies attacked and nearly toppled the Dutch Republic. To many observers and later historians, the Rampjaar signaled the end of the Golden Age. This chapter introduces the Dutch Republic and proposes several ways that an environmental history of disasters enriches our understanding of the development and meaning of decline. It explores these interventions through a deep reading of the print ‘Miserable Cries of the Sorrowful Netherlands’ (Ellenden Klacht Van het Bedroefde Nederlandt). This image visually merges the political and military disasters of 1672 with the floods and windstorms that followed. It condenses time, works across scale, and frames the collective environmental, cultural, social, and economic consequences of the Rampjaar as a breach with the past. Ellenden Klacht reads like a founding document of the Dutch decline narrative, but it also contains visual clues that point to alternative interpretations. It argues that disasters, especially natural disasters, were traumatic and they challenged the moral, economic, and political standing of the Dutch Republic. At the same time, disasters could yield opportunities for adaptation, recovery, and growth.

The Netherlands emerged from the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) a weakened state, and anxieties about the decline of Republic expanded as a result. That same year, an outbreak of cattle plague emerged in the Republic. Originating in the eastern European steppes, this panzootic spread slowly across Europe following networks of war and trade. Centuries of landscape transformation in the Netherlands set the stage for this disaster, and weather associated with a changing climate conditioned its severity. The disease killed hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Republic, impacting Dutch urban and rural livelihoods. Between 1713 and 1720, state authorities, moralists, and farmers struggled to understand and manage the disease. This chapter investigates the social and environmental origins of cattle plague, as well as cultural and state response. State authorities based their strategies in environmentalist and contagionist theories of diseases transmission that varied across scale. Its impacts were far from uniform, but moralists framed cattle plague as a problem that affected the entire country, which reinforced narratives of Dutch decline. This chapter argues that causal stories explaining the origins and meaning of the disease both reinforced pessimistic decline narratives and prompted a universalist approach to medical responses.

This chapter sets out how Elizabeth I’s extraordinary Poor Laws brought into being the world’s first collectivist-individualist society, a unique English political and moral achievement that mandated community support for orphans, widows, the infirm and sick, the old, the involuntary unemployed and single mothers and their children. It will show how this nurturing welfare system protected England from the scourge of famine – that other devastator of populations after plague – such that the English were free of large-scale famine more than 150 years earlier than the rest of Europe. It also helped power England’s exceptional economic growth, supporting a mobile workforce to develop secure in the knowledge that they would be supported if times were hard.

It details how these Poor Law provisions were misguidedly overturned in 1834 by the new, more exclusively individualist economics and utilitarianism of the nineteenth century before returning, over a century later, with the founding of the post-war Beveridge welfare state. This saw a collectivist-individualist balance restored in full all across society, a Golden Age of growth with a comprehensive welfare system funded by progressive taxation and leaders of enterprise incentivised to consider long-term returns alongside the welfare of their workforces and communities.

Despite this book’s focus on the period after decolonization, one must not think that Africa’s history started with the appearance of the colonial powers or their formal withdrawal. Hence, this chapter pays attention to the pre-colonial era, highlighting the rich culture and organization of African societies at that time. When exploring the colonization and the colonial rule, the chapter pays attention to collaboration with, resistance against, and avoidance of the colonial powers by African actors.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

The end of the war released a pent-up demand for goods and services that had long been unavailable, while the task converting a war economy back to peace conditions called for continuing restraint. In asking voters for patience during the 1946 election, Ben Chifley assured them of the benefits that would flow. ‘Australia was entering a golden age’, he said. With so many chafing at the shortage of housing and household goods, the opposition derided the prime minister’s claim, but he was vindicated. The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century. The population almost doubled, the economy grew threefold. There were jobs for all who wanted them. People lived longer and better. They expended less effort to earn a living, had more money for discretionary expenditure, greater choice and increased leisure.

In 1974 the Norwegian physicist and co-author of Limits to Growth (1972) coined the phrase “a sustainable society.” It was meant to capture his vision for a viable environmental future, while also open a new endless frontier for science with the larger goal of mobilizing Christian religion and respect for the almighty. It was an ecumenical hope in the coming of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God that framed early understandings of environmental sustainability. In Norway, Randers directed the Resource Policy Group, an influential think tank that provided policy papers to the Labor Party and beyond. The notion of a “sustainable development” was adapted from them by the Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development leading up to the Our Common Future report from 1987.

This chapter focuses on growth transition from the “Golden Age” (from 1950 to the early 1970s) of rapid growth, lower wealth inequality, and the absence of international financial crises during the stagflation in the 1970s (inflation, monetary instability, stagnation) and then to the neoliberal era (with volatile growth and frequent crises) in the core economies of North America and western Europe. The chapter identifies both economic and political economy factors surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s, in the context of challenges to US hegemony, and postauthoritarian transition in southern Europe. The chapter examines the frequency and intensity of recessive episodes and their impact on per capita GDP and investment from 1970 to 2015, affecting both core advanced countries and the European periphery.