Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

Chapter 2 critically approaches Skinner’s historical oeuvre and its problematic connection with his own theoretical perspective. It begins by analyzing his major work, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, and his perspective regarding the origins of the modern concept of State. In it, we can observe the tension between his theory and the teleological perspective underlying that project. This problem indeed became more noticeable in his recent works addressed to trace the remote roots of “classical republicanism,” as associated to a “third idea of liberty”: the concept of “liberty as non-domination.” It then continues by analyzing the differences between Skinner’s and Pocock’s views of classical republicanism, and its connection with their different definitions of political languages. Lastly, we observe here how the normative temptation that fuels both Skinner’s and Pocock’s proposals of recovering classical republicanism entails an instrumental use of intellectual history aimed at making it play into the present, which inevitably leads to relapse into conceptual anachronisms.

The Epilogue takes the story into the late 2000s, as another major economic crisis hit hard. It considers the cultural memory of how the 1930s touched Britain and other parts of the world. By the early twenty-first century, memories of the inter-war past had largely evaporated from popular party politics, but they retained a force in cementing both the self-identity and the entitlements of those people born in the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter elaborates on the general approach pursued in this volume to identify institutional weaknesses that may be preventing growth in Bangladesh from being faster and more inclusive today and that may cause it to slow down in the future. It also provides a brief overview of the political history of the country, without which it is difficult to understand its development achievement, as well as the present political economy context. Finally, in the light of that historical sketch, some reflections are offered on the specificity of the institutional link between business and politics in Bangladesh, a link that very much frames its development and that are often referred to throughout this volume.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental health illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

In the last thirty years, the historiography of Spanish-American independence has emphasized the paradoxical centrality of the Spanish revolutionary process, with the key role of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the general economy of emancipation. It also emphasized the role of Saint-Domingue/Haiti as a factor of regional destabilization. As a consequence of these revisions, the French Revolution is no longer considered as the intellectual and political source of these movements. Nevertheless, they allow us to rethink the Franco-Hispanic relationship, and beyond that, the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, by reformulating two classic issues. The first is the re-evaluation of the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions in Spanish America. The second is concerned with the forms of their appropriation by the actors of independence.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

This introductory chapter offers a synthetic approach to the current state of the field of study about Latin American independence and outlines the Companion’s contributions to that field. It does so by presenting a historical narrative of the process of independence to frame the Companion’s chapters and their specific thematic approaches to the intellectual, social, political, and economic changes brought about by the independence of Brazil and Spanish American in the nineteenth century.

The civilian gas mask made total war seem normal. As an object that could remind wearers of an existential threat to their lives and families and livelihoods while being carried on the body, the gas mask could encapsulate both the warfare state and the welfare state of the twentieth century. A government that freely distributed civilian gas masks made it acceptable to factor its noncombatant population fully into the waging of modern war.

In the middle of the 1930s, Britain released its first formal statement about air raid precautions (civil defense) and acknowledged that it could offer no guarantee of immunity for civilians in a future war that might involve both air power and chemical weapons. At the start of the decade, Britain had begun to create civil defense for chemical warfare by cultivating first aid for civilians facing chemical arms and continuing to test both chemical weapons and anti-gas protection. It had not yet decided whether to provide gas masks to its entire civilian population. The official release of civil defense measures in 1935 led to vocal opposition from a variety of groups including feminists, socialists, scientists, and religious pacifists like Quakers. Then, the return of the use of chemical weapons in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 dramatically altered the public conversation about the use of such weapons and the devices to protect against them. The return of aerial bombardment to Europe with the Spanish Civil War alongside the use of chemical arms served as a catalyst for developing anti-gas protection as a key component of civil defense preparations for the war to come.

All states are riven by political histories of the exclusion and oppression of so-called “minorities” and “aliens”. The uniqueness of settler states is in terms of degree. While all states deal with conflicts arising from issues of membership, within settler states the entirety of their claim to territory rests on the legal exclusion and/or diminishment of Indigenous peoples. This difference of degree is particularly important to the future of democracy, as settler states face a strongly amplified version of the problem of membership. As a result of this unique pressure on the question of membership, settler states have developed extensive and complicated legal and political structures. Political histories of membership in settler states can provide us with concrete examples of situations where the presuppositions of membership in nation-states are exposed and contradicted by the demands of factual situations.