Through a case study of the ‘speaking machine’ constructed by doctor-poet Erasmus Darwin between 1770 and 1771, this chapter aims to demonstrate that Romantic-era projects on the mechanics of speech were both new and controversial in their potential to undermine the religious, political, and philosophical status quo. It explores how Darwin’s simultaneous investigations of anatomy and machinery are suggestive of a materialist approach to the human, and particularly the speaking, body and how his materialist model of speech production simultaneously allows and is allowed by Darwin’s dual identity as philosopher and physician which informs the interdisciplinarity of his thought and practice. The chapter concludes by making the case that Darwin’s multidisciplinary approach to speech underpins both politicised reactions to his work and his own account of the role that a materialist understanding of speech and the voice can play in the development and improvement of society.

When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

G. K. Chesterton’s debut novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, promotes what he called his ‘antiquated dogmas’ and ‘dead creeds’. Pitting the vendors of Pump Street against the magnates of Kensington and Bayswater, Chesterton sides with local ownership as against capitalism; slowness instead of speed; evolution for revolution; and tradition not modernity. However, in The Napoleon of Notting Hill Chesterton tests and questions all ideas – including his own. The key takeaway from Chesterton’s novel of ideas is not that some ideas are superior to others but that all social and political creeds are bound to be vacuous (and silly) unless they are based on external, communal frames of reference: on higher, unifying ideals that should underpin them.

Some ideas get less attention than others. And as much as intellectuals may want to believe that an idea spreads, and only spreads, if it gets us closer to the truth, that is not the only reason an idea may be taken up and circulated. An intellectual’s class, caste, gender, nationality, physical location, time period and so forth radically affects whether the knowledge they produce will be read, accepted and passed on. Knowledge creation, in modern science and especially economics, is notoriously focused on western European and North American intellectuals. There seems, in other words, to be boundaries that define who can produce knowledge. I have questioned those boundaries throughout this book, to uncover marginalised economists that are seldomly analysed. The first generation of modern of Indian economists is a good example of marginalised thinkers. They worked within an imperial setting and were treated as inferior, while their addressees, mainly British, were considered superior. The Indian economists were thus producing economic knowledge from the margins. As such, the Indian economists often got – and still get – labelled as copiers of existing knowledge from Europe and North America. The imperialist context created a blindness to original Indian thought. Within the history of ideas, and more specifically the history of economics, studies are predominately about well-known figures such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, while lesser-known figures are rarely cited or analysed. Expanding the history of economics, which this book is only one example, provincialises well known economic theories like economic development and provides perspectives often either ignored or critiqued and quickly forgotten. Relocating Development Economics exposes new ideas not previously taken seriously.

The first generation of modern Indian economists in the late nineteenth century became known as the Early Nationalists, as they began India’s fight for independence. When historians and political theorists analyse them, they often portray them as political scientists and nation-builders who mostly regurgitated existing European economic thinking. Much less has been written on their contribution to economics, despite them being the first generation of modern economists in India. This book shows how they produced original, forward-thinking knowledge on economic development. The intention is not to define development a priori, but to use development as an overarching focus to tease out the concepts, theories, models and policy prescriptions that the first generation of modern Indian economists studied and disseminated, and to bring these Indian economists into the global debate around what progress and development mean. This book places these economists into the history of economics and offers economic historians new sources on the Indian economy at the end of the nineteenth century. The book explores their understanding of how India’s economy evolved, their prescriptions for bringing progress back to India, the economic consequences of imperialism, and a global plan for development. By relocating development economics to another time and space, the book uncovers new variations on the idea of development.

What counts as a significant innovation in human history, and what might we identify beyond the topics included in this book? In our concept of progress are we too influenced by the sense of our own era as the culmination of history, and can we avoid a presentist bias?

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

As the UK, and the world, enters another decade of climate-anguished debate, the record of the Conservatives’ policy and actions between 2010 and 2024 is under scrutiny. Dieter Helm analyses the extent to which the natural environment improved, how housebuilding interacted with pressures to protect the environment, the legacy of privatised industries, comparisons to what a Labour government’s actions in office may have been and to what extent a sustainable path to net zero was achieved by the Conservative Party.

This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to an emergent ideology of classicism, which literary historical thinking both reacted to and further strengthened. The first section briefly surveys immanent literary history in poetry from Homer to Aristophanes, typologising tropes which would endure through the ages and suggesting a skeletal metahistory of early literary history. The second and third sections then move forward in time and shift from poetry to prose in order to consider in greater detail two specific work. Glaucus of Rhegium’s On the Archaic Poets and Musicians and the Mouseion of the sophist Alcidamas, early instantiations of, respectively, a macroscopic narrative of progress and a literary biography, prefigure many core characteristics of later ancient literary history. A conclusion returns to the bigger picture to consider the distinctive value of studying ancient literary history on its own terms.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.