Chapter 9 looks comparatively within monarchies to assess whether the theory contributes to understanding why some monarchies survived and others were overthrown in the past two centuries. It begins by analyzing two datasets of ruling monarchies from the 1800s to the 1900s, showing that monarchies that shared more power with parliaments were less likely to fall to revolutions. It then uses case studies of the Iranian and Nepali monarchies to illustrate how centralizing monarchs made themselves vulnerable to blame and attracted mass opposition, ultimately leading to their downfalls. The chapter suggests that the theory has implications for understanding historical transitions from monarchy, and it underscores that kings who forego their delegation advantage and monopolize power are also vulnerable to being blamed and facing mass opposition when they govern poorly.

This chapter examines the conditions for revolution, its premises and accelerators, and its unravelling. Between 1959 and 1961, Rwanda made the transition from a Tutsi-dominated monarchy to a Hutu-dominated republic, creating the conditions for the armed return of the Tutsi exiles discussed in Chapter 6.

The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

Part I centers Italy in British heritage discourse, showing how nineteenth-century writers used Italy (especially Pompeii, Rome, and Florence) to redefine their own historical and political identities. Amid political resurgence and ongoing unification efforts, the long tradition in British writing of depicting Italy as culturally and politically dead faltered. In response to the Risorgimento, British writers deployed fractal and syncretism – two temporal forms that afford nonlinear historicisms. Rather than the timelines that locate Italy in a distant past, fractal and syncretism connect past and present. One result is a redefined political liberty that can transcend national, gender, class, and race boundaries, as I explore through forgotten transnational figures including the writer Susan Horner and the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.

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 draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

This chapter argues that instead of being a quiet gap between the noise of the post-Waterloo period and the rise of Chartism, the 1830s has its own under-examined, violently radical character. I concentrate on William Benbow and Francis Macerone, who produced inciting revolutionary works including Grand National Holiday and Defensive Instructions for the People, which pointed to the 1830s being a time of class conflict. During the 1820s, Benbow produced cheap editions of poetry for the working classes. However, Grand National Holiday was designed to promote a general strike that would lead to revolution. Colonel Francis Macerone, a revolutionary ultra-radical, created works that would be banned today, such as Defensive Instructions for the People. This pamphlet shows amateurs how to make pikes, bullets, incendiary devices, and bombs, as well as ways to engage in street-fighting against soldiers. I argue that Benbow and Macerone are central figures in pre-Chartist 1830s radicalism and examine the revolutionary early 1830s through their works published on the eve of the Reform Bill.

This chapter examines the sense of uncertainty fostered by postwar geopolitics. It looks at how the political orientations shaped during the interwar period were dislocated from postwar Italo-Egyptian relations and from emergent Mediterranean constellations. The fall of the fascist government in Rome in 1943 and the creation of the Egyptian republic in 1953 made uncertainty a defining condition of life for Italian residents in Egypt after the war. Their experiences no longer resonated with the political aspirations of the post-fascist state, nor did they align with Egypt’s accelerating movement towards national sovereignty. The material and symbolic exchange of two deposed kings – Vittorio Emanuele III in 1946 and Faruk in 1953 – and the establishment of the Italian and Egyptian Republics paved the way for new industrial and economic ties. Political-economic relations tightened around this kinship of exchange, and the Italian state sought to reinforce Egypt’s military government. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, many Italian residents fell into greater duress, coming to understand departure as their only possible future.

The final chapter investigates the nature of the 1918 transition from Empire to Republic. It opens with the lack of street lighting which persisted in the postwar years and symbolized the slow change from war to peace, and from old regime to democracy. The continuity between the two regimes and the continuation of wartime conditions were both visible in urban space. Prague’s unfinished transformation exacerbated the disappointed expectations of reward for war sacrifices and new life in the republic. Social uncertainty prevailed in the postwar city in an atmosphere of diffuse revolutionary spirit. The discourse of revolution, very present at the time, could refer to either the rupture of 1918 or the changes yet to come. Popular interpretations of revolution at the local level shed new light on 1918 as a turning point in twentieth-century Europe beyond its traditional interpretation as either an aftershock of the Bolshevik revolution or a victory of national self-determination.

This chapter introduces the essay collection Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750 – 1830. It argues that the history of exclusion and forced removal must be put center stage in order to understand the era often described as the cradle of political modernity. The collection argues against a dichotomy between free and unfree mobility, rather regarding them as points on a continuum of varying degrees of coercion. It emphasizes both the circular and multidirectional nature of human mobility across the planet and the counterforces that kept people in place. It draws together hitherto separated scholarship on the mobilities of enslaved individuals, convicts, soldiers and war prisoners, refugees, and displaced Indigenous communities. The result is a set of entangled histories that together break down assumptions about geographies and chronologies, and interrogate the dynamic interplay between systems of forced removal and the individuals who negotiated them.

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.