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.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

Romantic writing in English developed a rich repertoire of variations on the classical distinction between undertaking and undergoing an action, one that descends to us, for example, in the grammatical distinction between the active and passive voice. Shelley’s central writings often foreground this kind of distinction, as when in Act I of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus tells Jupiter: “I weigh not what you do but what you suffer.” Yet, in Shelley’s case, suffering is more particularly identified with the experience of pain and sorrow, and nowhere more clearly so than in Prometheus Unbound, where the Titan is repeatedly defined by his suffering, and his suffering is repeatedly cast as his capacity not only to confront the pain and sorrow of the world but also to bear them. Such radical passivity would become crucial to Shelley’s proto-Gandhian doctrine of revolutionary nonviolence, as spelled out in his Philosophical View of Reform, written in the wake of Peterloo just weeks after the completion of Prometheus Unbound. This doctrine, which Gandhi would have encountered in his London days from Henry Salt, would be eventually embraced, mutatis mutandis, by Christian leaders of the American civil rights movement who would have been otherwise unsympathetic to Shelley’s atheism, and in nonviolent movements around the world ever since.

The complex relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been much caricatured. Liszt is usually perceived as long-suffering, patient, and generous in his support, while Wagner appears self-serving and ruthless. This chapter unravels how their relationship was shaped by contemporary economic, political, and, artistic forces. In doing so, it observes the contrasting ways Liszt and Wagner attempted to reconcile revolutionary republican sympathies with their desire for royal patronage. It examines the advice and practical support Liszt provided Wagner through his position as Kapellmeister at the Weimar Court Theatre, Liszt’s ambitions to position his relationship with Wagner as equivalent to Goethe and Schiller within a new artistic ‘golden age’ in Weimar, and their differing responses to contemporary aesthetic debates. It highlights similarities and differences in their ideas about the future of music, the relationship between music and drama and its implications for musical form, and their compositional approaches.

Percy Shelley has been a young man’s poet. Ever since Matthew Arnold dubbed his predecessor a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” poets and critics would pit Shelley’s youthful radicalism against their own grown-up poetics and politics. T. S. Eliot would, for example, rhapsodize about his teenage years misspent idolizing the Romantic poet just to articulate his newfound modernism. Two hundred years later, we might amend the cliché to say that Percy Shelley is a young woman’s poet. His is the social media–savvy voice of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dreaming of a Green New Deal and the systematic dismantling of institutional inequities; Arnold’s the establishment voice of Nancy Pelosi, chastising the beat of ineffectual wings. Because of this generational reading of Shelley, his last unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, frequently sounds like a pessimistic turn from Promethean idealism toward Byronic cynicism, like youthful radicalism disappointed by unfulfilled promises. This chapter argues instead that the poem’s embodied contingencies of age, debility, and disability shape rather than frustrate Shelley’s developing idealism.