The domestic British response to the failure of the Niger and Congo expeditions was shaped by the opinions and agendas of various parties. John Barrow worked with the press and the publisher John Murray to produce a narrative that exculpated the government, placing the blame instead on the commanders’ excessive zeal. Groups with commercial or religious interests in Africa cast the setbacks as signs that the continent required colonization by the West, while critics of British involvement in Africa saw the failure of the expeditions as warnings against imperial expansion. The metropolitan scientific community had its own specialized standards for assessing the accomplishments of the two expeditions, and neither measured up to its expectations. If there was broad agreement, then, that the Niger and Congo expeditions failed, they were not heroic failures, unlike Mungo Park’s second expedition. This distinction—and the criteria that informed—determined which explorers lived on in public memory.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

The spy craze that consumed the authorities of the combatant states was based on the belief that certain groups of civilians were privy to secret information that they were eager to pass on to the enemy. This proposition may have been true in regard to a few individuals, but in relation to society as a whole, or even a part thereof, it was nonsense. There is no better proof of this than the enormous hunger for up-to-date information that was felt by the populations of all the warring states. Civilians generally did not possess or provide the enemy with valuable information, yet they themselves often felt confused and were keen, if not desperate, to satisfy their own curiosity. This is evidenced by the extraordinary popularity of the newspapers (so-called war tourism) and all manner of rumours and gossip. Relatively new media – cinema and modern museums – were also harnessed in the service of information and propaganda.

Chapter 5 examines the impact of the Internet and social media on how the speech and press rights discussed in Chapter 1 operate in the context of our modern democracy. New technology has had two primary consequences: to democratize public debate by permitting any and all citizens to reach potentially vast audiences, and to disintermediate public debate by reducing the role of the mainstream media and political leadership as gatekeepers of the flow of information and ideas to citizens. In the early Internet era it was hoped that these developments would revitalize democracy. Instead, their actual impact has been to produce cacophony, political polarization, and a collapse of social consensus regarding even basic facts. The balance of the chapter proposes possible solutions to address these pathologies. Importantly, the chapter does not suggest that a return to elite intermediaries such as media entities is plausible. Instead, it explores ways in which the democratizing potential of the Internet can be harnessed to create new institutions that might be broadly trusted, at least as to factual matters, and so might help ease political polarization.

This chapter explores some of the major strategic questions faced by Callwell as Director of Military Operations, including the German colonies, Salonika and Mesopotamia. It also assesses his views of other important issues with which he was concerned, such as munitions, manpower and the army’s relations with the press. The chapter looks at his time as an ‘odd-job’ man for the War Office (1916-18), during which he was engaged in various interesting (and not unimportant) roles. Finally, it examines his later works, especially his autobiographical and biographical work. Most infamous is his study of Sir Henry Wilson, a highly controversial work.