In recent years, empire, identity, and performance have emerged as key words in a new kind of historical and critical practice; “global” may soon be added to the list. Galvanized by the political and imaginative wakes of postcolonialism and the anxieties produced by contemporary globalization, scholars have sought to renarrativize the past, recognizing alternative modes and sources for understanding divergent histories and probing the limits of historical, geographical, and nation-based forms of knowledge. In British studies, much of this exciting work has been influenced by the simultaneous “rediscovery” of the importance of empire to British culture and the reworking of the methodologies of social and cultural history and criticism to address questions about identity and difference in global settings. Concepts of performance—as theatrical event, ethnographic encounter, and citational social practice—have emerged as central to these investigations, for their ability to capture the mobility and evanescence of historical interactions while also providing keen insight into how categories of difference and belonging—from class, gender, and “race” to enslaved and “free”—are established, naturalized, and challenged.Footnote 1 Our ideas about identity itself have benefited enormously from this infusion from anthropology, theater, and philosophy into historical and critical writing, in that identity is seen less as a “thing” than a historical relation whose very existence depends on temporally specific ideas about the self and its social location. Hence what is in many ways foundational to Western modernity—the “I” as an individual endowed with certain political, social, and cultural rights and attributes—has been relocated not within national histories but within wider, transnational political, economic, cultural, and imperial developments.

Yet important questions remain about the meaning and uses of ideas about performance and identity in imperial and global settings, as they do about the relationship between historical empires and the genealogies of globalization. How do concepts of performance enhance our understanding of the distinctive nature of a particular period's social relations? What impact did an era's own ideas about identity or social location have on its notions of self and collectivity? Conversely, does imperial history, whether new or old, exhaust the range (geographical or topical) of approaches to cross-cultural encounter and subaltern knowledges? Each of the books under review helps provide provisional answers to these questions, for each substantiates, in very different ways, the historical mutations of empire and nationness, the global dimensions of philosophical problems of identity and performance, and the impact of both on contemporary conceptualizations of difference.

Ania Loomba's illuminating study provides an appropriate starting point for this discussion. It should, very simply, be required reading for all scholars who wish to understand the genealogies and chronologies of English conceptualizations of difference and national identity. Her lucid analysis of the vocabularies of “race” in Shakespearean texts and performances may force us to reevaluate easy periodization, not because she has discovered modern notions of “race” in the Renaissance, but rather because she demonstrates that “race” was always and already primarily a cultural rather than physical distinction, made and unmade in historical relations and manipulated in the pursuit of power. To put it another way, cultural essentialism was alive and well in the early modern period, and its various forms did the ideological work that “race” would do later. In this respect, Loomba's position stands in marked contrast to that of, for example, Colin Kidd, who argues that religious belief and the theological basis of intellectual discourse in the early modern period prevented “modern” (i.e., physically based) racialist ideas from gaining ground, or Joyce Chaplin, who sees “race” as a product solely of Atlantic world slaveries.Footnote 2 Loomba moves the grounds of these debates by locating ideas about difference in cultural discourses and practices and in Old and well as New World imaginaries, where “religion” itself was the marker for differences in color and culture, and the features of religious difference were seen as fixed or even innate. In a wide-ranging discussion that considers Shakespeare's oeuvre alongside his contemporaries’ plays, romances, and travelogues, she demonstrates that associations of Islam and blackness were “spectacularly and intricately connected in medieval as well as early modern writings” (p. 20). This association challenged religious concepts of community, provoked sharp debates about religious faith and blackness as internal essences, and shaped English conceptions of a range of strangers, including Jews. On the other hand, the ability of outsiders to transform themselves into insiders by marriage, political allegiance, or faith—Othello, Shylock, and Portia being prime examples—suggested that the outsider was never safely without, but always poised for the infiltration of the boundaries of national and religious belonging.

Loomba tracks these insights through specific works—Titus Andronicus, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. In Titus, the figures of Tamora, queen of the Goths, and Aaron, her black lover and servant, are used to embody multiply determined notions of depraved and voracious femininity (Amazons to witches) and servile blackness (perfidious Jews, irreligious Moors). Class, culture, and geography combine to deform the inner character as well as the outward appearance. Such characters reveal that it may be unhelpful to insist that religion and “race” were necessarily antithetical. They also suggest that not only in the representation but in the performance of these differences new configurations of older ideas about difference are formed, performed, circulated, and reproduced in ways that shaped the historical moment and had lasting effects.

Anthony and Cleopatra provides another such example, where classical, biblical, and topical tropes get woven into the fabric of Jacobean anxieties about Englishness, colonial contact, and cultural difference. The dark and ravishing Cleopatra, who can “unman” Christian men with a glance, embodies not just the danger of politically powerful women (after all, England had just lost one of its own) and the threat that their sexual passions (something the Virgin Queen forswore, at least officially) can pose to masculine and imperial austerity and strength. The Egyptian queen also mobilized for Jacobeans fears of the gypsies or “Egyptians” invading England at the time from eastern Europe, who English authorities attempted to banish or punish. The performativity of these ideas are crystallized as Renaissance audiences watched a white male actor play the queen. Yet Loomba appropriately cautions against reading this context as an argument that “all identities are simply, or equivalently performative. Rather, it draws attention to the politics of performance—who is allowed to perform? Who is allowed to represent and appropriate others?” (p. 132). In both the play and the culture, the answers depended upon who had the social and political clout: while English vagabonds were persecuted for impersonating “Egyptians,” courtiers and ladies masqueraded in gauze and turbans, Egyptian slippers, and blackface with impunity. These crossings assured their players that the “terms and direction” of any exchange of identities could be controlled, that English people need not “go ‘native’ or lose their identities overseas” (p. 133). The politics of playing clearly had profound repercussions. Yet just as the pleasure of impersonating the other did not translate into an “open” society—official legislation targeted Jews, gypsies, and blacks for exile and punishment—so, too, the focus on cultural difference in Shakespearean texts did not make the racial ideologies of the day any more benign than those that were to come.

Loomba could arguably have devoted more attention to nascent ideologies about nation that are evident in many of these plays, where the discourses of “blood,” the heritable qualities of culture, and the geographical and historical location of nationness intermingle to represent the character of Irishmen, Englishmen, and Scots, Moors and Jews, Romans and Goths as indelible.Footnote 3 But this is a relatively minor quibble. Loomba, with considerable performance skills of her own, has produced an erudite and compelling vision of a world both strange and recognizable in its historical alterity and representations of desire.

Bridget Orr pulls off a similarly theatrical feat in her lively examination of Restoration drama and empire. Restoration drama has long been seen to have been caught up entirely in domestic political and social issues. But this book is sure to change all that. In a well-integrated analysis of imperial, dramatic, and anthropological literature, Orr demonstrates that the Restoration stage was a primary forum for debating the nation's past, present, and future as an imperial power, at a time when wars with the Dutch, French, and Spanish, emigrations to the western plantations, and the expansion of colonial trade, including the trade in slaves, exercised public opinion. Restoration drama, and particularly heroic plays, allowed English anxieties and identifications to move from the Persians and Turks (Oriental despots) to the Spanish and French (aspirants to universal monarchy) to Amazons and savages (equally mythic figures) in tandem with foreign policy and imperial concerns. The republican and imperial Romans provided a constant, if continuously revised, figure for English self-contemplation as a colonized and imperial people, and Williamite dramas reflected critically on the empire of trade extended in the wars of the reign, refusing to join in the idealization of the country's imperial aspirations that followed Scottish union and Marlborough's triumphant campaigns. Orr demonstrates, however, that the representation of empire and difference in Restoration drama was a great deal more complex, ambiguous, and multilayerd than was supposed. Never a simple matter of displaying the “other,” theatrical representations sought to mediate audiences’ understanding of foreign and colonial contacts in ways that drew on English desire and admiration as well as fear and opprobrium. The sheer range of canonical and noncanonical plays Orr draws on illuminates the vitality of drama in this period.

Orr stages her analysis engagingly, inviting us in with comforting assumptions about familiarity only to confound us with the historical nuances that radically transform these representations’ significance. Indeed, she delights in the performances of difference on the London stage and in the king's court for what they conceal as well as reveal, and for their use of supposedly despised groups, from Persians to Scythians and beyond, as models to emulate or improve upon and reject. The plays are a form of “colonial discourse” to be sure, but, more important, are also historical ruminations that defied and limited the aspirations to empire in their audiences’ present. Orr's attention to the “affective and spectacular possibilities offered by theatricality” (p. 27) suggests the visual delight to be derived from representations of encounter, conquest, and historical difference. Utilizing nascent ethnography in order to provide what Samuel Purchas dubbed “Scenicall History,” these productions intervened in the politics of performance in the presentation of self and community in early modern England and encouraged English ideas of their own historical distinctiveness through the comparison to “predecessors and rivals” (p. 273). As the Restoration stage was made to reflect the globe, displaying the diversity of peoples and their commodities and also the resemblance of their desires and weakness, it is, interestingly, history and politics that seem most to define national difference and prospects, a lesson that is not lost on future generations.

Obviously Orr's interpretation of difference on the Restoration stage compares in interesting ways with Loomba's analysis of the Renaissance. Orr emphasizes the older epistemological assumptions holding sway early in her period, when the most important category of foreigner was the non-Christian. Theological tenets of the day made “race,” in her view, untenable, and cultural difference was of critical interest mainly in order to assimilate it to sameness. The Restoration was a transitional era in this respect, however, for the increasing involvement of England in the African slave trade and English immigration westward called heroic representations of conquest and of Indic and Mogal monarchies into question and raised ethical questions about “complexion” and its possible meanings that were increasingly canvased on the stage. Yet one could base a counterargument on Orr's own reading of early modern anthropological texts and modern critical accounts that the moment when resemblance gave way to difference as the grounds of identity seems to be forever receding, or just on the horizon. In other words, the quest for the origin of modern forms of “race” as skin color may never be successful, for “race” is always as much about culture as nature.

In the eighteenth century, of course, the anxiety about difference became ever more entangled with anxiety about empire—the havoc it could wreak on appetites and desires, the degenerative spirals in which it engulfed British subjects abroad, and the threat it posed to autochthonous culture. Jonathan Lamb's account details the dangers that difference posed to the self through the lens of South Sea adventuring. In Lamb's very long eighteenth century (extending from the 1660s until 1872), the Pacific Ocean was the dream space and real place of the conflict between self-preservation and social duty, the imaginative and empirical location of the crisis of the self. This crisis was produced by intertwined efforts to define the self (not to be confused with the “subject” of poststructuralist theory), apprehension of its conflicting public and private duties, and the dislocation caused by both an expanding market economy and an increasingly intrusive and interrelated world. The contradictory imperatives produced by this matrix (worried over by eighteenth-century writers from Locke to Malthus and Defoe to Sterne, and displayed in such economic catastrophes as the South Sea Bubble) were resolved to some degree by empire, for it made individual enterprise a source of national wealth, glory, and patriotism. Yet the compulsion to sail over endless seas with few landfalls made the self an unstable reference point from which to describe or define the wonderful, the true, or the marvelous. These problems of preserving the self in voyages to terra incognita were thus crucial to negotiating and theorizing new kinds of relations between the self and society, infatuation and reality. Genre also interfered with successful “self” fashioning. Lamb shows that exploration narratives followed the model of the romance as a form of “global intelligence” (p. 55), with the perhaps not surprising result that they were greeted with skepticism by their various audiences, who nonetheless looked forward to the opportunity they afforded to “take a holiday from disbelief” (p. 251). The inability to be believed at the same time that they were pressured to provide the evidence for a new history of man intensified the conflicts in which the voyager was enmired: even the esteemed Captain Cook was caught up in the contrary pulls of wonder and science, romance and disinterested narrative. Lamb whirls the reader through an array of philosophy, travelogues, and fish stories in a journey to these conclusions that is as disarming as it is disorienting.

In what may be the most brilliant chapter in the book, Lamb argues that some aspects of the crisis of the self may have been embodied and perpetuated by scurvy. Seamen and officers alike recognized that self-preservation at sea meant in no small part preservation of health; they were equally familiar with degenerationist theories about the inevitable loss of bodily and mental faculties in foreign climes. Hence scurvy, “the plague of the Sea, and the spoyle of Mariners,” as Sir Richard Hawkins called it, was desperately feared and little understood. Caused by vitamin deficiency (mainly C, but also A and B), it appeared to cause the body to rot while still alive. The gums bled, ulcers oozed, and bones blackened and splintered; soon the mental faculties and vision were impaired. Rarely mentioned in voyages of discovery to the New World, it becomes a perennial problem for navigators of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, where it takes an awful toll on voyagers from Vasco da Gama to Anson. But, Lamb argues, it more than likely also affected the crews on voyages most celebrated for its absence, namely, those of Captain Cook. The sorrow, extreme melancholy, and nostalgia for home were all produced by the disease, as were acute sensations caused by colors and the retinopathy or night blindness that altered the color spectrum. Cook's strange state of “infatuation” on his last voyage, for example, when he seemed immune to reasoning by his senior officers, was very likely due to this or a related malady (pellagra, or lack of vitamin B), as were many other tropes and experiences of discovery. As Lamb puts it, “the reason that the terra incognita was so often represented as a utopia or a paradise owed less to long literary tradition … than to this pathological state of the nerves, keyed up to overreact to any stimulus after long voyages. Any land was paradise; all earth showed fair.” It may have been upon these “unregulated moments of pure sensation, verging equally on terror and enchantment” that the taxonomy of ignoble and noble savages was erected (p. 125)—an extraordinary insight that will certainly affect future interpretations of the arts of “discovery.”

Lamb also addresses the impact of South Sea voyaging on island populations. The clash of the complex gift economy of Polynesians with the commodity economy of the voyagers had the effect of provoking some of the same excitement as infatuation, Lamb argues, forcing locals to reorient their attitudes toward things and giving rise to storehouses of curiosities and cargo cults. This reading of the interior ramifications of cultural exchange opens up new areas of inquiry into where and how empire and its circuits shaped Pacific and British culture, but the direction of much of the cultural traffic shown here appears to be one way. Indeed, South Sea ventures transformed Polynesian and European selves, but may have been most successful in commodifying their peoples and treasures for a burgeoning global capitalism.

Although South Seas exploration may never grow old, there is a criticism to be ventured: the “evolution of the self” charted here is mystifyingly ungendered. Yet the self invented by philosophers and novelists was rooted in particular notions of masculinity and femininity that were in turn mapped upon public and private distinctions and the discourses of patriotism and market economy. The oft-expressed fears of the feminizing effects of credit and consumption, the suspected “effeminacy” of indigenes and connoisseurs of curiosities alike, and the reported erotic free-for-all of South Sea encounters all, in different ways, articulate a perceived threat to the maintenance of a self that is rooted in gender imperatives. More specifically, the terror of losing one's gender on the seas and frontiers of empire was noted by both stadial theorists and seamen themselves: on Cook's voyages, the apprehension of the intimation of inappropriate desire by male islanders toward the tars exacerbated existing anxieties about “discovery,” but also opened up new ways of “crossing over” into another culture.Footnote 4 And the preservation of the female self in the crucibles of imperial encounter look very different again, as the essays by Linda Colley and Betty Joseph in The Global Eighteenth Century substantiate (see below). At the very least, the gendering and disengendering aspects of exploration and their effects on the comprehension of the self require attention.

Such considerations are at the heart of Robert Aldrich's interesting study of colonialism and homosexuality. Covering the century and a half from the 1790s to the 1950s, Aldrich does not examine “gender” as such, and there are few women in his pages. But he does provide an encyclopedic tour of male homosexuality in European colonies. The many heroes, writers, and artists of empire who were or may have been homosexual—Cecil Rhodes, Henry Morton Stanley, T. E. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, Lord Kitchener, Arthur Rimbaud, Andre Gide, G. F. Green, Marshall Herbert Lyatey, Sir Hector MacDonald, and Roger Casement, to name a few—may attest to the seductive nature of empire for British men who, in addition to wanting to make a fortune and improve their social standing, also needed to express or practice their nonnormative sexual desire. Based on extensive archival and literary research, Aldrich presents much fascinating material in an elegant and sympathetic prose. One of the best vignettes is of Sir Richard Burton, explorer, cross-dresser, and translator of The Arabian Nights, who was “probably” bisexual, in that he took a prurient interest in outré sexual practices, had a “life-long fascination with genital size, circumcision, clitoridectomy and sadomasochism” (p. 33) and pursued an in-depth investigation of Indian brothels at the expense of a promotion. Whatever his sexual orientation, Burton spectacularly concentrated centuries of European prejudice and fantasy about Islamic and Asia societies in his postulation of the “Sotadic Zone,” stretching from 43 degrees north of the equator to 30 degrees south, where sodomy and same-sex pleasure were rampant. Aldrich suggests that the Sotadic Zone did indeed pull certain Europeans to wander the empire or work in its service, from India to Africa, Melanesia and Australia, and the allure of the Sotadic Zone enters into the journal writing, fiction, and poetry of men who engaged in same-sex and interracial affairs. Although same-sex desire was officially deemed to clash with one of the prime principles of colonization—to save the degenerate savages from themselves—heteronormative colonialism spawned its own demons: E. M. Forster and other critical imperialists saw the repression of homosexual desire and the brutal drive for domination as two sides to the same coin of imperialism. Hence homosexual men found themselves in a dilemma: empire clearly brought opportunities for a sexual emancipation unthinkable in post-Wildean England, yet it did so at the expense of the native peoples they ruled and sometimes bedded. Some homosexual men in the imperial service nevertheless linked anticolonial revolution with sexual liberation, such as Pierre Herbart, Daniel Guèrin, and Jean Genet, and even inspired an organized politics of resistance.

This book is noteworthy for giving access to and rich detail about an important topic that is little discussed in other recent studies of sexuality and empire. Yet Colonialism and Homosexuality jars by its lack of theoretical or conceptual architecture. In this sense, the themes of this review essay—identity, performance, and even empire—are conspicuous by their lack. After a decade of queer theory and its complex investigations of the historicity, nuances, and problematic relations between desire and identity, one expects the term “homosexuality” to carry some analytical punch. Instead, it is used to cover any man who regards other men with affection and desire. Homosociality, homoeroticsm, and homosexuality are surely not necessarily the same. Many of the men identified here as homosexual never engaged in sex with men, some had wives and children, some were more interested in friendship, and others’ knowledge of same-sex practice was theoretical at best. Homosexual desire was “repressed” or fulfilled in various ways in these pages; but is presumptive object choice alone sufficient to earn the label? While same-sex subcultures existed in colonial towns across the globe, the men (or women) who frequented them may have spent the rest of their time in “straight” occupations and lives. Homosexuality is thus an inner essence in these pages that may or may not make an appearance through outward performance, a characterization that is uncomfortably close to imperial constructions of sexual deviance. Similarly, “colonialism” is frequently used more as a trope—of travel, shame, normativity, repression—than as a politics or process. This in itself could be an interesting insight of the book if it were developed in relation to other internalizing or hegemonic processes of empire. But without such analysis, the detailed recounting of the sexual experiences of European men in exotic locales may merely reinscribe European prejudices about colonies as sites of homosexual license or perversion.

Thus far, it seems that through the historical mutations of imperial adventuring the understanding and performance of difference moved from religious and political allegiance (moving from the outside in), to identification with a self (an inner and outer state that may be in some conflict), to a sexual “emancipation” that (perhaps) brings the essence to the surface in the performance of same-sex practices—an interpretive arc that may confound established narratives of the emergence of modern notions of identity. The final book under review brings up a rather different set of questions. It is not possible here to do justice here to this excellent collection of essays, written by twenty-two exciting scholars of literature, history, anthropology, and geography. Beautifully edited by Felicity Nussbaum, the volume sets out to inaugurate a new field for the long eighteenth century: a “critical global studies” (p. 1) that operates at the intersections of imperial, national, and transoceanic boundaries. The contributors range far and wide in the effort to rethink cultural encounter and reciprocity outside conventional categories and periodizations. Part I sets out to reenvision the geographic and imaginary space of global relations: through maneuvers of Dutch and Anglo-Indian cartographers (Benjamin Schmidt and Matthew Edney, respectively), the artistic and navigational knowledge of the Polynesian high priest Tupaia (Glyndwr Williams), the Atlantic interculture of the Caribbean (Phillip Morgan), the sharawadgi (chaotic beauty) at work in the Chinese house at Stowe (Robert Batchelor), the iconic status of the parasol as a sign and prop of global difference (Joseph Roach), and the oceanic metaphysics of Georgian poets (Laura Brown). Part II focuses on the struggles to maintain, challenge, or invent national, gender, and class identities in the crucible of an extended and predatory imperial system: Betty Joseph examines the experiences of an Indian widow, the Rani of Burdwan, and Linda Colley those of a Barbary captive, Elizabeth Marsh, to demonstrate how gender and sexual attributions disrupt official policy and trouble Orientalist interpretations alike. Kate Teltscher interrogates the silence of the cross-cultural encounter when George Bogle visits the court of Panchen Lama of Tibet. Beth Fowkes Tobin traces the cultural pretensions of the East Indian nabob in the garden conversation piece, Kay Dian Kriz shows how the figure of the mulattress was used in the paintings of Brunias to signify West Indian civility, Peter Hulme unmasks the ethnogenesis of the “Carib,” Nicholas Rogers documents the conflict and racism aboard British men-of-war, and Vincent Caretta tracks the misadventures and uncertain origin of Olaudah Equiano and his Interesting Narrative. Part III explores eighteenth-century islands as territorial, ethnographic, and imaginative spaces where identity and difference could be redrawn and “discovered.” Neil Rennie evaluates European expectations about South Seas travel shaped by the staging of sexual intercourse at Point Venus, Tahiti, on Cook's first voyage. Rod Edmund describes serial “reencounters” on Tahiti, Tonga, and New Zealand as attempts to atone for or deal with the disease spread by earlier visits. Carole Fabricant and Jill Casid demonstrate how utopian visions obfuscated the violence and brutalities of empire in the writing of George Berkeley and Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, respectively. Anna Neill, like Jonathan Lamb, sees sympathy as intertwined with voyaging, but in her analysis it is necessary to the captain's authority with his men. Finally, Greg Dening inimitably concludes with a rumination upon voyaging, past and present, through the lens of the replicas of Cook's Endeavour and the Polynesian voyaging canoe the Hokule’a. Obviously, these essays provide an embarrassment of riches, fulsomely displaying the benefits that accrue from attempting to “develop conceptual frameworks distinct from national history” (p. 10) and bring the local and global into the same interpretive frame.

But the essays also raise an important question: What is the relationship between early modern empire and early modern globalization, as historical entities and as putative fields? According to Nussbaum, the critical global studies formulated by this volume seeks to be “differently inflected and more encompassing” (p. 7) than imperial history; it bypasses national perspectives to focus on “local, unconquered or uncolonized areas” and “local epistemologies” as well as on the “vast areas and groups of people … relatively untouched by empire”; it gives “greater attention to non-European areas, to indigenous peoples and knowledge, to disaporic mobility, and to the social, economic and ideological investments of colonialism on a worldwide scale” (p. 8). As a manifesto, this outline of targets is impressive and exemplary, and points out a way to avoid the pitfalls of the “postcolonial reason” that seeks to impose a colonial logic on the globe.Footnote 5 On the other hand, the essays themselves chart territories familiar to imperial historians, whether old or new. It may be an unsavory fact that eighteenth-century European people (and those who study them) gained much of their knowledge of the world through the undertakings of private merchants, amateur scientists, travelers, missionaries, officials, and others supported or authorized by European nation-states. Our opportunity to assess even uncolonized cultures in this period rests largely on past interest taken in those cultures’ status as exotics, potential trading partners, obstacles to European expansion (as Peter Hulme shows for the case of the Caribs), or rival imperial powers (as Colley points out) that the Europeans could never hope to conquer.

Finally, many of the goals outlined in this volume, and substantiated in its bracing chapters, are widely shared, not only by the other books reviewed above, but also by the confluence of practices and subjects taken to comprise the “new imperial history,” which also recognizes that state policy or formal colonial possessions do not begin to exhaust the global networks of social relation, cultural exchange, and practice generated by overseas dominions. In the case of eighteenth-century Britain, defensive and aggressive wars, a fiscal-military state that encouraged investment, accumulation and innovation as well as coercive forms of trade, the growth and dissemination of cultural and imaginative media through which British people and those with whom they came into contact could identify themselves, and the far-reaching networks that allowed these people, commodities, and identities to travel and be transformed meant that “forging the nation” and “inventing the globe” were inextricably intertwined.Footnote 6 The non-Western and European empires of the early modern period laid many of the bases for wider global and regional interconnections, the ghostly forms and categories of which still linger today. The Global Eighteenth Century shows us the kinds of questions that should be asked to circumvent their long-lasting restrictions and circumnavigate a different kind of globe.