Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

‘Race’ is the same word in French and English, suggesting equivalency, portability, and mutual intelligibility of the term. Yet in the early twentieth century, the word did different work in each language depending on time and place, often creating misunderstandings between Francophone and Anglophone interlocutors on how to fight racism. One instance of such divergent ‘race’ histories was the First Universal Races Congress in London in 1911. Organized by progressive philanthropists in Britain and the United States, the Congress attracted a global constellation of scholars, statesmen, diplomats, and activists to discuss how to diminish the inter-racial tensions internationally. Anglophone attendees spoke readily about the need to study ‘race relations’ scientifically to better manage conflicts between colonizer and colonized. French social scientists neither attended the Congress nor evinced interest in the very concept of ‘race’ contact. A comparison of English and French participation in London makes clear that modern colonialism produced different racial epistemologies in Francophone and Anglophone spaces, ones that only began to converge after decolonization.

Asylums’ adoption of printing and periodical publishing from the late 1830s was related to two major developments on both sides of the Atlantic: the growing accessibility of print and printing presses and the spread of the moral treatment of insanity. As the periodical press permeated daily life, and printing equipment became cheaper and easier to use, the introduction of presses into asylums was a practical move. The presses served multiple purposes: recreational, therapeutic, as well as administrative. This chapter identifies various factors that contributed to the introduction of printing in asylums and addresses concerns about the exploitation of patients’ labour hidden behind the theory of moral therapeutics. It also reflects on the symbolic meaning of the press, its association with civilizational progress, and the influence of such ideas on the early adoption of periodical publishing in America and Scotland. While presses were almost never bought solely for patients’ benefits, they offered novel opportunities for inmates to exercise initiative and agency as partners in the development of early psychiatry, as well as civilization.

The chapter completes my discussion of the inception of periodical publishing in asylums, by examining the histories of two of the first asylum periodicals published in America and Britain and their patient-founders: Barber Badger’s Retreat Gazette (Hartford Retreat in Connecticut, 1837) and John Reid Adam’s Chronicles of the Monastery (Glasgow Royal Asylum, 1842). It shows that the histories of early asylum periodicals were tightly intertwined with their founders’ fates, which was the major reason for the publications’ comparatively short runs. Furthermore, these founders were all patients with printing skills or, in the case of Adam, literary aspirations and willingness to learn, and the opportunity to print in the asylum played an important role in their lives and professional careers: for Badger, it was a way to continue providing for his family, while for Adam, institutionalisation constituted an apprenticeship that eventually enabled them to pursue a career in publishing beyond their discharge. Asylum periodicals allowed patients to apply their existing skills or gain new ones in the pursuit of their own aspirations and personal interests.

Why was Britain the first country in Europe to experience economic growth, with sustained technical change and the invention of machines that cut costs by taking over tasks previously done by hand? Cotton spinning is a striking example. In the 1700s, the world’s best spinners in India put in 50,000 hours to spin 100 pounds of cotton. By 1835, workers with machines took only 135. Technical change also generated new products and affected far more than the textile industry. Examples from 1700s would include the steam engine and new ways of making iron. One explanation for why Britain took the lead here was that its high wages boosted the demand for inventions of machines that could substitute for expensive labor. But closer inspection fails to support this argument. Rather, Britain had a more abundant supply of the skills and ideas that made technical change possible. We can see how they favored Britain by comparing two likely candidates for early industrialization: Lancashire in Britain and Normandy in France. The comparison highlights other advantages that benefited Britain as well, from agglomeration effects to the greater toll that land war took in Continental Europe.

Agglomeration effects and an abundant supply of skilled workers were not the only reasons Britain industrialized first. Its political institutions also gave it a century’s lead over the rest of western Europe. By the early 1700s, it had a national representative body – Parliament – and something approaching a unified legal and fiscal system. Parliament could pass legislation valid anywhere in Britain, and it allowed Britain to raise more tax revenue and borrow at a lower cost. The revenue let Britain win wars and garner the lion’s share of intercontinental trade as spoils of victory, which spurred innovation. Parliament also facilitated lobbying by entrepreneurs, and it could pass acts that rearranged property rights to improve transportation and agriculture, with a credible promise of compensation for property owners. The legislation helped entrepreneurs build canals and toll roads, which greatly improved transportation. The rest of northwestern Europe had wait until at least the French Revolution to have similar institutional advantages. The delay took a significant economic toll on agriculture and on transportation in Continental Europe, as French evidence shows.

The First World War has recently been reinvented in the West as the grand stage to play the anthem of “multiculturalism”: A colonial and violent past often gets sanitized and instrumentalized for a political agenda of social cohesion. This chapter uncovers this story through a focus on South Asia, which contributed 1.5 million soldiers to the war. In the process, it examines the color of war memory and practices of remembrance, the archive and the digital revolution, and diversity and recolonization, as well as the work of literary and artistic imagination in interrogating the colonial past.

The introduction brings the reader into the world of seventeenth-century Ireland. It offers a brief overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the legacies of rebellion and violence that were present at the opening of the study in 1603. It considers broadly English understandings of and policy towards Ireland across a wide timespan, before introducing some of the key differences that emerged in the early seventeenth century. It offers a survey of important historiography and a reflection on source materials, particularly the 1641 Depositions and associated materials, before concluding with an overview of the book’s structure.

It’s not often that football friendlies signal war – especially between allies. The game in London between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow, part of a tour of Britain by the Soviets in November 1945, was meant to celebrate the recent victory over Nazism. But things went badly wrong. Arsenal cheated by fielding ringers like England’s ‘wizard winger’ Stanley Matthews. The game started violently – and got worse. The thick London fog didn’t help, confusing the players and making it virtually impossible for officials and spectators to see the action. After Dynamo’s 4–3 thrilling victory, both sides accused each other of bringing football into disrepute. George Orwell bemoaned the ‘orgies of hatred’ engendered by such encounters, coining his famous phrase that international sport was ‘war minus the shooting’. This chapter investigates football’s role in helping trigger the Cold War in the mid- to late-1940s. It details Dynamo Moscow’s fractious, often comical tour of Britain in the autumn of 1945. It paints a picture of two cultures on collision course, despite the spectators’ amazement at the Soviets’ revolutionary style of play and the visitors’ enthusiasm for British football culture.

In 1899, the first Hague Conference outlawed the military use of expanding small arms ammunitions, also known as dum-dum bullets. This chapter contextualises this moment of weapons regulation, connecting it to the controversies that evolved around smokeless gunpowder ammunitions during the 1890s, beginning with so-called ‘humanitarian’ full-metal jacket bullets that created smaller and cleaner wounds than the previous generation of large-calibre ‘man-stopping’ bullets. When the British military decided to modify their full-metal jacket bullets so that they would wound and kill their adversaries more effectively, media outrage ensued, which was fuelled by evocative newspaper reporting and graphic reproductions of dum-dum wounds. This media frenzy helped to justify the dum-dum ban at The Hague. The chapter also describes the public diplomacy strategies employed by the British government in justifying their use of these bullets, particularly against non-European and colonial adversaries. Altogether, the chapter shows how quickly the idea that a dum-dum bullet was a peculiarly transgressive weapon was normalised.

In western provinces inscriptions described Constantine as the son of deified Constantius I and a descendant of Maximian, his father-in-law. Dedications mapped Constantine’s expanding jurisdiction, from Gaul and Spain into Italy and North Africa, then into the Balkan provinces. In particular, cities in North Africa honored him with dedications and statues. One new title was “greatest”; but the use of the Christian chi-rho monogram was limited.

In this chapter it will be focused on the topic about why and how Béla Bartók’s music was an important compositional point of reference for Elizabeth Maconchy, especially for her string quartets. The reception of Bartók’s music signalled her interest in the ‘ultra modern’ music of her time, something which was hardly the norm. Maconchy absorbed Bartók’s tendency towards objectivity and constructivism (in the sense of a constructive compositional practice consisting of short and concise elements), which he developed around 1926, when he explicitly distanced himself from the conventions, style and diction of nineteenth-century music, claiming that his music became more simple and more contrapuntal. Maconchy followed exactly this path, as, especially in her string quartets, she developed the monothematic technique, imitation and variation, and the contrapuntal combination of linear parts – similar to a conversation – in which four voices repeatedly recite almost the same arguments.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.