In the first two years of his reign, the thirty-year-old Philip had to mobilize as much cash as possible to fight the war declared by France and to refinance the debts of his father into long-term term juros. He did this while in Flanders and while dealing with a reluctant administration in Castile. The procedure for the refinancing was laid down in a letter of April 1557 to the Council of Finance in Madrid. The chapter shows that it was not a default but the first step of a sound policy that would be completed with the Cortes of 1560, when he had returned after the triumph of San Quentin.

This is the first of two chapters on Philip’s first years as king of Spain, from his departure for England and Flanders in 1554 to his return in 1558 after the crushing victories over France. During this critical period of establishing himself, he was led into simultaneous wars against the Pope and against France. This chapter shows how he used the suspension of payments to Rome as a weapon against the Pope. The next chapter will deal with the war against France, its financing and the refinancing of the debt.

The United States fought its first conflict as an independent nation against France, the ally that was essential for gaining freedom from British rule. After the United States signed the Jay Treaty with Great Britain resolving outstanding issues from the Revolutionary War and normalizing trade, France reacted by interdicting US commercial ships that were now trading with its enemy. The US policy on freedom of the seas was shaped by the need to protect its neutral shipping rights, especially in the face of increasing French maritime aggression. This policy stemmed from a desire to avoid being dragged into European wars while maintaining profitable commerce. However, the French government, angered by the US neutrality during the French Revolutionary Wars, saw American trade with Britain as a violation of their alliance, and French privateers began seizing American commercial shipping. In response, Congress authorized the use of military force, leading to the deployment of the US Navy to defend American merchant ships against interference by the French Navy.

The seventh chapter of this book reviews the several waves of expansion of foreign banks in Latin America during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. This story is of special interest for readers interested in aspects of a complex and diverse phase of financial globalization. Foreign banks participated in several phases of capital flows from Europe, and much later from the United States and Canada, marking a new stage of capitalism that was becoming truly global. The entry of banks of different nationalities into Latin America was pioneered by British overseas banks from the 1860s, which established offices and branches in many countries. They were followed by French investment banks that participated in many public works projects such as canals and railroads, as well as in government banks. Then came the powerful German universal banks from the 1890s, which specialized in trade finance and in some foreign debt transactions. From the 1850s onwards there appeared Spanish colonial banks in Cuba and Puerto Rico that continued to operate until the Spanish American War of 1898. Last of all arrived Canadian and United States commercial banks, in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The 1850s saw Britian involved in large-scale combat in India and the Crimea, which left it ill-equipped to intervene in Italy’s war against its Austrian rulers. Though sympathetic to Italy, Britain was more concerned about France’s participation and what was seen as its manoeuvring for greater European power. Britian responded with a massive volunteer movement which wasn’t always taken entirely seriously, and which seeded the potential for the year’s military activities being seen as a literal theatre of war. Charles Kean’s Henry V attempted to ignite pride in Britain’s martial history, but this was countered by the ignominious experiences of British troops in China, and the ‘Pig War’. Barbaric treatment of British soldiers by the military authorities diminished the distance between Britain and its ‘uncivilised’ enemies, and provided a fertile ground for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which celebrated in King Arthur another figure from the past.

This chapter examines how ‘race’ took on its modern meaning in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how ideas of race were intertwined with the developing idea of civilization, highlights the contemporary comparative lack of knowledge about sub-Saharan Africa in Western thought, and illustrates how race came to feature as a subject of investigation in its own right in the ‘science of race’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is devoted to ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment but places them within wider European and Atlantic contexts.

I begin Chapter 9 by situating the lessons from the Irish case study within a broader theoretical context. Although there are particularities to all case studies, theoretical frameworks can be developed from in-depth investigations in specific contexts. In this chapter, I explore the relevance of the moral psychology of fairness and feelings of relative deprivation across several other case studies: in the United States, Sudan, Chile, France, and during the Arab Spring in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Economic inequalities across multiple global regions are a key explanation for civic unrest, feelings of unfairness, and attempts at radical social change. The rise of populism and authoritarian leaders is the subject of the following chapter.

‘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.

The site of Incoronata offers a crucial model for understanding the collective sharing of techniques, objects, rituals, images and ideology between an indigenous Iron Age community and Aegean immigrants on the Ionian coast of South Italy in the eighth century BCE. The dialectic between locality and connectivity is explored through an archaeological investigation of themes such as the leading role of the indigenous communities and the contribution of crafts; the creation of a common ‘middle ground’ for ritual actions; and the shared memories of both communities in the construction of elite identities and hegemony.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the rest of northwestern Europe joined Britain on the path of sustained economic growth. Several other economies began to grow as well, among them the United States and Japan. But many others lagged behind. Chapter 7 explains these divergent outcomes. It does so not by analyzing worldwide data on economic growth, but by examining telling examples of rapid economic progress and of stagnation and even impoverishment: France and Russia, the United States and Mexico, Japan and China, and – last but not least – Africa. These examples lead to important conclusions about economic growth in general and about how widely its rewards are shared. As we have seen, political institutions will matter, and so will religion. But inequality will make a big difference too. It may keep people from using their talents or create perverse political incentives that stifle education and the accumulation of human capital. The resulting differences in economic performance can persist for decades.

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.