Systems theory can be used to integrate thinking across the natural and social sciences and history. While there are many varieties of system, systems theory provides conceptual common ground on which the natural and social sciences can meet. The chapter proposes ‘poly-periodisation’ as a heuristic and translating device between contributions of WSS and ESS. Drawing on sociological systems theory, it reflects on the possibilities of relating all kinds of natural and social systems to each other through their respective system histories.

The social sciences and history need to mount a matching response to the Anthropocene crisis to that constructed by the natural sciences in the form of Earth Systems Science. Humankind is facing major changes to its conditions of existence. While the natural sciences have done an exemplary job of assessing the limits of planetary carrying capacity, they are not well equipped to understand the social side of this equation. The chapter sets up the idea of a World System Science to complement and extend what ESS has done (and continues to do). It looks at the methodological and conceptual compatibilities and differences between ESS and WSS, and at how concepts such as system, can both unite and divide them. It begins to set out how WSS might be developed, and what it might aim to do.

Chapter 9 reflects on the authors’ approach to redescribing the Cold War and its relationship to international law. It challenges conventional narratives by presenting the Cold War as a subject rather than an object, exploring its multiple manifestations and impacts on global legal and political landscapes. The chapter addresses three key themes: redescription, periodisation, and aftermath. It emphasises the plurality of international laws and Cold Wars experienced worldwide, disrupting the notion of a monolithic, bipolar conflict. The authors discuss the complexities of periodisation, highlighting how different perspectives can yield varying start and end dates for the Cold War. The chapter also explores the Cold War’s legacy in the present, arguing that its influence persists in contemporary global politics and international law. It challenges the idea of a clean break in 1989, suggesting instead that many Cold War dynamics continue to shape current events and legal frameworks. Finally, the authors present their work as both a critique of conventional Cold War narratives and a retrieval project, aiming at uncovering forgotten or marginalised perspectives on international law and global politics during this period. They call for a renewed appreciation of the legal experimentation, political non-alignment, and revolutionary possibilities that emerged during the Cold War era.

This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

The Introduction outlines the essential premises behind this book and the structure the book will take. It also offers some thoughts on the book’s approach to periodisation.

This chapter focuses on Neo-Victorian fiction as a sub-genre of the historical novel. It examines how British neo-Victorian texts are informed by Anglo-American and European postmodernist theories that challenged the division between history and literature. In this context, it contains discussions of a wide range of novels including Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), and Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy that have now become part of an ever-growing Neo-Victorian canon, while also engaging with more recent manifestations of Neo-Victorianism in TV and film adaptations. It explores how Neo-Victorianism has intersected with British political discourse; how authors’ investment in Britain’s history and Victorian literary culture problematises the Neo-Victorian novel’s position in the academy; the form’s perceived prestige; and its contribution to debates surrounding accuracy and authenticity to argue that neo-Victorianism can be read as a symptom of decadent postmodernity.

Periodisations are inevitable and useful short-cuts in conceptualising the past. But they are often inherited without reflection or a clear idea of their origins; in literature they can endow fashionable aesthetic judgements with lasting canonical force in ways that can be intellectually harmful. Latin is a language with a literary history of over two millennia, with highly differentiated levels of survival from different periods, and with a complex scholarly tradition: its periodisation is both important and challenging. I open with three vignettes of attitudes to Latin literature which in their different ways show the tendency to esteem antiquity above all. I look at six possible ways in which the history of Latin literature has been periodised or could be better periodised, with a recurring focus on two particularly dynamic periods : the last half-century before Christ and the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. An examination of changes in language, metre, prose rhythm, politics, religion and book history is used to challenge and test established periodisations, and to suggest the benefits of a greater acknowledgement of continuities and the longue durée.

With his ‘imaginary portraits’, Pater developed a hybrid genre blending biography with travel writing, fiction, and criticism. The cross-pollination between Pater’s fiction and his essays remained strong throughout his career. This chapter explores how Pater employed the genre to engage with both English and French critics (Arnold, Newman, Sainte-Beuve) in the debates about the relations between reading, writing, the individual, and the nation through a series of character sketches. Seen in the light of an unfinished manuscript for a lecture on English literature, Pater’s early imaginary portraits raise questions of periodisation, of how far back the beginnings of English literature could be traced, while essentially questioning its Englishness. Stressing the significance of medieval rather than Elizabethan literature in the formation of a national canon, Pater selected Chaucer as the proclaimed father of English literature, thus selecting a writer with a profound European background, whose character sketches in The Canterbury Tales in some respects became precursors of Pater’s own studies of the individual.

What is ‘early Latin’? The main contention of the present volume is that this question does not have a single answer. Rather, ‘early Latin’ is one of those ubiquitous labels (like ‘old’ or ‘archaic’ Latin) which have been used by classical scholars to denote different linguistic entities, and above all to describe a variety of linguistic features, in an often confusing and potentially contentious way. ‘Early Latin’ is above all a linguistic construct, which evokes frameworks of periodisation (often diverging), and posits a distinction between a supposedly discrete and cohesive linguistic variety (‘classical Latin’) and another one, equally discrete and cohesive, belonging to an earlier time period (‘pre-classical Latin’, a notion which has often carried negative value judgments since antiquity). Far from aiming to replace one theoretical framework with another, the studies presented here contribute, through a fresh analysis of specific linguistic phenomena and stylistic trends, to challenge the myths of periodisation and standardisation, and to expose the limited usefulness of evolutionary models to explain language change.

This chapter maps out some key themes and questions for the volume as a whole. Studies of late Hellenistic Greek literature have tended to focus narrowly on individual texts and authors. The goal of this volume is to generate a set of new readings that do justice to the intertextual richness of the writings of this period. The introduction also aims to move beyond rigid accounts of the start and end-points of the ‘Hellenistic period', bringing late Hellenistic literature into dialogue with its later imperial equivalents in ways which draw attention to both the similarities and the differences between them.

Conventional historical periods – ‘classical’, ‘medieval’, ‘early modern’ etc. – help us as historians orient ourselves with respect to each other and to communicate what we do to a wider public. However, traditional periodisation is also dangerous. Giving a span of time a label tends to constrain our narratives within a set of assumptions. If we try to use the past to inform our understanding of the present, we may bring those assumptions forward, to identify or contrast with contemporary events in a way that has little to do either with the past or with the present. Terrorism is a historically and culturally contingent concept; it is modern, and it is Western. Past attitudes towards violence and who was entitled to use it were likewise very different from those that prevail in the modern West. As we write a history of terrorism, we should forgo both the use of conventional periodisation and the use of the term ‘terrorism’, even in a lowest-common-denominator sense, as a transtemporal, objective object of enquiry. This does not mean that we should jettison the word ‘terrorism’ altogether. We should rather view the word itself as having a history that embraces an evolving and shifting set of ideas, and that fits into a much older story about humanity’s views of order and disorder and its uses of violence and fear.

The chapter traces the rich legacy of the romantic literature in Ireland, through consideration of the varied influences of key Irish and English writings of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century on Irish writers of recent decades. It suggests that the reappraisal of romanticism in the 1980s and 1990s has important implications for Irish literary history, in that the plurality and inclusiveness of the ‘romantic period’ and increasing emphasis on historical contexts, locations, colonialism, and gender are especially helpful for approaching leading Irish writers of the time, such as Maria Edgeworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas Moore, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and emerging genres such as national tales, gothic fiction, political prose, and periodical literature. Recognition of the variousness of romantic-period literature also complicates the later twentieth-century legacies, opening lines of inheritance from John Clare to Michael Longley, Maria Edgeworth to William Trevor, Raftery to Derek Mahon. The perhaps better-known engagements of Seamus Heaney with Wordsworth, Paul Muldoon with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, or Ciaran Carson with John Keats are thus considered as part of the larger picture of continuing connections between the romantic period and modern Irish literature.

The introduction outlines how the book reassesses the impact of the Beatles on sixties Britain. Existing accounts have variously conceived of the Beatles as trailblazers of change, as exemplars of change or as outliers whose marginality revealed the lack of change in sixties Britain. Here the relationship between the Beatles and sixties Britain is instead conceived as one of creative tension, with the band’s divergence from societal norms provoking a full gamut of contemporary reactions: approbatory, contemptuous, ambivalent, indifferent and reformist. The book also uses different methods to study a familiar topic. It is a historical study of a subject largely studied by non-historians. Its empiricism distinguishes it from work informed by the theoretical approaches favoured by cultural critics and social scientists. It eschews the politicisation of the Beatles by writers engaged in culture wars over the sixties. It is purposely eclectic in its source materials, analytical methods and in its subject matter, which encompasses society, culture and politics. As the first book-length study of the Beatles by an academic British historian, The Beatles and Sixties Britain sets out to explain the significance of the band to twentieth-century British history, and vice versa.

This chapter is concerned with exploring the mutually constitutive character of the international law of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War and post–Cold War environs in which that law was to be developed. In one direction it is argued that a consensual treaty-based system of law-making prevailed during the Cold War, which shifted to a system of Security Council legislation in the post-Cold War era, and that this reflected a parallel shift from a multipolar to a unipolar geopolitics. In another direction, however, it is also argued that the international law of nuclear weaponry also contributed to the production of its own political environs by both legitimating the possession of nuclear weaponry and controlling its spread.