This chapter traces Paul Cullen’s invovlement in the extra-European church, first in the United States and then the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, India, and Gibraltar.

This Chapter provides a close reading of the Declaration’s text. Supporters of the thirteen independent nations argument rely almost entirely on the Declaration’s assertion about “Free and Independent States.” Yet, this assertion is far less compelling than is often claimed, and the relevant passage can be read quite differently (as declaring the independence of the “United Colonies”). More importantly, other passages in the Declaration strongly support a “one nation” argument, including the document’s opening reference to “one People” and its conspicuous failure to identify any state by name. The Chapter also focuses on the importance of the capitalization of “United Colonies” and “Free and Independent States” as well as the “United States of America” (phrases where the Dunlap broadside differs from the ceremonial parchment, an issue that prior historians have often bungled).

On 27 April 2015, Jamie Maynard and Courtney Penix met in a strip mall parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, a city in the Midwestern United States (US). Earlier that day, Courtney had sent Jamie a series of text messages asking if she could get her $150 worth of heroin. Jamie said that she could, plus two ‘rigs’ (equipment to inject the drug), for $175 total. They arranged to meet that evening to make the trade before Jamie headed to work at a local casino. Jamie and Courtney, both White women in their mid twenties, met earlier that spring through a friend-of-a-friend. They initially connected to exchange drugs: heroin, to which both had developed habits, and the pharmaceuticals Suboxone, used to ease painful opioid withdrawal symptoms, and Xanax, used to ease anxiety and sometimes used in combination with opioids to amplify the effects of the drugs. They quickly developed a casual friendship, communicating regularly by text messages and phone calls. They vented about their jobs, shared stories about their struggles to maintain their drug habits, and offered drugs to one another to keep each other ‘well’ (i.e., to stave off withdrawal) (Williams, 2020).

Methadone maintenance therapy arose as a treatment for opiate use in the mid 1960s. At the time, neither drug use nor treatment for it were considered disabilities. When Vincent Dole, the Rockefeller Institute metabolic researcher who was one of the progenitors of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT), asked, ‘What kind of disablement does a drug produce?’ (Courtwright et al., 1989, p. 334), this was a prescient question.1 Dole’s team stabilised patient-subjects on methadone, hoping to displace reliance on shorter-acting opiates, and explored dosages that would enable ‘cooperative relationships with patients’ (Courtwright, et al., 1989, p. 336). Opposing detoxification and abstinence as the sole basis for treatment, Dole saw opioid use disorder as a metabolic condition that required ongoing pharmacological stability. Contrasting the stabilising effects of one opiate (methadone) to another (heroin), Dole emphasised that drugs should be judged in terms of their social effects – did they improve or undermine capacity for stable relationships with family members, treatment providers or employers? Did they produce ‘disablement’ or did they instead ‘enable’ capacities for productive citizenship? Such questions dominated the social contexts into which methadone maintenance was inserted. Making stable, productive citizens was adopted as the goal of methadone maintenance.

Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are spaces where people can use pre-acquired drugs under the supervision of trained staff who monitor for overdose and administer medical assistance, if necessary.1 By providing sterile drug use supplies, referrals to various services and education about safer injection practices, SCS function as harm reduction apparatuses for reducing overdose and the transmission of blood-borne infections like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C (HCV) and other harms associated with drug use such as skin and soft tissue infections.2 While at least one unsanctioned SCS exists in the United States (Kral & Davidson, 2017), there are currently only three government-authorised sites in the country; two opened in 2021 in New York City and one opened in 2024 in Rhode Island. Another SCS was poised to open years earlier in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until the US federal government sued Safehouse, the organisation set to manage the site, to prevent it from opening. The government argued that Safehouse would violate federal law if it opened an SCS because the US Controlled Substances Act (CSA) (1970) prohibits the operation of places where drugs are made or used illicitly.

Before the American Civil War it was widely believed hat cotton was the key to victory. Many Southerners believed that by withholding cotton, they could force the North to accede to the South’s independence. Otherwise, Britain and other European importers of Southern cotton would be forced to intervene on the South’s behalf. Similarly, in the North the belief was widely held that cutting off Southern sales of cotton would impoverish the South and reduce its ability to buy arms, forcing it to give up its war. Early in the war, the South began to withhold cotton. Soon after, the North imposed a naval blockade that reduced Southern exports of cotton to Europe to a trickle. Although the South was weakened, it continued to fight for years. And for reasons including the moral imperatives of the war, the willingness to aid unemployed cotton workers, and the development of alternative sources of supply, cutting off exports of Southern cotton failed to have the effects on the North or on the Europeans that the South expected. The North was not forced to give up its war to defeat the Confederacy, and Britain and other European importers were not forced to intervene.

This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.

The dramatic impact of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington sharply intensified relations between Australia and the USA. The bilateral relationship was reconfirmed as the two states joined in war against an elusive, and unexpected, enemy. As the war on terrorism broadened, Australia enthusiastically joined the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, sending troops to fight in Afghanistan and, more controversially, deploying forces alongside the USA in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From late 2001 commentary in Australia invariably accepted that ‘relations with the United States dominated Australian foreign affairs’ or more subtly observed that ‘the central dynamics of Australian foreign policy revolved around the issue of relations with the superpower, and the implications of this relationship’ for the broader exercise of Australian foreign policy.

Short of war, public interest in foreign policy would seem negligible. A national poll taken in October 1980 found that only 3 per cent of those surveyed viewed foreign policy as a major issue. Of course, had the term foreign policy been substituted with overseas debt, Japanese investment, Asian immigration, the greenhouse effect or disarmament, the response may well have been different. On the whole the media, too, has adopted an uneven approach to foreign policy. ABC television and radio and most of the so-called quality newspapers have specialist reporters covering the area. However, tabloid papers, commercial television and commercial radio devote little attention to serious foreign policy analysis. Aside from periods of major international crises, such as the war in the Persian Gulf, even a cursory glance at the Australian media’s daily output shows foreign policy coverage very much lagging behind domestic politics, sport and entertainment.

For Australians in 1991, the old and traditional answers will no longer suffice. ’Kith and kin’ attachments to the United Kingdom have less and less meaning. Anglo-Celtic migrant Australia, the very basis of foundation settlement and the predominant force in society until well after the Second World War, has been substantially diluted by the great waves of postwar Central European and Asian migration. Australia passed through war against fascism as one of the imperial allies with a relatively monolithic and native born population. In 1947 less than 10 per cent of its 7.5 million citizens were born elsewhere, and many of these were born in the United Kingdom anyway. At the last official census in 1981, over 20 per cent of its 14.9 million population was born overseas, and a minority of that astonishing figure were Anglo-Celtic (7.78 per cent). Australia was indeed becoming a ’new society’ with a vengeance. Combined with tourism, and an increasing awareness of its Asian regional context, Australians admitted to living in a plural society, almost as much indeed as official multicultural policy of government kept declaring.

Foreign policy has not been a matter of continuing concern in Australia: the professionals have given constant attention to it, but the public has normally been involved with it only when it was a matter of war or of problems involving allies. Raising the public temperature has been possible in such matters as the Vietnam War or the US alliance, but the disputes have not been of great importance in the body politic, though it matters greatly at times for such bodies as the Democratic Labor Party in its heyday, or the fringe leftist groups which are always a vocal part of the Australian political scene. Such a state of affairs is not accidental, but arises from the situation of a country which has no land-based boundaries with others, and so is not excited by territorial disputes or by the presence of its people as persecuted minorities in other countries; which is relatively homogeneous in its society, though multicultural to a certain degree; and which is greatly concerned with domestic issues. There is not much scope in such a situation for the quarrels with other countries (especially neighbours) which have traditionally provided elsewhere the stuff of an absorbing foreign policy and fuelled the fires of political indignation.

Australian–American relations had never been worse than they were in 1975. It was reasonable to expect that they would improve in 1976. The reason was simply the change of government in Canberra in December. Labor Prime Minister E. Gough Whitlam had been unquestionably sincere when he claimed in 1973 that his policies would bring the trans-Pacific relationship to a new maturity, and place it upon foundations firmer than those on which it had rested previously. The fact was that during his term of office the two nations drifted from one disagreement to another, interspersed with occasional confrontations.