The Afterword probes the afterlife of the practices of revivalism and mythologization that remade the sixteenth-century cityscape. Drawing on letters, pamphlets, and printed books that bound Palermo to Mexico, it traces the global exportation of the local cult of Saint Rosalia, a twelfth-century Norman noblewoman who eschewed her royal birthright in favor of the life of an ascetic. Rosalia’s instrumentalization in practices of colonial conversion by Jesuit missionaries dispatched to the Mexican hinterland in the early eighteenth century reveals not simply the persistence of Palermo’s past but its implication in the infrastructures of power that globalized the early modern world.

This chapter examines Herodotus’ fulsome praise of Scythia, arguing that Scythia serves as an explicitly political model of human flourishing. Herodotus’ treatment of Scythia emphasizes that it achieves freedom without domination. This underscores both the importance Herodotus grants freedom and the great difficulty of avoiding cyclical violence, the stark dichotomy between ruling and ruled that drives the endless acquisition of empire. I thus contextualize Herodotus’ signal praise of Scythia by exploring the role of violence and vengeance in the ecosystem of strife he depicts much of life as bound up in. But as much as Herodotus highlights how rare and important this achievement is, his treatment of Scythia also emphasizes its great costs. His Scythian subsection thus shows his nonideal model of human flourishing, how it captures the vices and virtues of any particular political model. This pairs it with his treatment of Athenian freedom.

The Persian invasions are one of the main subjects of the Histories. This chapter examines how Persian conventions craft a culturally mediated conception of the truth – one that reinforces both despotism and empire. This promotes a practice I term “despotic inquiry”: a practice of inquiry and judgment that insulates the inquirer’s own perspective from interrogation. This practice of inquiry – a sharp contrast from Herodotus’ own methods – limits political debate and spurs a restless expansion of empire. Despotic inquiry, however, can also harm the inquirer – from Cyrus’ inability to rest to the madness of Cambyses, the consequences of the psychology of despotism are manifold. Herodotus’ multigenerational account of the Persian despots allow for a more nuanced and careful account of the various ways the convention of despotism interacts with human nature.

Chapter 5 examines how the United States’ emergence as an overseas and imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century reshaped constitutional war powers, reinforcing the book’s claim that war powers are structured by strategic context and institutional practice. In the Spanish–American War, Congress’s power to declare war again proved a weak constraint; the central constitutional questions instead concerned expansion – who controlled the scope, geography, and ends of a conflict that quickly outgrew its initial justification. The chapter traces how presidential control over diplomacy, command, and military operations enabled decisions that transformed a limited war with Spain into an overseas empire, driven less by theories of unchecked executive power than by fast-moving military and geopolitical events beyond Congress’s reach. At the same time, the chapter challenges conventional accounts of presidential unilateralism by highlighting Congress’s most consequential role: sweeping legislative reforms of the Army and state militias. Statutes enacted between 1903 and 1916 fundamentally altered the federal–state balance of military authority by integrating the National Guard into the national war-powers system. Taken together, these developments demonstrate how American war powers adapted to imperial ambition through executive initiative abroad and legislative reengineering at home.

The Conclusion builds on the arguments contained in the chapters to consider the wider significance of this book’s findings. It demonstrates that as there has been hitherto no attempt to examine military history’s growth on its own terms, this has served to limit understanding of the development of British historical writing more broadly and the subject’s role in shaping responses to the First World War. When military history is incorporated, existing explanations of the nature and evolution of historical writing in Britain are shown to be problematic and incomplete as they do not account for either the topics covered or the methodological complexity of some of the subject’s subgenres. Equally, understanding the role military history played in the development of military thought in the army helps explain several aspects of the force’s decision-making at the outbreak of war in 1914. This chapter concludes by briefly outlining how military history’s evolution prior to the First World War shaped its subsequent development during the twentieth century.

Commercial opportunism played a central role in the development of popular military history after 1854. The potential readership for such material grew as the literacy rate of the public increased and as book markets in the colonies emerged. Declining book production costs and the general reading public’s greater awareness of current events, due to the emergence of a cheap popular press, further drove up demand. As a result, publishers and authors responded by producing ‘instant’ and serialised historical works on recent military events which were cheap and accessible. The popularity of this material led it to be used to influence the reading public’s understanding of military matters, defence policy and the British Empire. As the period progressed, the messaging popular military history contained underwent considerable change, reflecting the complexity of contemporary views on the British Army and empire.

The origins of British official history can be seen in its function as a means of serving the educational and professional needs of army officers. Initially, official history was produced for specialists within the military, such as staff officers and engineers. As it was intended to assist them in the planning and conduct of future campaigns, especially on the imperial frontier, it focused on providing information about logistics, not tactics. Given the growing press coverage of British operations, between 1879 and 1903 official accounts of campaigns placed a greater emphasis on defending the army and senior commanders from criticism. The controversial nature of this new approach not only resulted in the suppression of one official history but led to the government’s insistence that this type of work should only provide a straightforward campaign narrative to provide information on tactics, as per the Prussian approach. Nevertheless, official accounts did not fully mirror the Prussian method due to the unique requirements of the British case as information needed to be imparted to staff officers on the planning of imperial expeditions and on maritime operations.

Chapter 6 reads the Genesis stories of Nimrod (Gen 10:9-12) and Babylon (11:1-9) as anticipations of modern human biopower, tracing how the rise of cities and kingship signals the emergence of collective human dominance at scale. Focusing especially on the Tower of Babel, it argues that Genesis frames concentrated human power as a destabilizing, invasive force – one that God contains not through destruction but through dispersion, a dynamic uncannily realized in the modern global spread of humanity.

This chapter shows how Tacitus uses paradiastole throughout his oeuvre to put two different kinds of political language into dialogue: the language of liberty and the language of empire. By using speakers with different standpoints, such as Calgacus, Cerialis, and Otho, Tacitus shows how history-writing can foster dialogue and serve as political theory. The chapter also analyses the collapse of speech-acts at the start of Tiberius’ principate, Maternus’ speech in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus, and Tacitus’ narrative of civil war in Histories One.

This chapter examines the citizenship categories established during the British and the French empires. These categories effectively created imperial hierarchies of membership, determining how state power was to be exercised and the material benefits individuals could claim. How were these categories created and justified, and what role did laws and practices play in this process? What criteria were used to determine inclusion in or exclusion from these categories? What benefits and obligations were attached to them? In answering these questions, the chapter introduces core concepts that will be explored further in this book, such as allegiance and assimilation, which remain prevalent in contemporary French and United Kingdom citizenship regimes. The data for this chapter includes primary sources (legislation, parliamentary debates, case law) as well as secondary literature.

Citizenship deprivation is often justified on the grounds that it helps to combat terrorism. In the last of these historically contextualising chapters, we thus turn to the citizenship categories that pervade the counterterrorist state. As this chapter reveals, these categories include the ‘non-suspicious’ citizen, the citizen ‘at risk of becoming risky’, the ‘risky’ citizen, and the ‘dangerous’ citizen, with the terrorist being the dangerous citizen par excellence, all of whom enjoy different access to rights and duties in the counterterrorist state. I derive these categories in practice from a cross-reading of critical terrorism studies literature and the workings of the French and UK counterterrorist states in practice. By the counterterrorist state, I refer to a set of institutional reconfigurations that have made counterterrorism a permanent and everyday feature of state activities and regard security as the ‘first of liberties’, with implications for state and non-state actors alike. This chapter exposes how France and the UK became counterterrorist states, before discussing the creation of different categories of citizens and their practical effects.

What was Pahlavi Iran’s role in the 1974 declaration of the New International Economic Order? How does this history, largely ignored and dismissed, alter political theories of decolonization? The Pahlavi state’s diplomatic efforts from 1968 until the 1979 revolution were a reflection of Iran’s semi-colonial history. Iran occupied an intermediary posture alongside peers who espoused anticolonial visions of nondomination more recognizable as revolutionary. The state’s posture is illegible in regnant theories of decolonization. To see it, scholars must adopt methods attuned to imprecision. Pahlavi state diplomacy thus set the stage for a popular transnational revolutionary movement, which would assume an intermediary posture of its own.

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary study of empire, where material culture takes center stage. Emphasis is placed on the tangible features of this socio-economic, cultural structure, attending to everyday practices that shaped and defined the empire and its aims, evading or working against that power. A theorized fashion is foundational to this study and diverse fashion-actors as well. The creative persistence of colonized and racialized communities is highlighted. Themes are outlined to be explored in later chapters: the cultural weight of whitewashing, entangled with a whiteness agenda, and the initiatives of Black laundresses, seamstresses and fashion-makers in the Caribbean; the advent of trousers as a genteel imperial fashion, birthed from maritime, plebeian roots; the determined self-directed travel of sailors, Black servants, men and women; and the material politics of British masquerades. These topics may surprise or unsettle expected narratives, with themes involving women and men, free and unfree, of diverse ethnicities, with subaltern agency centre stage.

This chapter studies H. G. Wells’s integration of climate control as the atmospheric background of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia. In the Victorian period, dubbed the Crystal Age, British engineers such as Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (case), John Claudius Loudon (conservatory), and Joseph Paxton (palace) all built glasshouse structures, increasingly fit for human inhabitation, hoping to construct the climatological statis of eternal summer on a regional scale. Engaging with the aesthetic, architectural, and ideological development, the chapter argues that Wells examined the anthropogenic climate of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia in the short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), the novella The Time Machine (1895), and the novel A Modern Utopia (1905), speculatively thematising the long-term socio-biological consequences of the planetary greenhouse.

All The Seas Were Ink wends its way with Abu Bakar, giving us a new and moving vantage point on the making of Muslim statehood, international order, and empire, and within these the central, improvisatory, and translative role that law, legal text and institutions would play. Abu Bakar’s itineraries generated what is still the longest continuously running modern experiment in Islamic constitutional statehood in the world. His travels ended with the first constitution in Southeast Asia, and within it, one of the world’s earliest constitutional declarations of Islam as the religion of the state.

The introduction establishes the book’s central argument: the German nation-state was shaped not only by domestic dynamics but also by its colonial empire. Rather than treating empire and the nation-state as incompatible forms of political organisation, the chapter situates them within a shared global constellation and underscores their historical interdependence. Moving beyond debates that focus exclusively on colonial legacies that mirror colonial structures – such as racism and global inequality – it argues that we must also attend to structural effects of empire that assumed different forms, thereby concealing their colonial origins. The European nation-state exemplifies this apparent paradox: historically shaped by overseas empire building yet appearing as its polar opposite. Against this backdrop, the chapter critically engages with scholarship ranging from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on imperialism to more recent debates on global entanglements, while advancing a mechanism-based approach. Its key conceptual innovation is to introduce challenge and response as a mechanism through which crises in the colonies prompted reforms in the metropole that contributed to the consolidation of the nation-state.

We broaden the scope of discussion, drawing from post-colonial and socio-legal studies, legal history, and the study of Indian Ocean Islam, to explore travelling Muslim legal imaginaries. The book closes with polyphony’s epistemic and political possibilities: a method for reading law, and a response to monist narratives of law and its authority, under empire and in its aftermath. A method attendant to the travels of law is therefore also an approach attentive to the operations of institutional memory and institutional forgetting.The Epilogue brings us into the present, to indicate how a renewed attention to polyphony as method, and as political approach, may be generative of ways to reconsider travelling legal imaginaries in the contemporary Muslim world: their maps and networks, misreadings and translations, and their nested sovereignties.