How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

Agustín de Iturbide was a renowned Spanish American military man who switched sides and led his Army of the Three Guarantees to declare Mexico’s independence in 1821. Within a year, Iturbide was forced off the throne and sent into exile on the condition that he never return. The ex-Emperor quickly broke his promise and traveled to London, where he spent four months conspiring with politicians, merchants, and bankers. He departed for Mexico in May 1824 and was executed soon after landing. Iturbide’s interregnum in London was significant – for the future direction of the young Mexican state, for political debates about recognition, for relations with Spain and the Holy Alliance, and for those merchants who were interested in Mexican markets and silver. This chapter describes the lived experience of a prominent exile whose fate was closely followed on three continents and offers a case study of the exile experience during the Age of Revolutions.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

The diametrically opposed outcomes of the Reformation in England and France have led historians to presume that there were significant differences in their religious situations before the Reformation that help account for that ultimate divergence. This chapter argues that any such presumption is wide of the mark. Not only were the supposed ‘preconditions’ for the success of the Reformation in England (such as Renaissance humanism, anticlericalism and church-state tension) more evident in France, but the early diffusion of Reformation teachings was swifter and more widespread there as well. Although in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation received increasing royal support in England but not in France, that early progress was insecure and was briefly reversed. Decisive divergence between the two realms in this regard began only around 1560, and in each of them the outcome might still have been different under other circumstances. The ultimate outcomes reflected the interplay of political contingency with pre-existing differences not in religious experience but in political structures and political culture, which put the English monarchy in a position to impose its will upon the English nation, but left the French monarchy less able not only to impose change but also to suppress it.

In this chapter, we explore how the transfer of power between the monarch and the prime minister occurred, when it happened, how the monarchy survived, the importance it still has in Britain, and how far the prime minister has effectively become the head of state as well as head of executive. The monarchy continued to exercise real authority for the first 200 years of the prime minister’s existence and beyond, up to today. The rebalancing of power was painful, faltering, and contested. Scratch below the surface, and the relationship between head of state and head of government has been far from settled. The continued existence of an independent prime minister was not a given in the eighteenth century. The continued existence of the monarchy until today has not been a given either. It had been abolished in Britain in 1649, as it was in France in 1792 (and 1848 and 1870), Germany in 1918, and Italy in 1946. It would have been vulnerable in Britain had there been military defeat or successful revolution: its continuation into the future is not assured. Monarchies are going out of fashion. Britain’s has held strong.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The assassination of the False Smerdis in Book 3 and the ensuing constitutional uncertainty offer Herodotus an inflection point to pause and consider the institution of monarchy in Persia in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. This chapter reexamines the speeches given by the conspirators in advance of the coup and its aftermath. In these episodes, Darius undermines a key nomos held by the Persians, their abhorrence of falsehood. Darius does so as a private citizen but given his subsequent rise to the throne, this invites comparison with the Great Kings. Darius’ disregard for nomos opens a philosophical debate on human motivation and self-interest. In a speech to the Persian conspirators, the future monarch defends "egoism," the philosophy that all action is performed to maximize the individual’s self-interest. This view is set alongside orations by the Persians Otanes and Prexaspes, exponents of cooperative action and altruism, respectively. The chapter argues that fifth-century intellectual culture engaged in a spirited interrogation of the individual in relation to self-interest, often in terms of the social contract. The clash between motivation on behalf of the one versus the many will illustrate the complex negotiation in Persia of ruler and ruled, self and society.

This chapter investigates the peculiar human habit of attributing political qualities to honeybees. It shows that by distinguishing a ‘queen bee’ from ‘workers’ we continue a tradition that has its roots in classical antiquity and in Aristotle’s inclusion of honeybees among the zōa politika (the ‘political animals’). The chapter asks why honeybees ‘need’ politics and why human politics ‘needs’ honeybees. The answer to these questions in the context of the ancient world shows what is at stake in current attempts to draw lines between humans and other social animals. The chapter shows that for the purpose of theorizing about human politics as well as in the scientific study of the natural world itself, to naturalize often means to normalize. The chapter shows that this frequently occurs in ways that resonate with what has been called ‘the naturalist fallacy’: the idea that because something occurs in nature it is by definition good.

By way of a firm case study for the new system of royal justice in action, Chapter 3 provides the first history of the Court of Requests from its initial entry in the historical records in 1483 through to its settlement at Westminster by the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The origin of this tribunal is located in the practice of receiving petitions during royal progresses, particularly in the reign of Richard III. Thereafter, Requests was part of the itinerant household, following Henry VII and Henry VIII as they travelled around their dominions. It only acquired a more defined timetable, judiciary, and seat at Westminster in the 1530s, when it became subject to ministerial reform programmes. Importantly, this evolution to courthood was neither smooth nor linear: its business levels peaked and troughed, it could seemingly always revert to acting on the road, and it was rarely referred to by the name ‘Court of Requests’. With these interpretive challenges in mind, this chapter argues that, contrary to administrative historians’ tendencies to identify positive development in improved bureaucracy, Requests’ flexibility and proximity to the king’s person was advantageous to petitioners.

This chapter synthesizes the history of the monarchy in Brazil from the Portuguese court’s 1807 exile to Rio de Janeiro to the end of the Regency in 1840. It addresses the European threats to the Portuguese monarchy, its successes in Brazil, and its adaptation to the Atlantic revolutionary era. It focuses on the actions of two monarchs, João VI and Pedro, João’s heir in both the old Portuguese kingdom and the new Brazilian one, which Pedro made independent and transformed into the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. It goes on to discuss Pedro I’s struggle (1822-1831) for domination against the Brazilian elite, and the results, through the Regency (1831-1840) following Pedro I’s abdication. Of particular significance in all of this are international and social issues bound up with the continued expansion of African slavery and its Atlantic trade. In both the diplomacy between João VI and his crucial English allies, the abolition of that trade loomed large. It was central, too, in the struggles between Pedro I and his parliamentary opposition. Indeed, slavery’s maintenance as foundational to the economy, the society, and those who dominated both, as well as the state, is made clear in analyzing the monarchy’s politics during 1822-1840. Slavery affected the monarchy’s survival, transformation, and the nature of party formation and ideology in the constitutional monarchy that emerged by 1840.

This chapter offers a narrative and an analysis of the process of independence in Brazil between 1807 and 1831 from a general perspective, but with a still little-known focus: the influences this process received from Spanish America, which, during the same period, was also becoming independent. The narrative follows the flow of the most relevant political and social events in both realms, revealing how Spanish America as a whole and its many regions in particular were “read” in Brazil, and how the country created its political options, among other factors, from its continental neighborhood, then becoming independent from Portugal and starting its formation as a sovereign state and nation. Far from the traditional – and still current – idea of Brazil as an exception in the American context of the nineteenth century, the ways in which Brazil and Spanish America shared a scenario and historical unity are shown, which cannot be properly understood separately. In addition to that, the drawing of this common plot will be developed with a general description of the inverse movement, lesser known in the historiography, i.e., of how Brazilian independency impacted parts of Spanish America.

Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. “In the beginning was the Reich,” declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, “that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has … its origin.” Winkler’s judgment reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany’s premodern “state,” the empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers.

England promulgated more laws of significance about religion than any nation in the Early Modern period in large part because of England’s break from the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII and the inconsistent relationship that Henry VIII’s successors had with that church. The colonies chronicled in this book were planted primarily by English persons with an aversion to English laws that adversely impacted their religious beliefs and practices. Given the book’s emphasis on law, it is appropriate to provide a brief history of the English laws from which the planters of colonial America were fleeing. The Introduction sets the stage for the chapters about colonial America that follow.

The chapter analyses the Laudian critique of puritanism as politically subversive of both monarchical and episcopal authority. Puritanism was portrayed by the Laudians as an ideology organised around ‘popularity’. This word denoted two things: firstly, the search for popular approval and applause, to be gained by a rabble-rousing espousal of singularity and an unprincipled criticism of those in power in church and state, and secondly, institutional arrangements – in the church, presbyterianism, and, in the state, an enhanced role for parliament – that subjected the rulers to the whims and opinions of the people. The organising trope was the puritan as a firebrand or incendiary, or alternatively as a malcontent tribuni plebis, with frequent either glancing or direct references being made to the so-called puritan triumvirs, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne.

In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.