This chapter will highlight the crucial role of the Nicaragua Canal route in the ambitions of American filibusters Henry Kinney and William Walker, as well as the route’s centrality to the clash between Central American republics and the filibusters in the region’s guerra nacional. Ultimately, the short but frenetic period of filibustering in Nicaragua had several enduring consequences both for the fate of the canal route and the “Mosquito question.” While the war disrupted transit activities and undermined dreams of building a canal through Nicaragua, it also paradoxically speeded up the process of settlement of the Mosquito question as metropolitan governments realized that the longer the status of the Mosquito region remained unresolved, the more prone it would be to filibustering enterprises.

Distilling an extensive literature on the First and Second Great Reform Acts, Chapter 3 argues how the Whig view of the period – a view that still largely informs political science research today – overstates both the progressive ideology of reformers and the democratizing effects of the two bills. It also includes two periods that are difficult to fit into a reformist narrative and are subsequently downplayed in most accounts of the English democratization. The first is the several decades of political reaction marked by the crushing of the Luddite movement (1811–1813), the massacre at Peterloo (1819), and the passing of the Six Acts (1819). The second is the repression of the Chartist movement between 1834 and 1848. Both episodes reveal how the British state generally responded to mass protests demanding political change. Rather than conceding to the demands of would-be revolutionaries, the state developed its coercive forces – most notably the police and the Home Office – to meet the new challenge. Even after the Second Great Reform Bill of 1867, political elites still felt they had largely dodged democracy.

This chapter will discuss the dramatic developments that enabled the Nicaragua route to become a serious contender to the Panama route in the early 1850s and its equally theatrical decline due to the bombing of its main port Greytown in the context of Anglo-American rivalries. While the bombardment exemplified U.S. gunboat diplomacy, the context of U.S. expansionism added a veneer of legitimacy to the act of destruction. In the aftermath of the bombardment, Nicaragua, which had entered the mid-century with dreams of a canal supported by American enterprise and money, plunged into a period of deep disillusionment and civil war.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

Chapter 6 moves the discussion on from the overview of local history-writing in Chapter 5 and takes a different perspective by considering whether pre-modern Muslims conceptualised local history-writing as something distinct from other ways of writing history. It deals with the ways history was (relatively rarely) fitted into ideas about the classification of knowledge, with works dedicated to explaining and justifying history’s importance as a discipline, with the evidence for whether local historians saw themselves as working within a larger tradition, and with what evidence there is for readers’ appreciations of local history as a distinct type of history-writing. The chapter ends by identifying some works of local history as having been particularly influential, including al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī’s history of Nishapur and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s history of Baghdad.

Pablo Neruda had complex relations to his multiple precursors. They belonged to various periods, from Dante’s Middle Ages to the present time, with Gabriela Mistral. They also belonged to varied cultural and linguistic spheres: early modern Spanish poets loomed large (Ercilla, Quevedo), but so did a number of French poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud, or the American Walt Whitman. This chapter aims to map out these spheres of influence and understand the various ways in which Neruda engaged with his precursors. He “negotiated his debts” (a phrase he used for Whitman) in commentaries, homages, and quotes, but also in complex intertextual operations. While he easily discussed the poets he admired, he also emulated them so as to find his place in certain traditions (especially in his love poetry) or used them for political purposes.