This chapter provides a succinct overview of pre-1945 developments. Examining developments since antiquity, it stresses that the idea of ‘Europe’ did not acquire any meaningful place in ordinary people’s lives until the twentieth century. Only after the devastation of the First World War did the concept of Europe and European integration become relevant to broader sections of the population, with the emergence of ideas of political and economic cooperation. As well as liberals, the far right also talked about building Europe. It took the Second World War to move European integration from the sphere of the thinkable to the realm of the politically doable. Still, the road ahead remained rocky, and conflicting ideas and projects emerged. The earliest predecessor of today’s European Union – the ECSC – was a latecomer and built on the experience of a whole host of international organisations created between 1945 and 1950.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

The forces of history have weighed on the Framers’ constitutional design. Their extended republic has grown geographically but shrunk in terms of transportation and communication. Representation as a filter of popular passions and the extended republic as a protection against majority faction have been less effective than the Framers anticipated. Significant changes to the Framers’ design by amendment, interpretation, and practice have also created openings for the influence of political factions.

Reforming Politics and Reform as Politics

The commissioner of excise asked his subordinates to gather information about the liquor Indians preferred most in the Presidency of Fort St George in 1905. He also wrote to laboratories to clarify whether toddy was indeed ‘a completely innocuous liquor containing a large proportion of food material’. Major Charles H. Bedford's report concluded that most of the toddy being consumed in the province was at an advanced fermentation stage. Samples sent for laboratory testing had revealed a high proportion of fusel oil – a known cause of indigestion, dysentery and rheumatism. With the hydrometer's use in testing the proof strength of alcoholic drinks in mid-eighteenth-century England, utilising technology to regulate alcohol had become an exercise in building public trust. The hydrometer's subsequent use to test and establish the proof strengths of different country liquors in India was comparable but much more significant in its impact. It demonstrates the colonial state's determination to penetrate an indigenous industry in order to bring it into alignment with Western scientific technologies, processes and practices. Remarkably, the Congress leadership would similarly show interest in ascertaining toddy's nutritional properties. As the president of the Prohibition League of India (PLI), Rajaji wrote to the heads of the Tropical School of Medicine in Calcutta and the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor in 1931. He sought to verify that ‘to drink beer in order to ensure efficient enzyme action in the body (was) as unnecessary as to drink toddy in order to ensure a sufficient supply of Vitamin B’.

This chapter argues how Ignatius Sancho’s oeuvre, his reception in the literary world, and his enduring legacy in the arts generate an important set of counter-representations to imperial representations of Black life. While providing an overview of the volume’s essays and its organization, this chapter argues how Sancho’s epistolary writing speaks to Black life-worlds beyond the British political terms of debates on equality and abolition. Although Sancho’s writings and presence in the public sphere have been absorbed into broader narratives of imperial power and prestige, his oeuvre and documentations of his influence (past and present) exhibit rare representations of Black life across a variety of social spaces, beyond the terms of servitude and enslavement. While many early public representations of Black life in England were translated for the racializing gaze of a predominantly white readership, Sancho’s self-representation through the arts (alongside subsequent critical and creative reception of his work) reveal complex patterns and particularities in African diasporic experiences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Americans of all political stripes are becoming increasingly frustrated with the partisanship of present-day politics. Democrats and Republicans alike claim mandates on narrow margins of victory and are quick to condemn their opponents as enemies of the public good. The Framers of the Constitution understood that such divisions are rooted in the political factions inherent in democracy. Their solutions were federalism, the separation of powers, bicameralism, judicial review, and other structural constraints on majority rule. Over the course of US history, some of those constraints have been eroded, as American politics have become more democratic and less respectful of the liberties and freedoms the Framers sought to protect. American Factions advocates for a renewed understanding of the problem of political factions and a restoration of the Constitution’s limits to revive a politics of compromise and bipartisanship.

Since the 1970s, the security landscape of the Gulf has been shaped by a series of transformative events, including the Iranian Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, the US invasion of Iraq and shifting global energy dynamics. More recently, factors such as the rise of non-state actors, geopolitical rivalries, economic volatility, and the COVID-19 pandemic have further complicated the regional security calculus. These developments have profoundly influenced the threat perceptions and strategic priorities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, reinforcing the region’s centrality in broader Middle Eastern security debates.

This chapter examines the evolution of Gulf security by engaging with classical debates, updating key conceptual frameworks, and categorising threats into external, internal, and ‘intermestic’ dimensions. By applying these analytical lenses, the chapter explores the most pressing contemporary security challenges facing the GCC, offering a comprehensive assessment of the shifting regional order and its implications for both policy-makers and scholars of security and regional studies.

The governance of politics, the economy and security has evolved in the Gulf States since independence. State formation describes the process by which states have grown in capacity and resources for the governance of different public policy areas: security, economic welfare and political representation. Theoretical approaches to state formation propose to look at war-making and resource mobilisation as drivers of this. However, war-making has in the Middle East often destroyed states, rather than helped build them. Moreover, rulers of the Gulf States have benefited from abundant revenues from oil and gas that have allowed them to govern without the need to mobilise domestic revenues. The specific governance model that has emerged is described as a rentier state bargain. Rulers are expected to ensure security, provide welfare and allow for representation of their citizens. This chapter describes the evolution of these processes in the Gulf States, including how certain societal groups have been central in state formation. The chapter also discusses expectations for a social contract beyond the rentier bargain.

During 1917–1918, the trans-European crisis of the war and its ending brought variable patterns of regime instability, popular insurgency, and revolutionary collapse. Most dramatically affected were the defeated countries (Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary), along with Italy, who ended on the winning side disappointingly. After great confrontational divisiveness and civil violence, outcomes varied from successful revolutionary insurrection (Russia), through fraught stabilization within republican-democratic frameworks (Germany, Austria), to violently repressive counter-revolution (Hungary, Italy). In western and northern Europe, victor powers (France, Britain, Belgium) and neutrals (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) underwent versions of democratic strengthening and substantial reform. These outcomes produced new political fields of polarized enmities and mostly fragile consensus that vitally shaped the 1930s.

This chapter examines the foreign policies of the Gulf states, including members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Iraq and Iran. It systematically evaluates three primary contextual dimensions that exert influence on the formulation of foreign policy within the Gulf region, namely the domestic, regional and international arenas. Furthermore, this chapter delves into the application of key international relations theories, including realism, neorealism, liberalism and constructivism, as frameworks for explaining the external behaviour of Gulf states. While realist and neorealist perspectives offer valuable insights into the Gulf states’ behaviour, particularly regarding threat perceptions and power dynamics, alternative theoretical paradigms offer different analyses that contribute to our understanding of Gulf politics. Since their inception, the Gulf states adopted diverse strategies aimed at ensuring their survival, including strategic hedging, omni-balancing and bandwagoning. Therefore, this chapter explains the evolution of Gulf states’ foreign policies, tracing their progress from the reliance on external powers, mainly the US, to having greater autonomy and confidence in the pursuit of their own interests.