The evolution of European Union (EU)-Africa relations should be set against two tracks. The first track concerns the programme managed by the European Commission. In this case, the most important change is certainly the adoption of the Cotonou Agreement, which marked a fundamental departure from the principles of the long-standing Lomé Convention. The second track concerns the attempt to create a continent-wide policy towards Africa, under the slogan 'one Europe, one Africa', which started with the first Africa-EU Summit held in Cairo in April 2000. This chapter presents some key concepts of this book. The book describes three widely held assumptions about the role of the EU in Africa: incoherent policies, asymmetrical partnership, declining relevance. It focuses on some of the 'internal' challenges the EU faces to implement a coherent approach towards Africa.

Staging the cultural consequences of a new metropolitan modernity, the 1920s were shaped around two massive fields of experience: on the one hand, the passage from utopian expectancies of the immediate postwar period (1918–1923) to peacetime socio-cultural normalizing (1923–1929); on the other hand, the new urban sensibility, with all of its exuberance and anxieties. Darkly shadowing each was the long-lasting trauma of the Great War: the pall of the war-dead and the war-disabled; the management of human catastrophe and personal loss. Each also produced extraordinary creativity across the arts and intellectual life. Across Europe, the brashness of big-city life underscored the urban–rural divides, creating a new topography of the imagination. Resulting debates pitted the religious against the secular, the traditional against the modern. This chapter maps the European variations in organized religion; in churchgoing and vernacular faith-related practices; and in the growing separation of belief and belonging. In notably spectacular form, Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s exemplified each of these themes.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

Total war meant unprecedented intrusion of states into the patterns and practices of economic and social life, with massive consequences for the structure of industry, organization of the labor process, and regulation of labor markets. New triangulations among government, employers, and unions settled into institutionalized arrangements of corporatism. Persuasive public discourses of “war socialism” and the “socialized state at war” captured those logics. Together, mass conscription of men and economic mobilization of women regendered the character and perceptions of work, employment, family, and citizenship. By 1917–1918, the intensified hardships of warmaking, both militarily and on the home front, brought impending societal collapse. Collective action – in strikes and shopfloor militancy; mutinies and desertion; food shortages and urban protests – threw political order into crisis.

Locating Prohibition's Origins in Colonial India

India is the only country in the world to have prohibition written into its national constitution as an ideal. Article 47 of the Constitution of India establishes that ‘the state shall undertake rules to bring about prohibition of the consumption, except for medicinal purposes, of intoxicating drinks and of drugs which are injurious to health’. Although the state is obligated to implement the policy, there is no compulsion to do so within a stipulated time frame, which makes it a Directive Principle of State Policy – an ideal. As much a national ideal as an instrument of state power, prohibition's fate has been entwined with the rise and fall of state governments since the country's independence.

Prohibition has also spawned its own political economy in India, with a broad spectrum of political parties professing commitment – though usually short-lived – to its enforcement. The specific circumstances of its introduction have varied across the country, as have the policy's trajectories and outcomes. Local cultures, economic circumstances and the demands of state governance have directly contributed to these differences. Besides Gujarat, which has enforced prohibition since 1947 despite a series of hooch-related tragedies and other controversies, Bihar, Mizoram and Nagaland are all ‘dry’ states at the time of this book's writing. Alcohol is all but banned in the union territory of Lakshadweep, although prohibition has been greatly contested in recent years. The association between prohibition and M. K. Gandhi has been the strongest in Gujarat, whereas evangelical Christianity paved the way for the policy's introduction in Nagaland. Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Manipur and Haryana have all tried prohibition on for size at various times since independence, only to suspend it as better suited for implementation at an unspecified time in the distant future. Crippling fiscal deficits and a strong liquor lobby heralded prohibition's termination in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala respectively.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

The fifth chapter examines the European Union’s course correction since the late 2000s, which is characterised by a paradigm shift away from market-oriented liberalisation towards a comprehensive security orientation. Empirically, the chapter is dedicated to EU crisis management between 2009 and 2025, examining key events such as the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. The analysis considers both institutional changes and the development of political narratives and priorities. It identifies a third major transformation of European integration, after those of the 1950s and the 1970s/80s. This change was brought about not by planned reforms, but by crisis-driven adjustments. The new security orientation reflects both the loss of post-Cold War optimism and the realisation that the EU must act in an increasingly dangerous world. While this transformation has strengthened the EU’s ability to survive, questions remain about the democratic legitimacy and effectiveness of the new security architecture.

First dramatically, then with ever-growing complexity, World War I began a long-running, openly contentious reordering of gender relations, gender understandings, and public gender regimes. Mobilization for total war articulated men’s citizenship to soldiering; women’s to motherhood. Harnessed to family in multifarious ways, each profoundly altered and strengthened belonging in the nation. Those processes of regendering shaped interwar public policy across multiple spheres: welfare provision and social services; broader social policy and public health; regulation of sexuality and reproductive rights; education and public morality. While presenting across Europe as common exigencies and desiderata, in democratic polities no less than in fascist regimes or the Soviet Union, this welfarist political complex varied markedly with different types of polity. The “front experience” became processed by many younger veterans and aspiring soldiers into a militarized outlook of aggressively misogynist, heedlessly violent, and empathy-purged masculinity.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

Religion shapes Gulf politics in different ways depending on the country under consideration but also the shifting socio-historical circumstances at the domestic and the regional levels. Religion has been used as a tool of state-building by Saudi Arabia. Alternatively, it has also been used by Islamist movements for the contestation of established regimes. In societies that are diverse religiously, sectarian divides between various currents of Islam have been politicised more often than not. Religion has also been an important element of the international soft power of Gulf states. In the twenty-first century, Gulf states have promoted ‘moderate Islam’ as a way to counter Islamist movements and to consolidate their international standing.