Federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism, the electoral college, judicial review, constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the relative difficulty of amendment have all helped limit the influence of political factions.

Although everything we know about Ignatius Sancho’s early life comes to us from a short biographical sketch written by the lawyer Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) as a preface to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African (1782), much of this is unsubstantiated and some appears improbable, exaggerated, or even invented. This chapter accordingly offers a critical reassessment and attempts a historical reconstruction of Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho.” It offers a possible version of events that may explain Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s childhood journey from Cartagena to London. It argues, however, that the challenge of verifying much of “The Life” remains insurmountable at present and we can better understand “The Life” as a rhetorical intervention in the early phase of the British abolition campaign rather than as an unproblematic record of historical events. Jekyll’s “Life” may offer the reader, this chapter concludes, a moral rather than a literal truth.

This chapter speaks of Sancho’s meaning to me as a Black Briton. It is also about his general place in the pantheon of Black British figures. I write about belonging and Sancho because it is at the heart of the reason to study a life such as his. Knowing about this Black Briton and his eighteenth-century world can impact on Black lives lived in the UK today. Sancho’s legacy is his engagement with the world of his time and the mirror of that engagement in ours. Artistic, political, and domestic history is interwoven with personal views on a figure who made his compromises and his accommodations in a world not designed for him or people like him. My chapter seeks to unearth a little talked about and less known subject, which is Britain’s deep and exceptionally involved participation in the human trafficking of millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. I conclude with highlighting the positive, contemporary manifestations of interest in Sancho and his world.

This chapter provides an examination of the documentary evidence for Charles Ignatius Sancho’s life and career as a servant in the household of the Dukes of Montagu. It is based on archive sources, with particular focus on the archive of the Duke of Buccleuch and the papers of his ancestors, John 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690–1749) and George Duke of Montagu (1712–1790).

Chapter 4 examines the changes from 1992 to 2009, a period that was characterised by the end of the Cold War. The focus is on examining how the EU became a politicised actor with increasing public visibility. The study analyses the most important developments of this period chronologically, including the introduction of the euro, the Schengen Agreement, several rounds of enlargement, and the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Both the institutional reforms and their social and political effects are considered. While considerable successes were achieved in economic integration and geographical enlargement, fundamental problems remained unresolved: incomplete institutional structures (especially in monetary and political union), growing social inequalities due to the neoliberal agenda, and a growing democratic deficit. These developments laid the foundations for the crises that were to shake the EU in the following decades. The period exemplifies the tensions between economic integration and political legitimacy, between enlargement and deepening, and between national sovereignty and supranational governance that still characterise European integration today.

This chapter examines the European Union's (EU) promotion of regional integration and inter-regionalism in the context of the Joint Africa-EU Strategic (JAES) Partnership. It considers the rationale behind the EU's adoption of regional integration as external policy and how or whether this defines the EU as a normative actor. The chapter also considers the JAES in detail, identifying the historical origins and the objectives of strategic partnership, the institutional architecture and the respective principal regional actors, and the challenges and limitations of the partnership. It focuses on the case of joint cooperation to develop the provision of infrastructure on the African continent, followed by a review of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) as intra- and inter-regional integration agreements. The chapter concludes with a summary of the prospects and limitations of the JAES as a case of inter-regionalism and as a concrete initiative to promote security and development in Africa.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

After 1917–1923, Europe’s polities varied across democracy and dictatorship. The agrarian east and south passed under dictatorship: Iberia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece. Liberal constitutionalism lasted in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. In Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia democratic republics faced polarized political cultures. Italy was fascist; the USSR socialist. Corporatism – government-brokered convergence of organized interests – shaped constitutional states, above all in Scandinavia, with its strong labor movements. Corporatism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was inflected by social democracy, but in societies riven by liberal-conservative enmities and religious, regional or ethno-cultural cleavage. Fascism beckoned as an extreme remedy for chronic parliamentary instability, where leftist defense impeded capitalist stabilization. Nazism and its state mapped onto this topography. Via the Belgian Plan de Man, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War, the polarizing fallout from rightwing radicalization cast western Europe into crisis.