Part one describes Genoa’s origins. It has four chapters. Chapter one explains who the first founders and builders of the city were. Chapter two relates how Janus, first king of Italy, constructed and built Genoa. Chapter three relates how Janus, a citizen of Troy, expanded and improved the original foundation. Chapter four relates how the god Janus, an idol of the Romans, was once venerated in Genoa.

This chapter discusses the foundation and transformation of medical societies in the Southern Netherlands from the late eighteenth century to 1840. It explores, how the model of eighteenth-century learned societies, like other institutions of the Ancien Régime such as universities, was refashioned into a new, uniquely medical institution. Central to this refashioning was the transformation of societies’ focus on usefulness to the general public ‒ an ideal that was typical of late eighteenth-century learned culture ‒ into a more concrete promotion of science among a newly conceived professional community of physicians. The chapter analyzes shifts in societies’ membership, mission and social role against the background of shifting political regimes (respectively the Austrian, French, Dutch and Belgian authorities), which paralleled successive stages of medical reform.

This chapter analyzes the participation of public health experts in nineteenth-century medical societies. It examines societies’ relation to urban politics and professional medical organizations by scrutinizing how these experts mediated between the worlds of science and politics, making use of medical societies in the process. The general line that runs through the chapter is a shift in the way expertise in public health was framed in the course of the century. Early and mid-nineteenth-century experts conceived of their work as the voluntary, philanthropic work of engaged citizens. For them, medical societies formed a vehicle through which they could express such citizenship. State investments in public health gradually brought forth a new class of public health professionals in the second half of the century. These new experts stressed the scientific grounding of their studies to differentiate them from popular works or lobbying efforts. Participation in urban medical societies, which increasingly defined themselves as ‘scientific’ institutions as opposed to professional organizations, allowed them to realize their ambitions. The label of public health studies as a form of ‘applied science’ proved helpful to convince both medical colleagues and politicians.

The chapter discusses the role of the UK in supporting African Union (AU) peace and security structures, particularly the AU’s Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), since 2010. It argues that UK Governments – especially that led by Tony Blair (1997–2007) – gave Africa policy a high profile characterised inter alia by a desire to build the capacity of African states and institutions. Nevertheless, the chapter also notes that since the year 2010, when the Labour Party lost power, tensions, contradictions and ambiguities in the UK–AU/APSA relationship have emerged, partly exacerbated by the continued illegal immigration of Africans to Europe, and the UK intervention in Libya in 2011 in total disregard of African views on the matter.

This chapter is based on a close study of the memoirs and diaries of Alexei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin (1848–1925), appointed Governor-General of Turkestan in August 1916 and tasked with suppressing the 1916 revolt. It shows that Kuropatkin was heavily influenced by his memories of the Russian campaigns of conquest in Central Asia, in which he had participated as a young man in the 1860s–1880s, and by the imagined legacy of the first Turkestan Governor-General, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1818–1882). This helps to explain the disproportionate use of force and violence by Russian forces in suppressing the revolt.

The revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia was an important part of the First World War and the crisis of imperial globalization. Despite this, it remains little-known and understudied in Anglophone and Francophone scholarship. While there is a rich legacy of Soviet-era publications on the revolt in Russian, these usually bear the strong ideological imprint of the period when they were produced. The post-Soviet period has seen a flowering of new scholarship from Central Asia itself, some of it in Central Asian languages. While much of this continues to use paradigms and terminology inherited from the Soviet period, and interprets the revolt in a series of narrow national frameworks, some of it is also making use of new types of sources, and uncovering voices that were often silent in earlier scholarship – most notably those of the rebels themselves, and the revolt’s many victims. This introduction will give a brief overview of the overall course of the revolt, review the existing historiography, suggest some of the unanswered questions that remain, and explore the new approaches found in the most recent publications and among the contributors to this volume.