Chapter 4 discusses the sign of the cross, another gesture with a long history going back to the early church. In the Middle Ages the cross was believed to have power to protect against evil, and was widely used both as a gesture of everyday blessing and in rituals and charms of healing. After the Reformation its use was discouraged, but it survived in the Prayer Book rite of baptism, where the minister was instructed to trace a cross on the child’s forehead. This necessitated a radical transformation in its meaning, removing the associations with exorcism and purification and redefining it simply as a symbol of allegiance to Christ. Yet the belief in the apotropaic power of the cross persisted in early modern England and was reflected both officially, in the ritual of the royal touch, and unofficially, in the use of the gesture as a form of protection against witchcraft. Even among theologians who regarded the cross as symbolic, there was still a sense that it was not ‘merely’ symbolic but retained some kind of operative power to effect change.

In a brief discussion of our key primary sources, we outline the necessary limits of our own investigation into an enormous and understudied archive, suggest ways in which the structure of the archive shaped our analysis and offer reflections that we hope will inspire future scholars to launch inquiries of their own.

The conclusion traces a history of religious gesture from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. This period saw major changes in gesture and bodily habitus which we could characterise in three ways. First, there is the decline of uniformity, that is, the gradual abandonment of attempts to enforce bodily uniformity as a means of social discipline, whether in religious worship or in other forms of collective social activity. Secondly, there is the process that sociologists have labelled the decline of deference, whereby individuals in the modern West are, for the most part, no longer required to kneel or bow to social superiors, or to use gestures of reverence in sacred spaces. Lastly, there is the decline of formality, a growing discomfort with formal ritual which could also be described in terms of interiority or individualism, as a belief that the mind rather than the body is the true locus of selfhood. In all these respects it would be rather easy to see the world of early modern religion described in this book as a world we have lost. But I want to argue that this model is unsatisfactory, or at least incomplete.

We explore the limits of conservative reform by unpacking the efforts of bonded labourers in the Cape between 1823 and 1826 to mobilise the Commission of Eastern Inquiry against the elaborate rules that governed the lives of people of colour. Hundreds of unfree people called on the commissioners to complain of systemic and personal abuse – more than any other colonial inquiry. And the commissioners opened their doors, recording unfree testimony and following up on most of the complaints that came before them. In the process, they performed a very important function of commissions everywhere – as emissaries of the king intimately supervising colonial governments and forging connections with new and old imperial subjects. Though they went to extraordinary efforts to follow up bonded complaint, Eastern Inquiry into the Cape failed, until extremely late in the day, to report their findings.

Returning to the recurrent theme of resilience, it is suggested that the ecological model of adaptive cycles helps to understand the responses of the post-antique world to crisis. Rather than rejecting the old model of civilisation based on cities, memories of the past are constantly used both as providing material for new adaptations, and as a way of associating contemporary realities with those of the classical world. The writings of the authors discussed in this book as seen as part of this process, of transmitting and adapting memories.

Chapter 6 shows how female subordination was expressed and symbolised through head-covering, following St Paul’s injunction that ‘the woman ought to have power on her head because of the angels’ (1 Cor. 11: 10). While some theologians, including Calvin, sought to reinterpret the text figuratively rather than literally, the Reformation never completely lost sight of the idea of the church building as a sacred space hallowed by the presence of the angels. This idea was taken up in the early seventeenth century by Laudian divines who used it to promote the gesture of bowing to the altar. More surprisingly, it was also supported by a handful of non-Laudian divines, including Joseph Mede and Paul Micklethwaite. This complicates the standard picture of the early Stuart church as divided between Laudians and their opponents, and suggests that the Laudians were tapping into a more widespread concern about declining standards of reverence in public worship. It also challenges the view that the Reformation witnessed a desacralisation of sacred space, by showing how the belief in the sacredness of churches not only persisted long into the early modern period but rested specifically on the notion of supernatural presence.

Chapter 6 explores the light cast on cities and their administration by the collection of administrative papyri from Italy from the fifth to seventh centuries. Frequently revolving round the sale or donation of property, they show the crucial role of local councils in registering such property transactions, and their relevance to the raising of local taxes. The same world emerges from the official correspondence of Pope Gregory at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries in which a network of links with cities emerges as the means of holding together the church. A collection of documents from French cities similar to the Ravenna papyri imply that city administrations remained essential to property transactions in Merovingian Gaul. Rather than seeing the city administrations that were an instrument of imperial rule as now irrelevant, the conscious retention of old structures suggests a process of adaptation to new conditions.

This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.

This introduction sets up our core findings about imperial inquiry and the British world in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It places imperial inquiry in the overlapping contexts of transforming modes of governmentality in Britain and changing ideas and practices of colonialism in the Age of Revolution. We outline the limitations of previous scholarly understandings both of this period and of the imperial commissions themselves. We also introduce the notion of ‘constructive conservatism’ as an entry point to understanding the vexed relationship between reform and reaction that characterised not only the Liverpool Administration (1812 – 1827) but also the wider context of Britain’s imperial meridian that would usher in a new phase of global history.

This chapter evinces that the engagement of Spanish imperial officials with distant societies utterly foreign to them was only possible thanks to the clever use of their networks of patronage. Patrons, clients, and brokers played a vital role in shaping the officials’ activities. By looking at some of these networks from an imperial perspective, new light is shed on how the culture of bounty and clientelism, which was based on personal and local linkages, adapted to the global dynamics and new geographies, thus facilitating the government of the empire, even in regions thousands of miles away from the core of those networks. Furthermore, the chapter shows that royal service was a familial endeavor, including, of course, the wives. Although often contradictory, the networks, goals, and means of the officials’ kin and those of the monarchy were interwoven and became almost indistinguishable.

This chapter traces how payments made by the laity to the Church changed across the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of the total amount of money given to the Church in the period, and of various attempts to formally regulate dues and fees on the part of the state, the Church, and sections of the laity, is followed by the analysis of some of the most fundamental, day-to-day methods of funding the Church and its personnel. This chapter traces first, at parish level, the evolution of Easter and Christmas dues payments and pew rents. Second, the varied funding of a raft of religious orders that emerged and grew in the period will be dealt with. Finally, the use of Sunday collections of various kinds and their connection to emerging national and international Catholic funding campaigns will be discussed. The key argument here is that this enormous diversification of the Church’s fundraising was a response to changes in the broader economy, including increased access to cash and growing consumption opportunities on the part of the laity.

The commission of inquiry into Ceylon (1829–31) which reported after the 1830 general election in England is a significant outlier in the broader story of imperial commissions called during the period of Liverpool’s administration. Changing metropolitan politics had enormous ramifications for the relatively new colonial subjects of Ceylon who, even more so than bonded labourers in the Cape, inundated commissioner Colebrooke with complaints about personal injustice and the failures of British rule. Commissioners Colebrooke and Cameron turned these complaints into a report for the times – the most Benthamite, uncompromising and radical recommendations given anywhere. Tellingly, significant reforms were implemented in Ceylon despite the trenchant opposition of Robert Wilmot Horton, former undersecretary of state in the Colonial Office, who, after Liverpool’s stroke, took it upon himself to hold the conservative line as Governor in Ceylon.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments and findings and argues for a global and synchronic study of the Spanish Empire to shed light on the nature and limits of imperial power and colonialism and their specific implementation, particularly in the case of Latin America.