This chapter examines scholarship in Islamic studies affirming Islam’s status as the symbolic “other” of Western modernity. The 1978 double upheaval of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran transfigured popular and academic representations of Islam in the West. But the transformation that Orientalism precipitated, as scholars like Richard C. Martin have argued, has gone politically and intellectually astray. Contemporary scholars’ romanticization of Islamist rejections of modernity confuses regressive ideas concerning culture, tradition, and family values with radicalism. The chapter traces this new orthodoxy to earlier thinkers like Henri Corbin, which Steven M. Wasserstrom described as “religion after religion.” We examine the work of Omid Safi, Talal Asad, Bruce Lawrence, Hossein Nasr, and Marshall Hodgson. We also discuss a second intellectual current emanating from the Left, whose popularity was made possible by the twentieth-century political eclipse of Marxism, which critiques modernity as a fusion of secularism and liberal democracy, exemplified in Ashis Nandy’s 1983 Intimate Enemy.

This chapter examines key writings of James Africanus Beale Horton and Edward Wilmot Blyden to highlight the inconsistencies inherent in the labelling of these activist writer-intellectuals as “proto nationalists.” Horton was a British army medical officer who was a participant in British conquests. Yet, he is indispensable to nationalist history because of extant evidence in letters, pamphlets and books that establish his commitment to self-government for West Africa as well as its progress. Blyden occupies the position of foremost articulator of the “African personality.” Yet, Blyden campaigned for Britain to colonise Liberia. Treating them as hostile to the ideals of later anti-colonial nationalists falls down because they shared with this later group a faith in and hope for African independent fluorescence. These conundrums are resolved by understanding them as, first, dealing with problems of the day in the terms of the day and second, being pro-African and not necessarily anti-colonial.

Chapter 2 examines the various ways in which British conquest affected the harbour’s relationship with two neighbouring princely states over the course of the nineteenth century. While the English East India Company attempted to erect various fiscal barriers between the British port and the two neighbouring states over the course of the nineteenth century, these restrictions ultimately proved to be counterproductive severing the port from its hinterland, which lay almost entirely in the two states. As the global market for agrarian produce expanded in the latter half of the nineteenth century therefore, the colonial state was forced to ease many of these restrictions to facilitate the passage of commodities, especially since countermeasures enacted by the two states had begun to adversely affect the port’s fortunes. Through a close analysis of the interportal agreement of 1865, the most significant step towards the region’s economic integration, this chapter will assess the motivations behind the agreement and its wide-ranging impact. Utilizing sources from the archives of the Cochin State, this chapter will track the political and commercial motivations guiding the state as it attempted to get more involved in the British port’s affairs and assess the impact of its growing involvement on Cochin’s development.

Chapter 5 covers the tradition of the apotheosis in North America, principally the North East. It outlines the earliest encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and considers how the former were interpreted as shamans, as powerful spirits called manitou, or as the returning dead. The Europeans’ magnificent vessels conveyed an impression of extraordinary power, but not divinity. The chapter considers what a “first encounter” might mean where coastal natives had already had (sometimes decades of) experience of Europeans by the early seventeenth century. It then considers the extent to which European voyagers, such as Francis Drake, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Raleigh, engaged in self-apotheosis. The final section analyzes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century first encounters in the North American North West, the emergence of prophetic narratives and the significance of oral traditions.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

One of many Americans hired as advisors by the Chinese Nationalist government in the decade-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor, the famous cryptographer Herbert O. Yardley made crucial but long underestimated contributions to China's war effort. The Nationalist Government benefitted more in communications intelligence from recruiting Yardley than from other intelligence partnerships. Yardley's codebreaking work in China also offers a window into the transformation of Sino-American relations and the US role in Asia during the 1940s. Intelligence cooperation and covert operations became key tools of US statecraft in Asia and elsewhere around the globe during the Cold War. But before Pearl Harbor, Sino-US military and intelligence cooperation relied on partnerships between individual, non-state American actors, such as Yardley, and the Chinese government. This chapter's exploration of Yardley's work with the Juntong reveals how the ROC government's security needs and engagement with non-state actors influenced the origins and development of the US-dominated Cold War order in the Western Pacific.

Free trade combined with emancipation to severely damage sugar production in the British Caribbean. The imperative to shore up the plantation economy led Whig-Liberal proponents of free-trade anti-slavery to commit the imperial government to the sponsorship of assisted immigration as a chief solution to high labour costs in the West Indies. The Caribbean migrant labour traffic subordinated humanitarianism to the imperative to preserve the sugar monoculture in the British West Indies, replacing enslaved labourers with imported Black and Brown workers who remained far more constrained than the free white immigrants who gradually supplanted convicts as a labour source in Australia. In its haste to keep the British Caribbean safe for sugar, the imperial state risked the lives of thousands Africans ‘liberated’ by the Royal Navy from the bellies of slave ships, prematurely entangling them in hazardous Caribbean sugar work.

The cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century saw the establishment of physics and astronomy as autonomous spheres. The Ptolemaic universe was a hierarchy of dignity – sun and stars above, lowly earth at the bottom – supported by a hierarchy of disciplines that set theology and metaphysics at the apex of intellectual life. The advancing belief in heliocentrism that undid the first was paralleled by challenges to the second, starting with the humanist celebration of rhetoric and moral philosophy and carried further by Copernicus’s exaltation of astronomy, hitherto assigned the lowly place of a mere computational aid, as a source of truth. The authority of the Church was often restricted by political and cultural divisions, so that many heretical ideas could not be stamped out, and Galileo long found support from Jesuits and even the pope. As he lost it, he sought backing in a wider audience, publishing his writings in Italian rather than Latin, and in a popular style. Newton and his followers would similarly seek to substitute horizontal connections for the vertical ones around which intellectual life had long been organized, demonstrating elements of their theories to popular audiences and explicitly describing the kind of science they favored as “public.”

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.