Convict transportation and assisted ‘free’ immigration were both ambitious projects engineered by the British imperial state. Not just a mode of punishment, transportation was also a source of labour that was central to the British settlement of Australia. By the 1840s, however, too many Australian settlers had become convinced that transportation was a moral stain on New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land that had to be wiped clean. The rise of free emigration in the 1830s that made transportation much less necessary as a source of labour was just as much a government enterprise, however. Colonial opinion frequently assailed British ‘government’ immigrants as too Irish, too poor, and ostensibly too unchaste. But the women and men thus recruited helped to provide a free labour force that ultimately made transportation expendable. They also helped ensure that Australia would preserve its status as a white settler colony by obviating the need for the mass importation of Asian-Pacific workers.

Although Europe deserves condemnation for the ethnocentric and racist notions and attitudes that flourished within it both before and during the era of imperialism, these were preceded, accompanied, and countered by a singular interest in and openness to other peoples and cultures. The marks of this openness were an exceptional interest in travel and writings about it, in learning non-European languages and translating and circulating texts written in them, in correcting their own forbears’ calumnies and defamations of others by exposing myths and legends for what they were, and by acknowledging the historical and cultural achievements of other peoples. The notion that Asian governments were despotic spread chiefly because those who adopted it feared the spread of autocracy in their own countries, and it drew forth harsh criticism. Images of other countries or regions, especially China and the Near East, became mirrors in which Europeans contemplated the limitations and narrow prejudices of their own way of life.

The final chapter turns to developments in the last decade of colonial rule. It will examine how wartime changes gradually diluted the Cochin State’s authority over the port of Cochin rendering its separate existence increasingly untenable. The Cochin State would thus become one of the first princely states to accede to the independent Indian state after zealously guarding its sovereignty for decades. This chapter explains this turnaround and examines how the transition to post-colonial sovereignty affected the Cochin State’s relationship with the harbour. It then discusses the post-colonial Indian state’s policies towards the port of Cochin, which has continued to attract significant investment to this day. We will analyze the extent to which development projects around the harbour have continued to bolster state authority in independent India and how this has served to obscure the divisive history of port development at Cochin. The resulting erasure of the long history of coastal transformations and uncertain technological interventions around Cochin has not only facilitated more reckless development over the last few decades despite protests, but it has also recently begun to allow successive governments to downplay the role of these local.

This chapter describes the continued, still ongoing, trajectory of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework and how it has co-evolved with the “Anthropocene,” another concept with Stockholm roots. During the course of the second decade of the new century, ethical aspects were increasingly taken on board. Will Steffen, former Director of the Stockholm-based International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), was the lead author of a second PB article in Science in 2015. Like the first Nature article in 2009, a sizable share of the co-authors had institutional involvement or other affiliation with Stockholm. This new iteration developed the ethical challenges of sharing the “safe operating space” inside boundaries among regions, nations, and societal groups. Steffen was also a member of the Anthropocene Working Group appointed by the Stratigraphic Committee to make the case for Anthropocene as a new geological era. The chapter articulates the significance of the overlap between the PB and Anthropocene processes and debates. These drew considerable interest from scholars in the social sciences and humanities, which helped make both issues concerns of epistemology and Weltanschauung.

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Vitruvius’s theory of architecture as art and science as well as the Reformation and the rise of print spurred a “figural turn” in architectural culture and the advent of a new genre of architectural images. In northern Europe, four institutions – artist guilds, publishers, masons’ lodges, and courts – acted as the key contexts for the figural turn. Artists began to specialize in forming architectural images, thereby making inroads into architectural professions and enriching the conventional practices of architectural design with new artistic and scientific modes of visual research. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, façade paintings by Wendel Dietterlin and Hans Holbein the Younger, and printer Bernhard Jobin’s collaborations with builder Daniel Specklin to form scientifically informed architectural prints all exemplify the figural turn. So, too, did Dietterlin’s botanically rich mural for the Strasbourg Masons and Stonecutters, as well as an empirically conceived, microcosmic interior Dietterlin made for the Duke of Württemberg. By the middle of the sixteenth century, artists and natural philosophers had introduced empirical visual research methods to northern Europe’s developing culture of architectural images, setting the stage for Dietterlin’s seminal Architectura.

Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.