An important part of the TTP deals with jus circa sacra, the question of the relationship between church and state, and more precisely, the question of knowing who is authorized to take decisions such as the appointment of preachers, the excommunication of members of the community, the censorship of books. Chapter 19 of the Treatise deals, as its title indicates, with the “right concerning sacred matters,” and declares that the establishment of that right “belongs completely to the supreme powers [summa potestas].” This thesis of the penultimate chapter of the Treatise is essential, both upstream and downstream. Upstream, it is largely based on notions and arguments developed in the previous chapters: the distinction between interior and exterior religion, the subordination of the jus (right) to the sovereign, the need for the individual to abandon the right of nature. Downstream, it in turn plays a role in determining the central issue of the Treatise: the freedom to philosophize.

Since Spinoza did not write in English, he did not use the term “belief.” Accordingly, it is a matter of interpretative choice (and of some debate) which bits of his philosophy, if any, are best understood in terms of beliefs. Spinoza’s own terms for doxastic states that are the most natural candidates for being translated as “belief” are, in Latin, “opinio,” “cognitio,” the verb “credere,” or even the terms “iudicium” and “idea,” as well as “geloof,” “mening,” and “waan” in Dutch. However, many of these terms are not as epistemically neutral as the English term “belief,” insofar as Spinoza often uses them to designate epistemically deficient doxastic states (such as “opinio” in E2p40s2, or “waan” in KV2.1–2) or epistemically privileged states (such as “(ware) geloof,” which Spinoza uses to designate doxastic states by which “we grasp … that it must be so and not otherwise,” KV2.2).

Confederate naval building during the US Civil War (1861–1865) was a form of “self-strengthening” that had much in common with similar efforts across the Pacific World in the 1860s and 1870s. To overcome structural limitations (a lack of industrial capacity or existing warships), Confederate navy builders relied on foreign acquisitions and local innovations such as the torpedo to compete with the materially superior United States. The US Civil War was, in this sense, a vast practical experiment for small or industrially weak states confronting North Atlantic power. Beginning in the 1860s, the template set by the Confederacy – local adaptation with cheap asymmetric weapons and the overseas acquisition of qualitatively advanced systems – found numerous adopters in Pacific newly made navies. Reciprocally, many industrial producers in Europe were stimulated by demand from the Confederacy to produce novel weapons for Pacific states.

According to Spinoza, devotion (devotio) is a compound affect (emotion), made up of love and wonder. In the TTP devotion is used in its customary sense as a religious sensibility. Spinoza writes, for example, of “obedience and devotion” (TTP5.39, 44).

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

“Suicide” rarely comes up in Spinoza’s works, though the concept crops up at E4p18s: “that those that kill themselves are weak-minded and completely conquered by external causes contrary to their nature.” The concept is also found at E2p49s: “just as I also do not know how highly we should esteem one who hangs himself, or children, fools, and madmen,” and in Ep23, Spinoza’s letter to Willem van Blijenbergh: “Then I say (whether I grant free will or not) that if anyone sees that he can live better on the gallows than at his own table, he would act very foolishly if he did not go hang himself.” A longer passage in E4p20s deals with Seneca’s self-destruction when he was “forced by the command of a Tyrant … to open his veins, i.e., he desires to avoid a greater evil by [submitting to] a lesser.” That scholium concludes with “But that a man should, from the necessity of his own nature, strive not to exist, or to be changed into another form, is as impossible as that something should come from nothing” (E4p20s).

Chapter 4 focuses on the early seventeenth century, when religious policy in the kingdom came to be in the hands of a determined new Audiencia president, an ambitious archbishop, and a radical group of Jesuits. With the support of a broad coalition of the kingdom’s leading settlers, these reformers took Christianisation in a new direction. The reformers focused on the promotion of the regular and frequent participation in a range of quotidian Catholic practices and institutions that their sixteenth-century predecessors had generally discouraged or withheld from Indigenous people, particularly private devotions, popular celebrations, confraternities, and public ceremony. This began in a handful of parishes entrusted to these Jesuit reformers, who had a very particular understanding of the role of ‘external’ manifestations of piety, and who used these sites as testing grounds for new approaches to Christianisation. These ultimately had the effect of affording Indigenous people space and opportunities to engage with Christianity in new – if, for the reformers, not always desirable – ways, laying the foundations for the reformation of the kingdom.

This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

Throughout the imperial period, but especially in the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial court held a quasi-monopoly on the production, circulation, and conservation of literary artefacts. As the dominant political and economic force in the Russian Empire, it was able to introduce a new type of public sphere by shaping the social mission of literary texts and dictating the norms according to which literature was to be created and judged. This chapter focuses on the reign of Catherine II in order to show how the court promoted social engineering through literature, in particular through the genres of panegyric poetry and neoclassical drama. Celebrated authors in turn benefited from the court’s support. As a result, the imperial palace combined political and aesthetic functions: it introduced a new ceremonial culture and deployed princely patronage to glorify the court’s policies and to impose an absolutist social and aesthetic order.

For most philosophers working in seventeenth-century Europe, modes are impermanent and changeable qualities or features; this is why Descartes for example insists that God has no modes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, AT 8B.348; cf. Principles i.56, AT 8A.26). Spinoza, however, departs from this consensus view of modes, introducing into his system modes that are infinite, eternal, and immutable: the so-called “infinite modes.”

In the early modern period, the distinction between “finite” (finitus) and “infinite” (infinitus) was traditionally grounded in God’s creative power. This established a clear divide between those entities which are finite and that which is infinite. Spinoza’s notorious rejection of this metaphysical chasm via his identification of God with Nature and claim that anything that is, is in God (E1p15), met with signification opposition. Many took the very natures of being finite and infinite as necessarily incompatible, such that what is finite cannot be said to be “in” or “follow from” what is infinite. We begin by reviewing the different aspects of Spinoza’s metaphysics that he refers to as “infinite” and explain in what sense they are infinite. These include the infinity of substance, the infinite attributes, and the infinite modes. Subsequently we will review Spinoza’s answer to a possible objection in Ep12 and E1p15s. Finally we shall consider Spinoza’s characterization of finite things and interpretative routes scholars have taken in this regard.

Much of Russian literature on the internet remains closely linked to traditional written and printed forms. Russian literature born online resembles that of much of the world, but some genres and forms follow different trajectories due to the peculiarities of the early local Russian online scene. In particular, poetry and code met early and often. Russian-language poets proved early adapters to the World Wide Web. Author-posted web poetry and prose has been anarchic and politically polarised. Early Russian online poetry projects like Vavilon.ru and LitKarta reflected hope for a liberal public sphere. By contrast, much web poetry and prose in the late 2010s and early 2020s has provided a place for celebrating right populism and policing borders – of Russianness, of gender and sexuality, of literary canon, language, and form.

The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.

Beginning in the late colonial period, banking and money became a central interface between the state and its subjects, with Ugandans demanding greater access to credit. In the years after independence, the government responded to expectations of commercial liberty by using savings and loans to turn colonial subjects into credible citizens—dutiful producers of export value whose personal “banking habit” would serve the nation as a whole. Whether through the Bank of Uganda’s national currency or the Uganda Commercial Bank’s vans circling the countryside, economic citizenship tried to sidestep the nation’s lack of affective solidarities by weaving together monetary ties. For many, this was welcome, but simultaneously, these financial interdependencies limited exchange across territorial borders. As a result, some people—among them, Asians, migrants, and residents of the border regions—were cast as suspicious subverters of the nation-state. Rather than a question of merely inclusion or exclusion, this chapter shows that postcolonial citizenship worked through “enforced membership,” as national currency imposed inclusion within the state’s monopoly on valuation, sometimes with violent implications (as in the case of the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians).