This chapter places the case study of Wiltshire within the context of rural Britain. It offers an in-depth overview and assessment of the existing historiography, and addresses the extent to which there has existed a rural dimension to integration from the perspectives of the county’s local authority and the Muslim migrant communities themselves. It shows that rurality matters, and that both its local authority’s political approach and Muslims’ experiences across the post-1960s period have set Wiltshire apart from the dominant urban narrative, and have shown that rural developments have often been far more complex than has been recognised. Finally, it argues that the rural dimension of Muslim integration in Britain has been neglected for too long and that it is essential to take into consideration if we are to reach a thorough and multidimensional understanding of the Muslim integration process.

This chapter brings into focus an underlying theme of the book – the structured antithesis between male and female attitudes to animals, which was induced by social conditioning; especially by the values attaching to aggressive masculinity in the context of empire and, in contrast, the sequestered domesticity and gentleness expected of middle-class women. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s conduct books for women interpreted ‘separate spheres’ as including special female responsibilities for the protection of domestic animals, while Eliza Brightwen’s Wild Nature Won by Kindness and other titles elided domestic and religious ideals with the notion of taming and gentling wild creatures. The nationwide Band of Mercy movement for children promulgated this feminised ideal of tenderness towards animals, often in conflict with the pugnacious ethos in which boys were reared. However, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) transcended such gendered and class divides, as a work expressive of the Quaker ideal of sympathetic insight into the minds of animals as fellow-creatures of God.

To provide a sense of how relations with the US fit into Brazil's global insertion, this chapter begins with a rapid historical survey concentrating on the Baron of Rio Branco's 1902 decision to shift his country's diplomatic focus away from Europe and to the US. The importance he foresaw the US having for Brazil is then surveyed by looking at trade and investment flows in the post-Cold War era, setting the economic ground for the contradictions examined. In a pattern that has parallels with the PT foreign policy of the 2000s, Brazil moved to a foreign policy of 'resposible pragmatism', becoming a Third World country pushing for structural changes in global economic governance and actively campaigning to head the Group of 77. The chapter unpacks the tensions of structural versus relative power by looking at the extent to which Brazil cooperates with the US and the corresponding 'nationalist' backlash.

This concluding chapter starts by restating the importance of the intermediary period as a key to understanding funerary practice. The agency of bodies, objects and caves is central to how we understand this intermediary period. The temporality of the intermediary period is shown to be constituted by physical indices of change. This is explored by contrasting the temporality of secondary burial rites with the temporality of successive inhumation in both caves and cairns. The agency of caves is examined through studies of cave orientation and of the way that tufa and pre-existing middens act as both indices and agents of change in burials. The chapter concludes by integrating many of these approaches in two case studies of relational landscapes of Neolithic cave burial in South Wales and North Yorkshire. It is concluded that the material narratives of change around cave burial in the Neolithic led to the development of a specific rite of cave burial after around 3300 BC.

In Middle East Studies, methodological and substantive questions as well as definitions are predominantly discussed and fixed by men. While analysing the manner in which the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is taught at universities in Europe it is worth considering the situation from the perspective of gender as a cross-cutting issue. While ‘how and by which methodological tools’ the MENA is taught in European universities is an essential question, it is also important to focus on ‘who teaches’ in order to understand whether gender has a particular impact or not on teaching and researching the MENA. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with female academics from European universities and research centres, this chapter analyses the manner of teaching (definitions, academic materials and methodological tools), fieldwork experiences and specific precarities of female academics working in the field of Middle East Studies.

Greyhound racing has been described as ‘the Ascot of the common man’, the ‘working man’s turf’ and ‘poor man’s racing’, though it is clear that it drew some middle-class presence, particularly so in its early years when they attended this modernist sport. However, it was largely a sport for the urban working class attracted to a cheap and glitzy ‘American night out’. What is not always understood is that, despite the large number of attendances in its early years, it was very much a niche sport, attended on a regular basis by about 4 per cent of the working class, the vast majority of whom were males. Also as Mass Observation revealed in several surveys, and as other surveys revealed, the working class spent only small amount of money, compared with middle-class bettors, on greyhound racing, and their betting was very much ‘a bit of a flutter’. It was not the impoverishing activity it was often presented as being and was widely accepted in many local communities.

Fabio Camilletti approaches Polidori somewhat obliquely at first, via Spiritualism and the various séances attended by the Rossetti brothers, William Michael and Dante Gabriel, who were nephews of Polidori. This prompts Camilletti to consider three topics – the composition of The Vampyre, the history of its publication, and the legacy of Polidori among the Rossettis. Polidori, says Camilletti, observed links between Englishness and the inhuman. Camilletti argues that Polidori’s writings, including those on somnambulism, are much concerned with free will and mechanical determinism, evoking too the discussions at the Villa Diodati. He claims that, through Lord Ruthven, Polidori targets Britishness and aristocracy as well as Byron. He also draws on the psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to show how from their readings of their uncle’s diary, the Rossetti brothers were haunted by family memories, which, in turn, were resurrected in later vampire fictions.

This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the hairy woman and the female werewolf figure and the ongoing complexities of the social attitudes towards fur/body hair and the feminine. Demonstrating the ambivalence towards hirsute individuals, the hairy female body has also been viewed as a manifestation of animalistic lust since at least the Renaissance. Hairy individuals continue to feature in evolutionary debates. Some biologists propose that congenital generalised hypertrichosis (CGH) 'is a manifestation of a genetic atavism'. Lupine body hair visibly manifests the 'mobile, elastic fictions or borders' between humans and animals; however, this perceived proximity to the animal is not necessarily indicative of compromised humanity or a sub-human status. Hirsute individuals are being distanced from their simian heritage as 'missing links' and increasingly attributed lupine lineages through conflation with the werewolf, particularly on screen.

This chapter addresses local government policy in Wiltshire between the early 1960s and the implementation of the Race Relations Act 1976. It charts local policy through the arrival of the first waves of post-war immigration to the county, and offers an insight into how policymakers perceived and addressed the integration, accommodation and experiences of Muslim migrants. Despite persistent claims that more rural areas in Britain shied away from devising policies and strategies due to their numerically small immigrant communities, a range of measures were introduced in Wiltshire, especially in the areas of education, the resettlement of Ugandan Asians and community relations. Furthermore, this chapter also exposes how Wiltshire’s local authority went some way towards considering the religious affiliations and needs of its Muslim communities specifically during this period.

This chapter begins by using the subject of women’s preuytees (or shamefuls, as genitalia might also be termed in Middle English) as a gateway to examining the relationship between shame and the embodied nature of female honour in medieval English culture, focusing on the links between postlapsarian shame and the body in the medieval imagination. It then considers how postlapsarian shame contributed to medieval understandings of pain and shame as universal features of women’s experience of childbirth. Finally, it explores how the prologue of one version of the mid fifteenth-century gynaecological treatise now known as The Sickness of Women, as well as the prologue of The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, employ strategies to mitigate the social and emotional risks women faced in exposing their bodies even for the ostensibly innocent purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment. While they perhaps inevitably replicate the gestures of concealing and revealing that characterize the practice of female honour, these prologues also present women’s shamefastness as something deserving of sympathy, respect, and protection.

Anthropology struggled to escape its colonial heritage and find a place for itself in the era of decolonisation. Faced with losing access to colonial field sites, anthropologists at the University of Manchester sought to establish the applicability of anthropological theory to modern Britain throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They aimed to demonstrate how their expertise, which was derived from the study of Africa and other colonial regions, could be applied to labour, community or social relations in Britain. This work sought to position anthropologists as social scientific observers who could use their knowledge of different societies to provide guidance to the British government and public in a period of social change, industrial unrest and shifting ideas about national identity. It also reveals how the end of empire and the loss of the privileges of ‘colonial science’ forced scholars to find new ways to justify their expertise and to adapt their practices to win support from new patrons. This chapter focuses on the work of anthropologists based at the University of Manchester, analysing their research into factory-floor dynamics and rural communities. It connects recent historiography on ‘post-colonial careers’ and the links between imperial and domestic intellectual practices with work on the construction of knowledge within the social and human sciences, in order to highlight how social scientific ideas about modern Britain could make use of models developed to explain the social dynamics of the Empire.