In the Second World War, women were involved in undercover work but they were concentrated in particularly female-appropriate positions. This chapter is an exploration of textual accounts which narrate how femininities, which were strategic and empowering, could be mobilised and how the necessities of war impacted upon femininity. It explores testimonies that narrate the ways that female agents employed conventional forms of temporally specific attractiveness in order to assist passing. The private, domestic tasks traditionally performed by women offered female agents immunity and provided them with a cover for their clandestine work. The chapter discusses accounts that record the effectiveness of enactments of traditional feminine conduct. Some tasks were explicitly denied to women as a gendered division of labour was developed within the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with women being sent into France only as wireless operators and couriers.

The subject of 'Negative Creep', one of the highlights of Nirvana's first album Bleach, is generally taken to be the singer himself, Kurt Cobain. Almost as memorable as the music it contained, the album's cover nicely catches the negativity of the record that locates its interior to a contradictory logic of (anti-)capitalism. As Alexander Kojeve's Hegelian story unfolds, the pure negativity of desire becomes the inhuman machine of historical becoming. American rock music seems an ideal place to look at the conjunction between American culture, economy and the various forms of negativity that characterise it. By 1989, one social form in particular, rendered heterogeneous by the neoliberal economic policies of Ronald Reagan's government, came to negatively exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit of American capitalism. Ironically, the negativity of this form was noted by neoconservatism, even as it was abjected as its social antithesis.

This chapter describes how both sociological and lay understandings of family change have been informed by the belief that modern families are fundamentally different from traditional families. It reveals the origins of this idea in nineteenth century evolutionary thinking and shows how it was developed by twentieth century sociologists. The chapter introduces some of the iconic studies on Irish families from this period and evaluates them in light of recent scholarship. It describes how qualitative research on contemporary families and new findings on historical households, together with the growing influence of feminism, prompted the development of more critical perspectives in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter introduces some of the concepts and theories that are essential for understanding family change, including kinship and family systems and the demographic transition.

The Restoration church and dissent might continue to be conceptualised, in terms used by Collinson of the earlier church and Puritanism, as two halves 'of a stressful relationship', defining and shaping each other. In their relationships with the Church of England, dissenters came to rely on a vigorous, often polemical, print culture that represented and conceptualised the church in robust terms as a persecuting authority. Patrick Collinson dated the end of the birth pangs of Protestant England to the Restoration. The Welsh Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell, entering into the debates about the Restoration church settlement of 1660-1661, produced a pamphlet against the prayer-book and episcopacy that went through four editions in those years. The Presbyterian poet Robert Wild, who had produced robust verses, larded with scatological humour, throughout the early years of the Restoration, wrote his The Loyal Nonconformist in response to the Five Mile Act.

This chapter identifies the scale and pattern of defections and some of the attributes which distinguished those who defected from those who stayed loyal. The vast majority of the defectors were actively seeking a political role, aiming to apply their skills in opposition to the Liberals. There was a preponderance of departures to Labour among the early defectors, followed by clusters of defections to the Conservatives and then to the Liberal Nationals. The difference between the rates of military service of the defectors and the loyalists is statistically significant. On average, defectors started their political careers at a younger age than the loyalists. In many cases this was possible because the defectors came from wealthier backgrounds. There was no significant difference between the electoral success rates of the defectors and the non-defectors.

This chapter addresses one of the lord lieutenancies’ most important roles, the organisation and running of the county militias intended to defend against invasion attempts. The chapter firstly looks at the militia chronologically. It considers early Elizabethan attempts to reform the militia, notably the creation of the ‘Trained Bands’ in the years leading up to the crisis of the Spanish Armada (1588). It then looks at the crisis itself, during which the militia did not have to fight, but demonstrated good levels of organisation and readiness, and finally looks at how readiness was maintained during the remaining 15 years of war, when there were several further invasion scares. The second part of the chapter assesses the militia thematically: its organisation, training and equipment. Overall, the chapter concludes that the militia, although inconsistent and often badly run, made real improvements over the period in terms of weaponry, organisation and training. Whilst the military prowess of the militia remained untested, the chapter shows that the ability of the privy council to generate activity and the willingness of the lieutenancies and the wider population to carry it out was greater than usually thought.

This chapter draws the book's central themes together into an overview of how Ireland and the ‘fire brigade’ states adapted to the shifting sands of international relations in the Cold War. The principles of interdependence and interconnectedness are key. In place of a pragmatic battle of East versus West, this chapter emphasises the socialising effect of international relations and the link between national (individual) and international (collective) interests. Africa played a key role in that process. Ireland's history and its deep-rooted (if largely self-defined) post-colonial identity played shaped its attitudes to decolonisation and the creation of successful, independent African states. Its approach in the Congo, Biafra and elsewhere echoed a long-held conviction that the key to international stability – and by inference its own security – lay in the rejection of outside interference and the promotion of co-operation through the medium of international law. Its progressive stance on apartheid and foreign aid helped shape its identity as a member of the EC. And the rise of non-state actors (the anti-apartheid movement and humanitarian NGOs) linked Irish opinion to global debate on an unprecedented scale, precipitating a shift towards transnational action and away from the centrality of the state.

The hundreds of thousands of German prisoners in Britain during the First World War needed a bureaucracy to control them. Any attempt to reconstruct the overall administration of the camp system reveals a series of layers of bureaucracy and concern, ranging from international to national and local. While prisoners of war in Britain may have had the common characteristic of spending time behind barbed wire deprived of their liberty, the types of camp in which they found themselves varied greatly. This chapter presents six categories of camps, essentially maintaining the distinction between civilian and military incarceration: the smaller establishments which held non-combatants, special camps, the Isle of Man camps, military camps, military hospitals and finally, working camps. Outside London, several civilian camps emerged in north-west England during the early stages of the war, reflecting the pre-war settlement of Germans in Manchester and Liverpool.

An episode of MTV's Celebrity Death Match illustrates one of the many misconceptions concerning the relation between rage and the machine. In this episode, pioneering rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine were pitched against 'the machine', a giant robot. Biohazard, another metal band whose early use of rap can be credited with pioneering the nu metal genre, addressed similar themes to Rage, often emphasising the environmental damage caused by capitalist exploitation and the waste of natural resources. Formed in 1988, their first major-label album, State of the World Address(1994), combined rap and metal with political rage directed at nuclear power, pollution, greed, violence and rage itself which becomes the object of self-reflection. Discussing creative or artistic production in the context of supercapitalism, addressing the rage that is integral to the machine, requires developing a concept of econopoiesis.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on critical aspects of the British Royal Navy's suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. It presents a new interpretation of the political framework under which slave-trade suppression was executed. The book provides the sustained discussion of the squadron's wider, cultural significance, and its role in the shaping of geographical knowledge of West Africa. It considers the responses of officers serving on the squadron and explores how far faith, profits and honour shaped their responses to the assignment. The book also considers how the nineteenth-century suppression of the slave trade has survived in British public memory, tracing early commemorations through to the museums and political debates of our own times.

Hailing King Alfred as the source of much of Britain's law was a means of giving a reassuring aura of stability and permanence to a fast-changing area of modern life. This chapter recognizes both the dominance of Victorian narratives of social progress. The fact that trial-by-jury was cited in Victorian rhetoric as a beneficial export to the colonies, also no doubt increased concern to establish an early, native origin for the practice. Spelman's The Life of Alfred the Great was the best-known biography of Alfred for the first half of the nineteenth century, and Thomas Hughes's was the most popular in the latter decades of the Victorian period. It was Spelman who first associated Alfred's new ships with the highly successful modern British 'navy'. The druid's prophecy about the union of Great Britain links the alliance intrinsically to the growth and success of the British Empire.