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.

This book is a study of the communist life and the communist experience of membership. The study will also place itself on the interface between the membership and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by considering the efforts of the latter to give shape to that experience. 'It is the simplest thing so hard to achieve', goes the final line in Bertolt Brecht's famous poem,' Praise of Communism'. Yet many British communists between the Wars felt the striving to realise their communist vision worthwhile, even though 'the patents of their nobility' lay far into the future as Max Eastman put it.

Between 1660 and 1714, Laudians and Latitudinarians had vied for supremacy, with Calvinism increasingly becoming the preserve of Protestant dissenters. During these same years the dream faded of a restored Church of England embracing all manner of Protestants, as the balance of forces shifted in one direction and then another. Exemplifying the shift in the balance of theological forces is the replacement of William Sancroft by John Tillotson as archbishop of Canterbury in 1691. The doctrinal standard of the English church became the Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles, the ambiguous phrasing of which had in the past allowed Calvinists and Arminians to draw rival conclusions concerning the theology of grace. The 'Catholick faith' of the Church of England was threatened, so Francis Atterbury claimed in 1697, by a welter of 'Deists, Socinians, Latitudinarians, deniers of mysteries and pretended explainers of them'.

This chapter examines series of linguistics-based concepts of literary forms, including the post-structuralist concepts of 'the text' and 'writing'. Roland Barthes has stepped through the graphic surface of the page into the conceptual space within text to examine linguistic signifiers and what they signify. The 'text' of structuralism is idealised text, intertextually limitless, whereas specific actual texts must be created and limited by their readers. Linguistics-based analysis routinely ignores the material aspect of any text, despite the fact that it is this materiality, the process of publication that gives the text its communicative power through distance and time and allows it to be discussed by critics. A positive awareness of the signifying power of writing led Derrida to write about a novel that utilised its graphic surface, Philippe Sollers's Numbers, and to write Glas.