Hamlet is probably the most famous play in literature, thoroughly international in its appeal, admired and imitated in Asian cultures as well as in the west. Reservations about Hamlet impugn William Shakespeare's knowledge of himself, and Coleridge the advocate speaks with the authority of Shakespeare. In 1769 Jean-François Ducis produced a French Hamlet, the first theatrical version of a Shakespeare play in France. Count Harry Kessler's Cranach Press Hamlet was published in a German edition in 1929 and in an English edition in 1930. Both Voltaire and Johnson intentionally trivialized Hamlet by reducing it to its plot, but there are more ways than one of approaching the plot, some less reductive than others. The real problem, since it is a Shakespeare tragedy we are dealing with, is that no version of the action seems sufficiently heroic to fulfil our expectations of the genre.

This chapter provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the organisation of the carrying business on Manchester canals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It analyses the circumstances that led certain waterway owners to acquire their own fleets of barges, and their associated investments in horses and crew, to carry goods on their navigations, while others simply provided a public waterway for the independents' use. The chapter also analyses the carrying services of canal companies. It discusses the businesses of public carriers and examines the fate of canal carriers in the early railway era. The number of public carriers operating on Manchester canals can be roughly tracked using trade directories. The chapter also examines the trades of private carriers, who hauled their own goods on canals and did not offer public services.

The global wave of mobilisations that emerged in the late 1990s and challenged the dominance of neoliberalism bore considerable similarities with the student and worker opposition to the dominant political order in France in 1968. While May '68 and the anti-globalisation movement were symptoms of and were formed by specific historical and socio-political conditions, they both interrupted periods of prosperity for Western capitalist societies, challenging the stability of the dominant system. Photography's centrality in these movements' formation, sustainability, reception and outcome has been extraordinary. Looking at photography's circulation within different contexts, following its usage by different individuals and groups for different purposes becomes crucial within the context of the struggles against capitalism. In the more contemporary cases, new technologies and the internet opened up new communicative possibilities to promote these alternative stories to the public sphere.

Supercapitalism's contentless, pragmatic Calvinism is like a genetic algorithm that turns economy into a computing machine. The understanding of supercapitalism is consistent with Jean-Joseph Goux's interpretation of Bataillean general economics, which he sees as a characteristic of what he calls postmodern capitalism. From the early modern period of mercantilism there has always been a connection between war and commerce in the West, articulated but never totally determined by the emergent European states. The role of the state has been diminished in the face of the rise of multinational corporations and the acceleration of transnational capitalism made possible by the globalisation of the system of finance and electromagnetic communications. Supercapitalism fractures paternal law and family structures though its deployment of contract law and its commodification of identity as workers are required to sell themselves and not just their labour in a highly mobile, flexible market.

The temporary or seasonal movement of Highlanders for work outside the region was of central importance in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most striking feature of temporary migration in the nineteenth century was its further dynamic growth and development. The long-term expansion of migration was a result of the chronic problems of the Highland economy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Temporary mobility have slowed down the rate of permanent migration by making up part of the deficit in regional income which was emerging from the collapse of the indigenous crofting economy in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the entire economic and social system in many areas in the north west and throughout the Hebrides had come to depend on the migrant labour economy.

For contrast and completeness, the scale and timing of inward defections to the Liberal/Liberal Democrats between 1910 and 2010 can be compared to the loss of outward defectors. Compared to the Liberals with their on-going problems, the Labour Party recovered relatively quickly from its 1931 debacle and its reduction to only fifty-two seats in the election that year. The boldest of the Labour dissenters was Dick Taverne. His path out of the Labour Party blazed a trail which was to be followed, first by Christopher Mayhew and then by the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP). The inward defectors from Labour and the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats all brought either a direct local electoral advantage or donations of much needed money. They also brought an indirect electoral advantage at a national level.

Chapter 5 moves from the global to the local level and explores how the global constructions of reconciliation are brought to a local post-conflict situation and how they perform there. Focusing on the example of Sierra Leone, the chapter shows how the activities of global reconciliation agents were crucial for shaping the local reconciliation process according to the global standards, despite some local resistance. Once the global constructions shaped the local understanding of reconciliation, the reconciliation discourse performed by producing a particular ‘reconciliation reality’ in the country. The reconciliation discourse constructed Sierra Leone’s post-war society as the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations, which are in need of reconciliation and healing. This re-interpretation must not be understood as a neutral or innocent process, however. Rather, the reconciliation discourse thereby overwrote and neutralized the polarized identities that had emerged from the narrative on the civil war, such as ‘rebel’, ‘soldier’, or ‘civilian collaborator’, and it also overwrote the political demands raised by these identities.

This chapter outlines the Western Front's environmental history to show how the First World War was fought in, through, and against nature. If sterility implies the absence of life and infertility, it seemed that the war had sterilized vast swathes of northern and eastern France. The mobilization of terrain and topography had begun before the establishment of trench warfare during the initial war of movement. The military mobilization of animals during the war was, at times, symbolic. As well as featuring on propaganda posters, animal imagery appeared on actual war machines. Bases and training grounds served a variety of purposes during the war. Among them were training troops in trench warfare, testing weapons, and providing places of repose for soldiers recovering from life in the trenches. The mobilization of nature for military training and weapons testing militarized sites beyond northern and eastern France.