In 1857 Emperor Napoleon III invited celebrated photographer Gustave Le Gray to visit the newly established Châlons Camp to record its imperial glory. The camp's anxiety-provoking medical geographies are overlooked within the nineteenth-century French medical history and the global environmental histories of health. Long before the creation of Châlons Camp, military forts were some of the most prominent signs of the militarization of the French environment. Creating the imperial militarized environment required considerable effort and money. The nineteenth century saw the medicalization of France. Not only did the medical profession expand and become more organized, but 'medical discourse infused all areas of French society'. As well as paying careful attention to the Châlons Camp's medical geographies, Napoleon III and his supporters intended it to act as a vector of modernization.

This chapter examines the role of Irish soldiers in British India during the long nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on familiar representations of the Irish soldier abroad, this chapter links Irish service in the Empire to contemporary imperial ideology and changing patterns of economic and political thought. Ireland was central to British imperial expansion in the East, a point vital to our understanding of the multifaceted and pluralized nature of the British imperial experience, an experience which embedded Irish Catholics into British India. This chapter draws attention to the close, informal bonds that existed between Irish individuals within the imperial armed forces in India, which gradually gave rise to soldier networks based along ethnic lines. This was bolstered by the presence of Irish Catholic chaplains, stationed in British military cantonments. These networks were important conduits of cultural, financial and political interchange between Irish, Indian and Eurasian communities. These networks transmitted material items, capital, information and knowledge across the Empire, adding yet more links to the imperial systems of mobility and exchange.

This chapter considers how the French experienced and challenged the foreign militarization of their country from the German occupation that began in 1940 to the withdrawal of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces in 1967. It examines how Axis, Allied, and NATO forces mobilized nature during this period. As well as establishing the Colleville-sur-Mer and other cemeteries in the postwar period, the USA occupied other sites across France under the framework of NATO agreements. With French armed forces defeated and reduced to 100,000 men charged with maintaining law and order under the terms of the 1940 armistice, German occupation troops were the main instigators of environmental militarization between 1940 and 1944. Occupation forces did not monopolize the mobilization of nature between 1940 and 1944. As the occupation continued, the hills, mountains, and forests of France became places of refuge and resistance.

This chapter extends the key themes of chapter six – the ‘fire brigade’ response to Afro-Asian radicalism, and the growing influence of the international anti-apartheid movement – into a new decade. It shows that the principles that allowed the ‘fire brigade’ to gain prominence in earlier years were re-shaped to fit a changing international context in the 1970s. In the Irish and Danish cases that meant using their progressive approach on issues such as apartheid and minority rule to shape new identities for themselves as members of the European Community (EC) from 1973. While those core values were being re-articulated and re-defined at official level, anti-apartheid movements in Europe and North America continued to be a thorn in the side of the South African, Rhodesian and Portuguese regimes. This chapter describes the 1970s as a time of ever-increasing integration and inter-dependence in the campaign against minority rule, and asks, what impact did that have on Irish politics and society?

This chapter looks at another key function of the Elizabethan lord lieutenancies: raising soldiers to serve in the wars overseas. It first addresses the overall extent of the burden, showing, through an examination of every troop levy of the period, that the counties provided around 94,000 soldiers across the period, somewhat fewer than had been thought. It then examines the process of finding recruits (and who those recruits were), supplying equipment and transferring the soldiers to military control. Finally, it assesses the overall quality of the outcome, showing that, although results were inevitably very mixed, the outcome in terms of the quality of the recruits and the equipment was far from as universally bad as it usually regarded, and that many local officials worked very hard to ensure as high a standard as possible.

In 1909 The Eton College Chronicle announced the delivery of 'a great wreath of ilex and laurel' to the grave of Algernon Charles Swinburne. This chapter situates 'The Flogging-Block' within nineteenth-century metrical discourses, and debates about classical verse composition during Eton reform, in order to show how the beaten boy becomes an exemplary Eton boy. Taking pleasure in the graphic visualisation of flogging, Simeon Solomon and Swinburne liked to exchange flogging fantasies in their personal correspondence. Swinburne's imaginary incorporation of metre reflects, and reflects on, a broader cultural imaginary in which Eton was associated with metrical as well as corporal discipline. In contrast to Eton reformers who would do away with corporal punishment, Mary Gordon Leith and Swinburne imagined the practice of birching as the highest form of aesthetic education.

Carnival Against Capital (J 18) were mounted on numerous Global Days of Action in the late 1990s, signalling the emergence of a movement against neoliberal globalisation and for global justice. This chapter examines the photographic documents of the Carnival Against Capital party available on the website of Reclaim the Streets (RTS) offering an analysis of the recurrent themes. It also examines photography's role in the production of an alternative narrative of protest to the one constructed by the mainstream mass media. RTS actions were a cluster of innovative practices and elements found in earlier collective attempts at social transformation. Most importantly, the online photographic archive resists the conventions of photographic reportage, attempting to accommodate diverse practices that would 'preserve' the memory of the RTS actions. The RTS website contributes to the collective struggles against capitalism by preserving the memories of protest as a joyful collective process.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book suggests that Francis Hutchinson dedicated his life to protecting the position of the established Church within society, and to forging and maintaining the political hegemony of the Whig and Hanoverian regime, first in England and then in Ireland. James Sharpe suggests that Hutchinson's witchcraft scepticism was the result of two things. First is Hutchinson's desire to distance himself from a belief system increasingly considered by the elite as part of vulgar, popular culture. Second is his disinclination to view the universe as a place where immaterial forces regularly impinged on the day-to-day workings of the temporal world. Ian Bostridge argues that Hutchinson rejected witchcraft, because he regarded it as a salient example of religious enthusiasm and as such inimical to his Whiggish vision of a polite, ordered, and, commercial society.

This chapter examines the role that photography played in shaping the memory and the forgetting of May 1968, by taking as starting point an exhibition of the May 1968's photographs by photojournalist Bruno Barbey at the London's Hayward Gallery in 2008. The chapter discusses both the compositional decisions by Barbey and the subsequent institutional decisions in order to examine the problematic of documentation and the display of protest photographs. The chapter highlights the subsequent institutional framing of these photographs, which have become slanted towards an overemphasis on individualism that ignores their intrinsically collective nature. Barbey's exhibition at the Hayward tended to equate anti- and pro-Gaullist demonstrations, as is evidenced by the way in which images of collective entities exclude rigorous slogans and creative banners as part of the demonstrations.

This chapter explores how manufacturers and advertisers sought to market their products during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a variety of hard sell, soft sell and psychological techniques. It also explores how they were actively attempting to shape desire than simply meeting the demand, and sometimes succeeding. William Hesketh Lever always emphasized the power of advertising in bringing about his business success. Attacks on commerce and all its permutations were, of course, centuries old, but indictments of the Admass culture that Lever had helped create were particularly a feature of the inter-war period and after. One way to reach the audience was through the new medium of the radio, hence the invention of the soap opera in the 1930s, aimed squarely at a daytime audience of women in the home.

This chapter examines the journeys of the women in studies from Christianity into the organised Freethought movement and examines their attempts to carve out a ‘public’ role as prominent lecturers, journalists and authors. It positions the struggle of Freethinking feminists to access male-dominated intellectual and religious domains in relation to wider attempts by women to intervene in the public sphere. The chapter argues that the Freethinking emphasis on freedom of discussion opened the way for women to participate in conversations on science and reason while simultaneously marginalising the ‘feminine’ from this discourse.

This chapter contains essays on William Hesketh Lever in the context of factory paternalism and town planning. At Port Sunlight, Lever replicated the attempts by earlier paternalists to create a happier, fitter, stronger, more productive, less fractious work force and provided a small-scale but replicable answer to urban blight. If Port Sunlight was an attempt to do something about labour relations and the bleak state of towns, it was also good advertising copy. It smiled out of Lever Brothers' posters, a radiant, gleaming, sun-blessed idyll. When he moved into his first soap factory at Warrington, initial success rapidly encouraged expansion. Lever was not only a (short-lived) director at Letchworth and a trustee at Hampstead Garden Suburb, but he made key speeches to conferences of housing and municipal authorities about his town-planning ideas.

This chapter looks at the experience of Communist Party membership within the framework of international communism and its imperatives, the strict Leninist code of practice for recruits, and the British Party's fluctuating recruitment performance. Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) membership could become a 'total' way of life for some recruits, an all-consuming enterprise of personal devotion to the Party and its mission. The chapter delves into the inner world of the Party 'local' or branch by illuminating some of its characteristics and idiosyncrasies, and explores the meaning of communism for Party activists. It considers the experience of expulsion for those who parted company from the Party and the communist world. Margaret McCarthy's feelings were widely shared in the Party. The idea of the 'working class' as a subject transcending its individual elements, the proletariat as a distinct discursive entity, was a characteristic feature of communist belief.