Reflecting on his own personal experiences in being asked to condemn terrorists, Asim Qureshi begins the volume by detailing the psychological and physiological trauma that accompanies these moments. These personal reflections are placed in a wider context of a culture of condemnation – where routinely Muslims and Black gangs are expected to condemn the violence some choose to associate with their communities. The Introduction seeks to enter into a conversation between all of the contributed chapters to identify a few key themes that speak to their collective experience. While the chapters largely focus on the contemporary experiences of the authors, a number of them explicitly reference how the history of colonisation and empire is directly relevant to current discourses, particularly in relation to the ubiquity of ‘Whiteness’ as a system of violence and power. The underlying racism of society has been transformed into a form of ‘public safety racism’ as the authors evidence how communities are placed within a threat matrix. This matrix brings with it an expectation for those very communities to condemn their own, the central concern of all the contributors – who feel caged by this expectation. The chapters highlight how those who hail from these communities at times engage in acts of performance in order to pander to demands of those who expect condemnation – a form of betrayal through public performance – but what these scholars and activists demonstrate through their lived experience is a genuine praxis of resistance.

In 1985 Smiley Culture became the first Black British rapper to appear on Top of the Pops, performing the track ‘Police Officer’. He performed in two separate voices on the track – as himself in patois, and as a cockney police officer. In the song’s story, Culture is stopped by the police whilst driving his car in London. Worried about a stash of cannabis in his car, he considered bribing the police. In the end the situation was resolved when the police officer recognised him and asked for his autograph instead. Culture’s adoption of vernacular voices demonstrates the complexity of Black working-class resistance. His voice is then a hint, or window into place, class, race and speaking of and to power. In this chapter his relationship with one particular organisation, The Commonwealth Institute (CI), shines a light on the slippery faultlines around being heard, and being seen, which relate voice to representation. Like the Commonwealth itself, the CI was simultaneously inward and outward looking, and subject to the machinations of the politics of government funding in Thatcher’s Britain, changing media opportunities and understandings of race in Britain, as well as changing ideas of the role and form of ‘education’. The CI therefore offers a way into the interwoven layers of historical memory of and from the Commonwealth within everyday experiences of Black Britain. It also works as a useful lens to see the leaks between Britain’s past and its new global technological present.

This chapter gets specific about the kinds of biological interventions into love that are currently possible—and those that may exist in the future. It shows how love can be affected by certain chemicals through a variety of different pathways, depending on the psychosocial context. It also discusses common medications that may already be influencing love and relationships, such as hormonal birth control and anti-depressant pills, and argues for a shift in scientific research norms: away from an exclusive focus on individuals and clinical symptoms, toward a more inclusive, relationship-oriented paradigm that considers the interpersonal and social implications of drug-based medical treatments.

Expanding the scope of colonisers beyond the corporation, the Introduction presents all the vehicles that were employed in the conduct of early modern European overseas colonisation and trade, as well as the array of actors who employed these vehicles, so as to embrace the diversity of imperial experiences and the means by which imperial authority was validated and put into practice. Built upon Atlantic history, and moving away from the state-centred analysis of empires and colonisation, Agents of European Overseas Empires offers cases of private ventures mingling national and private interests, thus emphasising the diverse agents involved in colonisation by the English, French, Spanish and Dutch.

By the end of the eighteenth century, New England was well established as a leading supplier of horses to West Indian sugar colonies. Equids were central to ensuring that sugar plantations worked and it made sense for West Indian planters to import them. Most planters did not want to waste valuable acreage and time raising equines when they could import mature work-ready animals. From the mid-seventeeth century, New England had supplied horses to the sugar colonies, but New Englanders were aware that many sugar planters actually preferred mules over horses for both crushing sugar cane and transport. Thus, New Englanders sought to diversify their thriving equine breeding and exportation business to include mules. While New England’s foray into mule-breeding never reached the success of its horse enterprises, how far farmers and merchants went to start a breeding programme demonstrates how wider Atlantic markets drove New England’s economy. The case study of mule exports unveils strong inter-imperial networks and emphasises aspects of local colonial needs in terms of economy and trade. This chapter illustrates how colonial trade could be conducted from the margins of the empire or several empires. It also highlights how private interests, motivated by profits, could also go against the imperial forces, by developing illegal networks of trade evading the control of empires. When New England settlers realised how lucrative breeding mules and sending them to the West Indies could be, they did not hesitate to participate in the imperial trade.

‘It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.’ – James Baldwin It is the age of the ‘Muslim problem’ which connotes the multitudinous ways the dress, eating habits and sexual preferences of Muslims have come to represent an immediate and present threat to Western civilisation. Pre-emptive counter-terrorism policies invite Muslims to take responsibility for acts of violence committed by others and to reform their communities under the mighty weight of state security apparatus and the judgement of wider society. However, it is James Baldwin’s insistence on the disease of Whiteness that mutilates and stunts the lives of African Americans – and what his words can teach us today – which is the point of departure for this chapter. In 1963, Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew on the one hundredth anniversary of emancipation imploring him to recognise the reality of being rejected by the society into which he was born and to resist internalising the reasons for the vicious degradations White America visits upon its Black populations. This chapter continues in this vein. It was written following an attack by a White supremacist on two mosques in New Zealand, who ended fifty Muslim lives. It is written for the people who Nadya Ali thinks of first when violence is unleased against Muslims: her nieces and nephews. The chapter is a howl against this inheritance bestowed upon them and from which we, their elders, cannot seem to protect them. It is also a manifesto of resistance of how to live and thrive in a world which despises, shuns, incarcerates and kills Muslim life. It is about the centrality of love for survival and possibilities for political transformation.

By considering health as the status of an individual when their needs are optimally satisfied, it becomes apparent that health cannot be the responsibility of a specialised arm of government. It needs to be the driver of public policy as a whole. This general principle finds its roots in Cicero and has been endorsed by political philosophers of the Enlightenment. The limited successes are discussed of an untheorized Systems Prevention in some modern institutions (Public Health England, the Health and safety Executive and the NHS Health Check). Research projects that might be the basis for Systems Prevention are described. The authors describe their own research experience that underpins the plea of this book to deliver Systems Prevention consciously. This experience includes work on developing the infrastructure required for health improvement.

This chapter summarises the book’s messages and proposals for change. The Health Society relies on a consensus that ‘your health is my health’. Achieving that consensus requires the countering of objections. These are considered and their weaknesses exposed. Synergy is noted between health as needs-satisfaction and action against global heating.

employs Studio Boggeri as a case study to illustrate how graphic and advertising practitioners found themselves on common ground and joined forces in the interwar period. In an attempt to extend the field of their activity beyond book design and poster art, graphic practitioners focused on everyday visual communication and printed ephemera. Their interest in commercial graphics coincided with the impact of an American-inspired approach to advertising. The chapter provides new perspectives into Studio Boggeri, examines how and why Antonio Boggeri promoted modernist techniques and aesthetics, and discusses his role in the definition of the practice. Moreover, it sheds light on working and commissioning practices at Studio Boggeri from its foundation in 1933 throughout the war years. Departing from the analysis of self-promotional ephemera, it also addresses the ways in which Boggeri constructed a recognisable image for his studio and adapted it to the changed socio-political circumstances of post-war Italy. As such, it looks at the impact of Fascism on designers’ everyday practice and representation strategies. Finally, the chapter explores Boggeri’s attempt to position the studio at the vanguard of national and international graphic design by hiring practitioners who were trained in Switzerland and had networks abroad.

Studying prize-winning essay contests on the consequences of the ‘disiy’ of the New World in the 1780s offered by Académies in France in the 1770s and 1780s provides precious light on the reflection and debates on colonisation since the late fourteenth century that occurred in Europe at the time of the American Revolution and the birth of the United States. The epilogue focuses in particular on the Académie of Lyon, whose ambitious contest on the impact of the colonisation of the Americas on humankind raised much interest in Europe and North America from 1781 to 1789. Most contestants condemned colonisation while praising the new republic, that of the United States, born out of war of a colonial rebellion. The epilogue provides, therefore, a contemporaneous vision on colonisation that is many issues addressed in the volume’s Contents.

This chapter takes a personal and historical account of Cyrus McGoldrick’s evolution on the issue of condemning Muslim violence. He looks back at ten years of appearances in American and international media, and how his confidence and strategy shifted as he studied Muslim history and as history was made around him. Breaking onto the scene as a newly reverted hip hop artist, he was such a novelty that the media treated him gently, not even analysing his lyrics. As he began organising New York’s Muslim communities against government surveillance and war, the media came to treat him with increased interest and suspicion. His advocacy for Muslim political prisoners was construed as showing sympathy for terrorism, turning him into an open enemy. The last decade of McGoldrick’s life has been focused on learning, practising and teaching. As he has tried to maintain his community work, and study, he expresses an understanding of the lived and narrative weaknesses underpinning the political naivety of Muslims in the Western world. Rather than respond reflexively or even defensively to the pressure to condemn Muslim violence in the world, might it be possible to take the opportunity to convey our message with clarity and confidence? In the end, after all, it is Allah who condemns.

This chapter illustrates how observational epidemiology has recognised the breadth of sources of risks to health. This breadth is captured in the word ‘exposome’: the sum total of exposures to sources of risk. The development of concepts is described as to how living systems maintain their equilibrium and how this equilibrium may be disrupted. This equilibrium – or homeostasis – is illustrated by considering the role of glucose. Research in understanding mechanisms for homeostasis is described but caution is expressed on the limited value of genetics in addressing disruption of equilibrium.

This chapter builds on the author’s book Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which considered the establishment of seventeenth-century English overseas commercial and colonising endeavours from a global perspective, tracked those enterprises as networks of aristocrats and merchants – rather than the English state or the British composite monarchy – and initiated and developed them along with the worldwide conflicts and negotiations they generated, especially with Dutch rivals. Thus, this contribution engages the latest literature on the part played by the English state in early modern empire-building along with recent characterisations of the functions and roles of ‘company-states’ in English imperial history. In doing so, it argues that joint-stock and other forms of proprietorships constituted a natural evolution from medieval practices whereby the Crown granted rights to conduct functions such as holding markets and fairs for chartered ‘private’ entities: such activities benefited the ‘public’ weal and, thus, warranted the chartering of extraordinary ‘public’ powers, including to conduct diplomacy and warfare, to those who had the wherewithal and interest – that the Crown customarily lacked – to carry them out.

This chapter highlights the recent burst of controlled, scientific research on medical and non-medical uses of psychedelic drugs and MDMA to improve individual welfare, and argues that this research should be extended to couples in romantic relationships. It questions the line between ‘drugs’ and ‘medicine’ and argues that such distinctions often reflect dubious social and historical factors, rather than a clear-eyed assessment of actual benefits and harms. It introduces the idea that love drugs might help strengthen certain relationships, and that anti-love drugs might help other relationships end. But there are serious risks that might be associated with such drugs, and the wider social implications will be hard to predict. To minimize this risk and uncertainty, careful ethical deliberation and nuanced policy measures will be key.

What are love drugs? Basically, drugs that affect love—or romantic relationships more broadly. This chapter begins with an account of drugs, explaining that they are essentially just chemicals—clusters of molecules that work on the brain to produce certain effects—and that our choice to regard them as medicine versus recreation, or as a means to personal or spiritual development, is up to us. It is a question of values. The chapter then gives an account of love, explaining that it has both biological and psychosocial dimensions. When there is a tension between love and well-being, it may make sense in certain cases to intervene in either or both of those dimensions to improve our relationships and our lives.