As with the plagues of the past, the modern plagues increase the risk of breakdown of trust and social order, and perpetuate health inequalities. The modern plagues confer very large financial costs on society and some of the estimates of these costs are described for each of the common long-term conditions, singly and collectively. The societal costs work in both directions: a dysfunctional community (one with social fragmentation) increases the prevalence of the modern plagues and those plagues, in turn, tend to make communities dysfunctional.

This chapter opens the collection with a theoretical and wide-ranging discussion of the meaning of imperial expansion across Europe in the early modern age. Historians Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel have both described the early modern period as a time of accelerated globalisation, during which European and non-European expansion triggered a degree of interconnectedness not known before the 1500s. Susanne Lachenicht places this observation in the context of European perceptions of the role and function of empire in relation to national interests and emerging definitions of what the nation was meant to signify to the individuals and institutions involved in shaping and strengthening it, in part through overseas expansionism presented in the sources as a service to the people and their rulers. The overview of the multiplicity of agents, both voluntary and involuntary, involved in the processes at work in connecting spaces, both European and overseas, shows how these processes of growing interconnectedness developed often through national and exceptionalist stances seemingly at odds with the realities of global trade. Comparing the evolutions of French and British imperial policies with regards to local understandings of national sovereignty and power allows us to demonstrate that trading companies enjoyed unequal and changing support from the Crown and the nation, depending on a variety of factors over which they had limited control, such as the demands of national production and competition from other corporations.

Remi Joseph-Salisbury reflects on his experiences as an anti-racist activist in the UK. As a Black mixed-race man involved in a number of community groups, he considers what it means to be asked to condemn racially minoritised communities generally, and Black communities particularly. Whilst recalling specific incidents to illustrate his arguments, he suggests that ‘calls to condemn’ are not always explicitly spoken but are constantly felt. These calls, he contends, are an attempt to shift the focus away from anti-racist critiques of structures and institutions and back towards always-already-pathologised communities of colour. Focusing on his work with the Northern Police Monitoring Project, the chapter evidences how despite the organisation’s understanding of the complex ways in which communities are placed under suspicion, the organisation was forced to condemn acts of interpersonal violence outside of its remit, in order to ensure their wider messaging would not be misunderstood. As cultural deficit arguments abound in the vacuum left by ‘post-racial’ mythology, the work of anti-racist scholars and activists becomes all the more difficult. Calls to condemn, therefore, act to maintain White supremacy. However, in societies that have already pushed people of colour to the margins, anti-racist actors must work against rather than with White supremacist power structures. We must, therefore, refuse to condemn.

This short conclusion draws together the ways in which the eighties have been remembered and how the past was remembered at the time. It brings my own historical context into perspective, recognising that this history is written under the particular material, economic and emotional context of its time. It takes lessons from historians of the time who worked on collective and cultural memory and who recognised the power of seeing oneself represented in the histories we are given and applies them alongside what Bananarama called their ‘dancefloor mentality’.

The NHS is both necessary and sufficient for our healthcare. However, is it sufficient when it comes to our health - when it comes to the prevention of the common long-term conditions? This distinction between healthcare and prevention is fundamental to the authors’ arguments. This chapter provides an introduction to services for prevention of infectious diseases and of common long-term conditions and to the frequent changes in UK government policy over the first two decades of twenty-first century from the appointment for the first time ever of a Minister of Public Health to the subsequent side-lining of this ministry. Lip service has been paid to prevention but policy action has been inadequate since it has failed to stem, let alone reverse, the rising prevalence of the modern plagues.

The NHS is both necessary and sufficient for our healthcare. However, is it sufficient when it comes to our health - when it comes to the prevention of the common long-term conditions? This distinction between healthcare and prevention is fundamental to the authors’ arguments. This chapter provides an introduction to services for prevention of infectious diseases and of common long-term conditions and to the frequent changes in UK government policy over the first two decades of twenty-first century from the appointment for the first time ever of a Minister of Public Health to the subsequent side-lining of this ministry. Lip service has been paid to prevention but policy action has been inadequate since it has failed to stem, let alone reverse, the rising prevalence of the modern plagues.

The NHS is both necessary and sufficient for our healthcare. However, is it sufficient when it comes to our health - when it comes to the prevention of the common long-term conditions? This distinction between healthcare and prevention is fundamental to the authors’ arguments. This chapter provides an introduction to services for prevention of infectious diseases and of common long-term conditions and to the frequent changes in UK government policy over the first two decades of twenty-first century from the appointment for the first time ever of a Minister of Public Health to the subsequent side-lining of this ministry. Lip service has been paid to prevention but policy action has been inadequate since it has failed to stem, let alone reverse, the rising prevalence of the modern plagues.

During the 1970s and 1980s, post-colonial migrants of Asian, African and Caribbean descent collaborated to confront the discrimination and exclusion they were facing in Britain. This chapter intends to explore the dynamic and complex relationship between the Bangladeshi community in the East End of London and the structural violence they endured. This community dealt with the National Front on the streets of East London and collaborated with other communities to lead the anti-racist movement of the 1980s. By drawing on the pivotal moment when Altab Ali was killed in 1978, this chapter will attempt to weave in and link the role of colonialism, the East End and the consequent galvanisation by the Bengali community. The colonial relationship is necessary to emphasise because the East India Company had its HQ in East London while in India its base was in Kolkata, West Bengal. The entanglements of geography and the Bengali community are crucial here and how the imperial metropole managed Bengalis ‘over there’ and how those from ‘over there’ then became a significant demographic in that metropole hundreds of years later.

The clashes between European states that punctuated the history of the seventeenth century were transposed, at the time of colonisation, to American soil. As a matter of fact, it was to counter their Spanish Catholic enemy and to reposition themselves in the Atlantic space that the United Provinces and England, two rival Protestant states, entered the slave trade, which was, at the beginning of the century, under Portuguese (Catholic) monopoly. Studying the slave trade in the Atlantic world will allow the highlighting of the existing tensions between the various interests of the states, their colonies, the trading companies and the individual merchants, all of whom made use of slavery to enrich themselves. If the empires tried to impose a national framework from Europe, the reality of the colonies was quite different, hence the need to show how the colonies responded to a logic that was their own, far from the interventionism and interests of European states, operating autonomously and responding to the needs of their immediate environment. Taking the example of the colony of New Netherland, looking at the correspondence between governors and the Dutch state, colonial legislation and ship registries, this chapter analyses how the introduction of slavery resulted from the imperialist policies of the States-General, the implementation of the Dutch West India Company as well as the colonists’ personal motives and ambitions.

This chapter explores settler colonialism as an explanatory and interpretative framework of the history of early America. Settler colonialism has taken the world of early Americanists by storm, creating debates about its relevance, revived in the last two decades by studies of British expansion in Australia insisting on the genocidal intent behind this form of colonisation. Burnard and Delahaye argue that the concept offers solid perspectives through which to differentiate between modes and processes of empire-building and colonisation, and to highlight the strategies deployed by colonial agents to negotiate and manage the authority conferred to them through their various colonial projects. However, they take a long view of the concept that challenges both the unifying and reductive definition of Australian scholarship and the neutral and normalised definition of American historiography. Instead, they argue in favour of the call for a contextual study of settler locales within the scope of the entirety of British expansionism, to point to commonalities and differences in the relationships British settlers entertained and retained with the native country from which they issued. They demonstrate that settlers understood and promoted their different Contents to British expansion in their own terms but within a common frame of reference regarding sovereignty, political culture and the meaning of empire in the long history of the nation. The dynamic processes through which colonisers could belong to the imagined community of their nations of origin while pursuing their own particular interests in the colonial spaces they wrote about and defended is revealed.

In a world in which the Muslim identity has been essentialised into a hijab, donning the hijab instantaneously transforms the wearer from an unbiased third party to a biased apologist of any and all oppressive regimes and parties that call themselves Muslim. In a panel ‘dialogue’ between Hoda Katebi and Asra Nomani – a self-proclaimed ‘Muslim feminist reformer’ – a conversation about hijab and representation politics in the United States spiralled quickly into a hostile debate about global international politics, and a game of ‘how many things should Hoda condemn before she is allowed to speak’. This chapter describes how Katebi is interrogated by the media and audience members, about why she wears the hijab, despite the fact that more often than not, the questioning has no relevance to the subject of the panel/talk at hand. Islam is seen through a lens of being inherently foreign and a threat; everything private needs to be dissected and discussed for a public forum. Katebi charts how these conversations, in which she has to debate her humanity and justify her belief systems, result in her dehumanisation. They are only ever about a performance in a way that is consumable/acceptable within the parameters set within Western society – in a way that no one else is pressed to do.

This final chapter has two main goals: to address lingering worries about the medicalization of love—that is, bringing love and relationships into the domain of medicine in a way that threatens to undermine their value—and to put forward a positive vision of love as something we can partially choose, or improve, through science and technology. Will knowing how love works, and even shaping it through hormones and chemistry, rob it of its importance in our lives? Or will it empower us to make our most intimate relationships more reliably consistent with real human flourishing?

Systems Prevention means transforming all of public policy and the relationships between its components. The authors call this reform the construction of a national Health Society. They identify the three main pillars of the changes required as institutional change, community change and technological change. Change affecting these three pillars needs to be concurrent. Health (as needs satisfaction) should be at the top of the agenda of all branches of national and local government. The critical role of central government is in coordination and this finds institutional expression in health becoming the responsibility of a Deputy Prime Minister and in the modern plagues all being identified as risks on the National Risk Register. The Health Society has significance for every department of government and some of these are explored.