This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts to fill a major gap in the historiography of migration from two of Europe's most striking migrant groups. It makes an original contribution in two respects. First, it adopts a comparative perspective, analysing the countries of origin. The second contribution is methodological, using raw migrant narratives to convey a sense of migration as a story. The book examines the broader context of the outflow from Ireland and Scotland. It goes beyond traditional transnational and diasporic approaches, usually focusing on two countries. The book also attempts to survey issues relating to transnationalism, comparison, and history and memory. A further comparative element of the book is its use of personal testimony, drawing as it does on such diverse sources as letters, diaries, shipboard journals, and interviews.

This chapter presents the interview between the author and the DJ, musician and writer Excalibah. Excalibah co-directed The Blacks Remixed and played the role of Archibald, the MC. This interview is a companion piece to author's conversation with Ultz. Ultz wanted to do a modernised version of The Blacks in a contemporary urban setting. The Blacks Remixed is not a play about Africa; it's a play about black people in white cities. Jean Genet is a white playwright writing for Blacks. The Theatre Royal Stratford East is known for promoting black and Asian work. At the Theatre Royal, black people knew what they were seeing right away. They were aware of the reality behind the clichés, the fact that black men, in a white world, play at being hard and unemotional.

This chapter discusses the nature of the king's relationship with Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes as demonstrated by their staging of royal ballets. Luynes was first mentioned in the journal of the king's doctor in November 1611 as the royal falconer in charge of the king's favorite hunting birds. Luynes was an important innovator and an enthusiastic patron of the dramatic court ballet. Dramatic court ballets had a unified, coherent plot recounting a heroic story taken from classical mythology or medieval romances. Luynes was ambitious, and his relationship with the king was based on self-interest. He wanted the brilliant court career that had eluded his father, and the key to such a career was royal favor. The nature of their relationship was revealed in a conversation that François de Bassompierre had with Luynes in November 1621.

British railway enthusiasm remains a remarkably varied activity today, articulated through attachment to prototype railways' life-world. As with railway modelling and enthusiasm for the current prototype, stuffed steam faces a full-blown reproduction crisis. Building on Big Four companies' practice, British Railways laboured away building new steam locomotives to standard designs; but a delectable variety of more ancient locomotives and rolling stock wheezed and creaked around the system. British railway modelling's golden weather ended with the first Margaret Thatcher government's decision to break union power by eviscerating the artisanate. Though steam traction's eclipse in 1968 was widely predicted to signal railway modelling's death-rattle, not all modellers faded away as British Railways' last standard-gauge steam locomotive was dragged away to the Woodhead Brothers' breaking yard at Barry. The Locospotters club's activities shifted sharply over time, from shed and works visits to today's talks on modelling, preservation and the dear dead steam scene.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes the democratic stalemate in European politics through an examination of European integration as a general transformation of practices, norms and identities. It also describes France's European policy as an executive political strategy that attempts to influence the shaping of European institutions and common European interests. The book explains the integration of French politicians and civil servants into European institutions, the European Parliament and the European Commission. It examines the constitutional reforms of 2000 in the only two semi-presidential political systems in the European Union, France and Finland. The book analyses the European Parliament elections of 1999 in Finland and France. It demonstrates that European Parliament elections have also provided French intellectuals with an opportunity to reaffirm their role in public debate.

James Kenward's 1937 novel The Manewood Line described local people resuscitating an abandoned branch line. In Britain, modern steam railways' birth generated huge and novel demands. Building and running these gigantic enterprises required vast capital resources. Though by 1960 the British railway preservation movement could flaunt only four lines: the Talyllyn, the Festiniog, the Middleton and the Bluebell. On the brutal bottom line all preserved railways are businesses. Running a small business efficiently means getting embroiled in the labour process. Located in prime holiday spots, the reborn Talyllyn and Festiniog railways could coin money from train services in a short summer season. The Middleton's antithesis, Bluebell trains trundled deeply rural rather than industrial territory, running through soft southern England rather than the flint-hard West Riding.

This book examines the historical formation of ideas about sexuality in modern Irish culture. It analyses the history of sexuality in Ireland and the Catholic Church's regulation of Irish sexuality from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the study of a literary genre, the Bildungsroman and its significance in twentieth-century Irish writing.

This chapter examines the expanding corpus of experimental science at different levels. It begins by exploring the burgeoning consumer market for pre-packaged Newtonian science in Birmingham. Erasmus Darwin had anticipated the first excursion of the West Midlands savants into the field of ballooning, by using a launch to celebrate the founding of the Derby Philosophical Society. International savants were all in favour of knowledge dissemination, but apparently only after priority rights had been fairly attributed. Some sense of the role of Birmingham and its district in the distribution network for natural knowledge and experimental data emerges from our attempt to analyse the activities of the Lunar Society. But the real hub of international exchange, as it impinged upon the West Midlands in the second half of the eighteenth century, was the Soho Manufactory.

This chapter examines the relationship between French political traditions and the construction of a European security structure. In France's Grand Strategy for Europe, French hegemony in the European Union was to be achieved by maintaining a dominant position in the French-German duo and by modelling European institutions on French administrative structures and their culture. France's quitting North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1966 was designed to reinforce the impression that it was the only alternative to American security dominance. The more Europe has become integrated, the more France's goal of constructing Europe in its image has become unrealistic. In general terms, President Jacques Chirac's vision of France and Europe has been very much in line with Charles de Gaulle's intergovernmentalist vision of the 1950s and 1960s. In the sector on justice and internal affairs, the French presidency would work on putting together a European policy of asylum and immigration.

Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. The first section of the chapter compares the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious, against Erasmus Darwin’s poetic descriptions of liquid ontogeny. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive fluid force, illustrating and criticising the materialist argument (found in Mandeville and Malthus) that love and altruism are merely the evolutionary products of libidinal self-interest. The final section returns to the textuality of The Four Zoas and shows how the nervous mind and the sinuous text work together to give unreliable body to thought. Comparing Blake’s poetics to that of Erasmus Darwin and Edward Young, the chapter discusses the mimetic qualities of Blake’s revisionary verse and ends with an analysis of the poem’s fantasies of symbolic liberation through physical destruction.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.