The introduction lays out the basic intellectual framework of the book. It argues that human agency is derived from collectively produced reliance systems such as energy, transportation and water. These systems are governed by complex formal and informal agreements called spatial contracts, which differ depending on the system, geography and moment in history. These spatial contracts need to become the focal point of twenty-first-century politics.

This chapter, on the fortunes of the French Socialists, is written at two levels of analysis. First, from the narrow perspective of the 2017 presidential competition, it considers the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party) primary and the historic defeat of the party’s candidate Benoît Hamon in that year’s election. More broadly, the chapter discusses the decline and possible demise of the party once described as the natural party of government. The Parti Socialiste’s decline, and possible demise, involved an explosive mix of four core dimensions, namely sociological change (the loss of, first, the popular and, second, the professional and managerial electorate), organisational challenges (the divisive impact of internal factionalism), a poor institutional fit (the unresolved relationship between the party and the presidential institutions) and profound policy disagreements (played out through the 2012–17 governments in the division between the governmental and radical left).

The introduction makes the case for historians making use of material culture, not only as a primary source, but as a catalyst for developing new lines of enquiry. This chapter sets the context of the book by describing how the academic landscape in the last twenty years has drawn museums and historians ever closer. It also defines the scope of ‘material culture’ for this book and explore common definitions in the interdisciplinary field of material culture studies. Finally, the introduction provides a summary of the contents of the chapters and suggestions for how to get the best out of the research guide

The chapter details how Stanley Baker differed from most British screen villains of the 1950s and depictions of working-class characters. The Cruel Sea established the actor as a cinematic anti-hero of note but a contract with the Rank Organisation offered typecasting. Hell Drivers marked a change in role to flawed hero and Baker’s work for Val Guest consolidated his appeal as the authority figure and self-doubting ‘tough guy’ with Hell Is a City and Yesterday’s Enemy. During the 1960s Baker worked as an independent producer while his collaborations with Joseph Losey – in particular Eva and Accident – were deconstructions of the masculine screen identity. The last ten years of Baker’s career were marked by a succession of B-films but also intriguing character performances for Michael Winner and on television.

David Hume’s contribution to the eighteenth-century debate about the limits of the freedom of the press – ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (1741) – has usually been considered in the context of the Scotsman’s extensive revisions of the essay in the wake of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Plenty of historians have already written about how and why Hume, in response to popular discontents in London, removed his initial and more positive conclusion about press freedom and instead called it one of the inconveniences of mixed governments. By contrast, little has been said about what initially prompted the essay. When the first version of the essay is considered in its original setting in the late 1730s and early 1740s, we learn that the essay was written in the context of the paper war between Walpole’s Court Whig administration (1721–42) and a Country/Patriot opposition consisting of Tories, Whigs and Jacobites. In this context, the ‘Liberty of the Press’ had become an opposition slogan, as Walpole sought to rein in freedom of speech by harassing opposition journalists and printers, outlawing parliamentary reporting during sessions and introducing censorship of stage plays. In contrast with later editions of the essay, Hume took a clear stance in favour of the liberty of the press, referring to it as ‘the common right of mankind’. However, although Hume was very loosely associated with oppositions Whigs at this time, for example the Marchmont family, this should not be regarded as an unconditional espousal of anti-Walpole propaganda. Crucially, Hume appears to have favoured conciliation rather than confrontation with Spain in 1739. As will be shown, his argument was distinctly independent, and his defence of press freedom was much more sceptical than that of Protestant thinkers who called it a human or natural right.

Following the Pantigate controversy RTÉ, the national broadcaster, paid compensation to people named on a Saturday night chat show as homophobic. The compensation was paid out of television licence fees, without consultation. This chapter examines the broadcasting implications and political debates that followed.

This chapter discusses an experiment on donating organs. It asks whether the nudge strategy of changing choice architecture can encourage people to agree to donate their organs after their death. It then outlines a second experiment testing whether a booklet alone or a booklet combined with a discussion (a think strategy) would cause people to be more willing to donate their organs. In this experiment, the elements of think and nudge were tested together.

This chapter focuses on building an analytical framework for understanding reliance systems and spatial contracts. It is based on the argument that we must begin with the system, and understand the politics from the system up, rather than from the politics down. The framework draws on systems thinking to establish how we can differentiate between different systems. It then uses this systems perspective to repurpose ideas from economics which are useful if focused on systems instead of commodities.

Much anarchist and social ecologist writing argues for a degree of connectedness between other animal life and insensate bodies and materials on earth. In this vein, a new strand of nonhierarchical, vitalist political ontology, termed ‘new materialism’, takes mutualism and ethics more radically beyond the human. This chapter looks briefly at prehistories, within vitalist traditions, before turning to recent contributions to this dynamic field such as by Barad, Bennett, Grosz and in the anthology by Coole and Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010) among many others. New materialism seeks to take politics and philosophy to new levels of nonhierarchical awareness. This chapter argues for its potential (along with its variants) within the history of art, given new materialism’s apparent productive encounters within other humanities disciplines. The perhaps surprising conclusion for art history, as a discipline dominated by hierarchies, markets, monetisation and value systems, is that this is an intellectual trajectory that art historians should positively engage with and make their own contributions.

This chapter maintains that the key concerns and political debates during the period 1215-1381 invariably rested on issues of legal import, among them ways of defining the legitimate exercise of royal power, matters of jurisdiction, law and order, and the functioning of the judicial system. It examines some of the contexts in which law entered the political arena and the processes by which royal authority was transmitted to, and received by, subjects. The chapter focuses on kingship and particularly the use of image and rhetoric in upholding public order and maintaining confidence in the law. It considers the attempts on the part of successive monarchs to legitimise their actions on the national and international stage by applying legal concepts and processes. The chapter looks at 'popular' attitudes towards the law and the assimilation of legal concepts as manifested in the Peasants' Revolt.

The Western quest for origins received an initial formulation in the recognition of a philological relationship between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and other languages of Europe. Already in the Enlightenment, there was much speculation regarding India, its culture, language and peoples. Many of the uninformed assessments of this time would resurface in subsequent Orientalist scholarship, Romantic mythography, nineteenth-century linguistic science, and race theory. Excited by the linguistic affinity between Sanskrit and other languages, Orientalist scholars fostered the comparative science of religion and mythology that developed a vision of an Aryan race as the originator of Indian and European culture. The belief in Indo-European origins further spurred European interest in Vedic Aryan sources. The chapter focuses on the work of Voltaire, Herder, German Romantic mythographers and Max Müller, who established a vision of the Aryan through their reading the Veda and posited Sanskrit scripture as an alternative to the Bible. Speculation regarding the Aryan provided a means whereby Indian history could be used to create a fresh historical tradition that expressed specifically European political and ideological interests. What Europeans sought in India, the chapter argues, was not Indo-European religion but a reassessment of Judaeo-Christianity.

When Simon Walker began researching the retinue of John of Gaunt in 1980, 'bastard feudalism' had been the subject of debate for thirty-five years. He examines Yorkshire under Richard II and Henry IV, looking at the role of the four elements in the commissions: magnates, assize judges, justices of the quorum (local legal practitioners) and local gentry. Two principal conclusions emerged about political culture below the level of the literate political class: first, its ambivalence revealed a measure of sophistication and subtlety; and secondly, it broadly connected with the issues of high politics. Walker used case studies to build up a picture of collective mentalities among different social grades and vocational worlds. It was a challenging approach, for it meant working against the grain of the central sources, displaying sensitivity to other incidental evidence, and using conjecture and imagination with the utmost discipline.

In his famous double-essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05) Max Weber translated a generally felt discontent with modern capitalist civilization into a theme for the (then still emergent) discipline of sociology. Like many of his contemporaries, Weber both affirmed and critiqued modern liberal, capitalist society, celebrating capitalism’s dynamism and creative energy (propelling Western civilization to its well-deserved world-dominating position) while deploring its tendency to become an ‘iron casing’ through which it fetters and destroys itself. Weber felt promoting what he perceived as the original, Puritan capitalist spirit against corrupt ‘utilitarian’, hedonistic capitalism might help slowing down, or even reversing, the decay of Western civilization.