The British missionary enterprise disseminated the Bible across the empire with often unintended consequences. The reception of the Protestant Scriptures among colonial subjects was anything but passive. Readers and hearers appropriated scriptural texts in their own distinctive, even subversive ways. Surviving sources, however, are often less revealing about this process than we might like, and it can be hard to get beyond the voice of the missionary to that of the native convert. This chapter explores a unique set of sources: the trial records of the London Missionary Society (LMS) missionary John Smith, who was prosecuted (and died in prison) for allegedly ‘exciting the negroes to rebellion’ in the sugar colony of Demerara in 1823. Smith and his black congregants were cross-questioned at length about the use and abuse of the Bible. The records offer a unique window on the use of the Bible in missionary chapels, its reception among enslaved hearers, and the sensitivities of colonial authorities. It was also emblematic of a larger shift – the growing identification of black Protestants with Old Testament Israel, and the problematising of Britain’s identity as a new Israel.

An overview of the first stages of seeking the introduction of a Civil Partnership Bill for same-sex couples in 2007. During the parliamentary debates on civil partnerships the issue of whether the Irish Constitution would need to be changed arose. This chapter describes how and why the focus on the Constitution would become the central issue in the legal and political debate surrounding the introduction of civil partnerships and later the extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples in Ireland.

This chapter asks if a nudge, through creating social pressure to do something, can encourage people to follow through their good intention to give to charity. A web of complex and overlapping issues can impact on what might encourage people to give to charitable causes or to help others. We can learn much about what leads to altruism from economics and psychology research. The experimenters asked people to pledge a book donation from their home to help children in South Africa. They then investigated whether households who were advised their donation would be made public were more likely to give because their generosity would be advertised to their peers.

The emergence of a distinct legal profession was one of the defining features of the development of law in the period 1215-1381. This chapter examines the extent to which the professionalisation of the law inculcated and encouraged ways of thinking about the law and legal practice. It looks, first, at the provision of legal education and the growth of an intellectual domain and, secondly, at avenues of promotion or advancement within the profession and its sense of identity and collegiality. The chapter then investigates the relationship between the legal profession and the wider population, especially the position of judges and lawyers within society. The ethical behaviour and general conduct of members of the legal profession was the subject of deliberation and official scrutiny in the profession's early years. The chapter considers how 'popular' perceptions of judges and lawyers affected the development of the legal profession.

According to Mandeville's Travels, a spring in the very centre of the Garden of Paradise gives rise to four great rivers from which all the fresh water in the world ultimately comes. This chapter contextualises Mandevillian geography within the still- authoritative, though increasingly problematic, geography of scripture. Even the most intrepid of readers would thus be discouraged from setting out to find the source of any of the four rivers of Paradise, since they would be no more likely to succeed in the attempt than the author himself was. Before turning to the Bible to examine the origin of the belief in an Earthly Paradise, the chapter makes another remark about the English text of Mandeville's Travels. The Book of Genesis, with its image of the Earthly Paradise and the four rivers, is clearly a major source of inspiration for the same i.e. in the Book of Sir John Mandeville.

Vladimir Putin shows a remarkable interest in history in general and the Second World War in particular. This chapter explores this historian-president’s attempts to codify the memory of this war in an open attempt to transmit a useful past to the younger generation. It argues that top-down models of historical memory are of little explanatory value in the Russian situation. The president rides a wave of historical revisionism that he shapes at the same time. Putin’s government successfully uses it to mobilize Russian society against critical minorities within, and perceived enemies without. The far-reaching consequences of this politicization of the history of the Second World War are sketched in the final section of the chapter.

The chapter starts by introducing the book’s two key themes: that philanthropy has been criticised as much as it has been praised, and that the meaning attached to the word has been in constant flux. It was only in the later twentieth century that a monetised definition took precedence over others. After outlining the methodology with its focus on usage of the words ‘philanthropy’ and ‘philanthropist’, the chapter outlines the ways they have changed over time, linking these changes to wider forces, chiefly the Enlightenment, Romanticism, evangelicalism and capitalism, and arguing that philanthropy can be understood only through its relationship with poverty and the Poor Laws, slavery and anti-slavery, political radicalism, mutualism, national identity, voluntary societies and volunteering, citizenship and the welfare state. Short chapter descriptions form a conclusion.

This chapter begins with a discussion on some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism. Post-structuralism says, in effect, that fixed intellectual reference points are permanently removed by properly taking on board what structuralists said about language. The chapter lists some differences and distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism under the four headings: origins, tone and style, attitude to language, and project. Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s. Two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. The chapter includes a STOP and THINK section presenting key texts from Derrida's book Of Grammatology. It provides a clear example of deconstructive practice, showing what is distinctive about it while at the same time suggesting that it may not constitute a complete break with more familiar forms of criticism. The chapter describes three stages of the deconstructive process: the verbal, the textual, and the linguistic.

The chapter focuses on the decline and collapse of bipolar détente in 1979 and the domestic backlash against Carter’s equilibrium between human rights and détente. Since late 1978, the conclusion of SALT II dominated both bipolar relations and the political debate within the United States, and human rights were relegated to quiet diplomacy channels. This brought a backlash against Carter’s foreign policy, led by neoconservative critics, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick. After the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, détente was finally over and Carter’s difficult balance between arms control and human rights ended. Human rights remained on the American agenda but the issue became a mere propaganda tool to be used against the Soviets.

This chapter argues that one of the most important frames for linking popular grievances and the elite project of leaving the EU was a national one in which a majority of the English electorate sought to defend British sovereignty from the EU. The Englishness of the vote to leave the European Union in 2016 therefore requires an examination of an elusive subject: English nationalism. There is little academic or political consensus on this topic and whether or not a politicised English identity can be labelled nationalism as such or into what kind of model of nationalism England best fits. Such divergent views depend on definitions of nationalism itself. Historic imperatives in English nationalism created a sense of nationhood that was broader than England alone and was constituted through engagement with other peoples across the world, notably the English-speaking peoples. This was a major component of the wider categories of belonging that informed understandings of English nationhood. This merged the content of English nationalism with wider polities and projects, notably Britain and Empire, but not the European Union for which the Anglosphere operated as an alternative.

Ecocriticism as a concept first arose in the late 1970s, at meetings of the Western Literature Association. Ecocriticism takes its literary bearings from three major nineteenth-century American writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. This chapter indicates the scope of some of the debates within ecocriticism concerning the crucial matter of the relationship between culture and nature. Perhaps the most fundamental point to make is that ecocritics reject the notion that everything is socially and/or linguistically constructed. A related issue, which is also thrown into relief by ecocriticism, is whether a distinction is deconstructed into self-contradiction by the fact that it is not always absolute and clear-cut. A STOP and THINK section provides the reader with some ‘hands-on’ experience with the subject discussed. The chapter describes some activities of ecocritics and presents Thomas Hardy's poem 'In Time of The Breaking of Nations' as an example of ecocriticism.

Dagobert II was a Merovingian king who ruled for about four years in Austrasia, the Frankish kingdom which included northeastern France, Belgium and the Rhineland. His reign probably began in late 675 or early 676. This chapter first reviews what we know of Dagobert and next examines the Vita Dagoberti. It then looks at how Dagobert II was rediscovered via the Life of Wilfrid in the seventeenth century, and was subsequently re-inscribed in the history of the period. This leads readers to an evaluation of the Life of Wilfred as a source, reflections on the significance of Wilfrid himself, and further thoughts on the relationship between memory and tradition. The Life of Wilfrid is therefore a text that is to readers vital for historical research, but not one of which more than a handful of early medieval people were aware.

This final chapter looks at a short, but densely argued article by Theodor W. Adorno that was first published in 1965 as a handbook entry titled ‘Society’. Adorno agrees with Durkheim that society is a bit like a thing – ‘thing-like’ – but emphasises that it is also very different from actual things as it cannot be experienced immediately: society is essentially ‘mediation’, namely a specific form of relationships between people, between people and things, and between people treating each other as things. Not only ‘society’, though, but also individuals are mediated – structured, ruled, determined – by institutions and cannot exist otherwise. Institutions, in turn, cannot exist without that which they mediate – us. We made this world, and therefore we can re-make it, too. The problem is that we made it in such a way that it has become quasi-independent, namely thing-like, and this in particular makes it so difficult for us to change it. A tricky situation…

Patchen Markell begins his response to Rainer Forst by expressing a concern about the narrowness of Forst’s commitment to the idea of human beings as ‘justifying, reason-giving beings’. Building on the intuition that a more capacious sense of critical theory’s modes of engagement with the world is called for, Markell chooses to focus on Forst’s conception of power. For Forst, power is not just a simple dyadic relation between one agent and another: there is also such a thing as an ‘order of power’, which is also an ‘order of justification’. This involves the patterning of relations among persons in a society by virtue of the acceptance of certain ‘narratives of justification’, sometimes including patterns of domination and subordination. As Forst acknowledges, one of the central tasks of critical theory is to identify, analyse and criticise such situations. But practices of justification themselves may be implicated in relations of domination, since ‘justification’ is an abstraction from the concrete social practices in which it takes place. Forst is aware that criticism of social relations can be foreclosed by people being socialised into a tacit belief in the justified character of those relations. However, he fails to acknowledge that, while the demand for justification is an important part of the critique of these phenomena, in many cases it must be accompanied or preceded by a struggle to reconfigure the space of appearance, to bring these phenomena to attention or to alter the terms of their public representation.