In the nineteenth century, the colonial administration in British India would serve as a model for the British Civil Service. The foundations of the world's first ‘Civil Service’ were already in place by 1800. Yet, from the 1760s until into the 1790s, the administration of British India had been synonymous with corruption and maladministration. Between the assumption of territorial rule by the British East India Company (EIC) in 1757 and the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial administration underwent several transformations. Decisive economical reforms took place in 1788 and they were based on the recommendations of the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts. British India provides the prime example of a consistent administrative reform process in the eighteenth century.

The administrative reforms in British India were embedded in a larger transformation of the colonial government. With the assumption of territorial sovereign rights in 1757, a merchant company turned into a territorial government, but it continued to be managed as a joint-stock company. Neither the Company structures nor the Company staff were prepared for their new tasks. Accordingly, the EIC came under massive pressure and the shareholders’ unrealistic expectations of returns added to widespread internal uncertainty. Twice, in 1772 and in 1784, the EIC faced bankruptcy. The British state intervened in both cases, regulated the Company, and successively assumed executive control. The British territories in India repeatedly came under military threat, so that the continued existence of the dominion was far from safe. Even more so than in Britain, the reforms in India took place against the backdrop of permanent crisis.

In Europe, the winter of 1708–9 was one of the harshest on record. On 15 January 1709 Adam de Cardonnel, secretary to the duke of Marlborough, wrote:

I hope you have been better advised than to stir abroad this extream cold weather, the most severe that has been known in this country for many years the poor soldiers and other poor people froze to death like rotten sheep.

The poor soldiers were of course those engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession, which saw an alliance of England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Portugal and numerous German States, including some of those in the Rhineland, face down the Bourbon alliance of King Louis XIV of France and King Philip V of Spain. In the midst of these turbulent times, upwards of 13,500 people travelled down the Rhine to Rotterdam in search of a new life in the English plantations. There is much debate among historians about the response in England to the Palatines, which contrasts sharply with the welcome afforded to an earlier influx of Huguenots. These debates tend to run along political, religious and economic lines. It has been said that the Tory party in England regarded both the Palatines and the Huguenots who came before them as ‘the scum of all Europe’. The Palatine migration has been framed as a Whig initiative and it was certainly the Whigs who pushed through the Naturalisation Act of 1708, just in time for the arrival of the Palatines.

The intersection of narrative elements and form is especially compelling in programmatic works where a more specific narrative emanates from extra-musical texts and contexts, embedded within or embodied by the music. It is all the more interesting to find parameters of tonality, motive and – as in our current discussion – register participating in that narrative, shaping, reinforcing and interacting with extra-musical associations. The Sonata in E flat Op. 81a ‘Les Adieux’, composed in 1809 and subtitled ‘Das Lebewohl, Abwesenheit und das Wiedersehen’ offers a prime example. It is programmatic, sharing aspects with the proto-Romantic Pastoral Symphony: for instance its titles for each movement, ‘Das Lebewohl’ (The Farewell), ‘Abwesenheit’ (Absence), ‘Das Wiedersehen’ (The Return) are both specific (dates, names and places are included) and suggestive, rather like those of the symphony, which Beethoven made clear should be considered not a concrete imitation of nature, the objectivist pictorialisms deemed too concrete and restrictive, even inartistic, but rather should comprise ‘more the expression of feeling’. In this attitude to avoidance of concrete imagery Beethoven anticipates the Romantic approach to character pieces evinced by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt.

As Nicholas Mathew has explained, the sonata forms part of a tradition of ‘farewell’ works. Mathew reminds us that many works, orchestral and choral as well as instrumental, including individual songs, were composed to celebrate the return to Vienna of noblemen who fled during the various Napoleonic wars, for instance including Emperor Franz I, who left and returned in 1806. Indeed, the sonata may also have been influenced by Dussek's similarly titled ‘Les Adieux’ (Farewell) Sonata Op.

INTRODUCTION

In the contemporary world, futuristic literary explorations inspired by traditional African mythologies often offer interesting opportunities for understanding the continuous role of traditional mythologies in shaping the future. By employing the perspective of speculative posthumanism, Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon presents a posthuman world where extraterrestrial intervention disrupts human identity, agency, and power structures. However, these disruptions are shown to be just another transformative event in a continuous stream of transformative events already inherited from antiquity. Unlike Western speculative post-humanism which has traditionally focused on the advent and influence of contemporary and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, and technological transcendence; Lagoon blends African mythologies, indigenous ontologies, and extraterrestrial transformation, creating a hybrid post-humanism that moves beyond Western frameworks.

By engaging with the work of speculative post-humanist scholars like Francesca Ferrando, Donna J. Haraway, and N. Katherine Hayles, this analysis explores how Lagoon redefines posthuman futures within an African cosmological framework, not through technological singularity, but through the convergence of mythological and extraterrestrial forces. Adding the magical to the mundane and the scientific in strange otherworldly settings with humans and myriad other nonhumans from various sides of multiple divides makes Okorafor's speculative tale of the aftermath of an alien visitation on Lagos very posthuman.

Several critics have examined the interplay between the mundane and the fantastic in African literature, highlighting how authors blend everyday realities with supernatural or magical elements to reflect complex social and cultural landscapes (Mposa).

This book is a tribute to the influence of Bernard Capp, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick, and Fellow of the British Academy, one of the most distinguished and innovative early modern historians of his generation. When asked what his specialism is, Bernard invariably replies ‘seventeenth-century England’, a response which reflects the thematic and chronological breadth of his academic pursuits over the last fifty years. Since the 1970s, Bernard has consistently been at the forefront in ‘the shift from narrower social historical to broader cultural historical approaches’, producing eight important monographs as well as a significant number of influential journal articles and essays. These works have not only responded to wider changes in early modern studies but also have shaped our understanding and influenced the direction of developments in the social and cultural history of early modern England.

This is not the first ‘Cappite’ tribute. In 2010 a collection of essays, including several written by some of the most eminent historians in the field, expressly celebrated Bernard's role in ‘help[ing] us to reassess our ways of thinking about the ordinary and extraordinary experience of past actors’ and his ‘major contribution to our understanding of the fluid and culturally constructed nature of the “norms” which early modern people negotiated’ via ‘his distinctive capacity for empathy and originality’. In the fifteen years since that volume was conceived, Bernard has continued to open up new avenues of research, having produced another three monographs and numerous other key publications that have further transformed and enriched our view of the inner and outer worlds inhabited by seventeenth-century English people.

Excepting Schoenberg and Berg, active German cypherjugglers included Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), who experienced firsthand the advent of twelve-tone serialism as Schoenberg's student during the early 1920s. When Eisler's music was banned in 1933, he fled Germany and settled in Los Angeles, where he composed dozens of film scores. Because of his communist sympathies Eisler was blacklisted in Hollywood, interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and deported in 1948. He spent his final years in East Berlin, where he resumed a lifelong friendship with Bertolt Brecht, and composed the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic.

Like many composers tied to East Germany, Eisler drew inspiration from the BACH cipher, as in the Präludium und Fuge über BACH for string trio, Op. 46 (1934), in which the tetrachord generates through two transpositions an entire tone row. But, as Eisler explained, ‘the choice of the “B-A-C-H” motto is not meant to honour Johann Sebastian Bach … The choice … should connect much more to the bourgeois mysticism of the common musicians, who often only understand no more of Bach than the letters B-A-C-H’. Another work, Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain Op. 70 (Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben) originated in a score for Joris Ivens's silent film Rain (Regen, 1929), but was repurposed for Schoenberg's seventieth birthday in 1944.

My most honour’d Doctor.

For your most acceptable Present, which I received, when you honoured me with your Defence of your Natural History of the Earth, I return you all the Thanks of a Mind fill’d with Gratitude.

Your Triumphs over the Doctor of Tubingen, do but whett our Appetites for that most valuable Work; whereof I find my excellent Friend Dr. Edwards in a learned Essay with which he favoured me, raising also our Expectations.

I am overwhelmed with some Confusion, that I have not all this while yeelded a due Obedience to the Commands you laid upon me, to make a Collection of our Fossils. I can plead nothing for my Delay of my Duty in this Matter, but my being overwhelmed with Employment. For truly, Syr, I am far from what some have putt into their Letany, Homo unius Negotii. But I am forming the best Projection I can, in an Infant Countrey, entirely destitute of Philosophers, to have this, and other Intentions answered.

In the mean time, I pursue my Design, as well as I can, to make my Annual Presents of American Curiosities.

I am very much afraid, whether one of my Collections, did not miscarry; In which I also enclosed a Couple of Guinea's or, Louis d’ors, (I forgett which,) to be spent by you, and our dear Mr. Waller, when you should (with your Treasurer,) undergo, the Trouble of Reading over my tedious Letters. I therefore look’d out ﹛for﹜ some Imperfect Copies which I kept of those Letters, & have thrown them into the Packett now before me. If you have had ‘em, — tis well; There is no hurt in this Repetition.

The history of art music in Israel began with the 1931–1939 wave of Jewish immigration that brought more than forty professionally trained and accomplished composers from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine, then under British Mandate. The amazingly large repertory created in the Jewish community of Palestine, and later in the State of Israel, featured a diversity of ideological trends and created an imaginary line connecting two ideological poles.

The Heritage of the West

Confronting the trauma of enforced displacement under often terrifying conditions in Europe, most of the immigrant composers were reluctant to part with the heritage of the West within which they were trained and had composed. Their cultural attitude was an inversion of medieval Jewish poet-philosopher Jehudah Halevi's famous line, “My heart is in the east / and I am in the uttermost west.”

Example 2.1 presents the opening section of the “Praeludium” from the Suite for Cello Solo that Josef Tal (1910–2008), then Grünthal, composed in May 1937, exactly three years after he came to Palestine. The work combines two stylistic worlds: (1) the order and discipline of Bach's austere solo sonatas, an admired model for all German-educated composers; and (2) the Berlin-Vienna avant-garde of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples on which Tal was raised. Indeed, the work opens with a nearly regular twelve-tone series, save for a brief passing return of D♮ in measure 2.

The year 1926 was an exceptionally happy and productive year for Janáček. His works enjoyed great success with Káťa Kabanová pro¬duced in Berlin, the revised Mr Brouček's Excursion to the Moon given in Brno, and world premieres of the Concertino and The Makropulos Affair. Janáček was invited to London, where he was warmly welcomed (in spite of his visit coinciding with Britain's General Strike) and his music was generally well-received there. His native village of Hukvaldy unveiled a commemorative plaque at his birthplace – the Hukvaldy school – which pleased him greatly. New compositions that year included the Capriccio and the expanded version of Nursery Rhymes (Říkadla), alongside two large-scale works: the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta.

As discussed in the Prologue, Janáček had only completed four works for full orchestra before 1926 (apart from his early folk music arrange¬ments): Jealousy (Žárlivost) and three symphonic poems – The Fiddler's Child (1913), Taras Bulba (composed during the war years in 1915–8) and the Ballad of Blaník (1919–20). All four have some kind of programmatic, extra-musical element. Jealousy was based on a folk ballad, ‘The Jealous Man’; The Fiddler's Child took its inspiration from Svatopluk Čech's poem about a deceased fiddler and an abandoned orphan; the ‘Slavonic rhapsody’ Taras Bulba is based on Gogol's novella about a Cossack leader and his sons; and the Ballad of Blaník was inspired by Jaroslav Vrchlický's poem about the legendary Knights of Blaník. Programmatic or narrative ele¬ments were also to be significant for the unfinished Danube Symphony and the abandoned Violin Concerto, ‘The Wanderings of a Little Soul’, though there is little detail about what their precise inspiration might have been, literary or otherwise. Janáček also drew on extra-musical programmes for several of his chamber music pieces, including the Fairy Tale (Pohádka) for cello and piano and both string quartets.

Peace Not War: Traditions of Restorative Justice in Imperial Ethiopia, 1769–1960 traces the use and improvements made to restorative justice practices that characterized Ethiopian history into the early twentieth century. Overlapping, the book also assesses the pull of modernity that both forced and lured Ethiopia to cast aside its endogenously evolved legal remedies and adopt European jurisprudence that aligned more with retributive justice. This Epilogue demonstrates how thorough and encompassing was this transition to retributive justice, for when the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the Marxist dictatorship in 1991 and felt the necessity to apply transitional justice to try Derg members (Amharic for Committee and the term popularly used to refer to the military junta) in a court trial for their crimes against humanity and genocide, the EPRDF leadership did not even entertain the use of Ethiopia's traditions of restorative justice.

Peace Not War's agenda is twofold. First, it contributes to the literature on restorative justice by showing how Ethiopia, through trial and error, corrected the “forgive and forget” ideation of restorative justice as one-and-done, blanket amnesties that, as was shown (Chapter 2), did not bring about reconciliation, but rather encouraged enmity and war. It also demonstrated that historical analysis can uplift significant improvements that were made to restorative justice modalities through the development of “conditional forgiveness” that evinced ingenuity, flexibility, and adaptability to, in fact, reconcile warring parties and bring about lasting peace. Second, the historical method possesses a perhaps unintended consequence, for, by focusing on the way national threats to the sovereignty of the state were resolved, it outlined how one legal remedy was supplanted by another – restorative for retributive justice.