Voting reform was as much concerned with creating the right kind of voter as with extending representative opportunities. It was debated at length before competing party interests conspired to defeat the possibility of reform, and a general election was called. Despite winning additional seats, the Tories were defeated in a vote of confidence by united Liberal interests who formed a new party. Other forms of collective action were seen in strikes that spread through the country in the summer. They were condemned by Samuel Smiles as they ran counter to the ethos of his book, Self-Help, which came out in November. These topics indicate disturbances in traditional class demarcations, also seen in fictional depictions of young professionals. At an unsettled time, the country was further distressed by the passing of the great engineers Brunel and Robert Stephenson, though the widespread success and popularity of Adam Bede offered a more positive collective experience.

Chapter 3 discusses how audiences interpret character motivations. The Iliad frequently draws attention to what drives characters, prompting ancient and modern audiences to reflect on motivations even when they are not explicitly mentioned. Many influential Homeric interpreters denied that characters had free will, and claim that a supposedly ‘complete and unambiguous’ heroic code dictated all their choices. The chapter argues that this view contradicts both the text’s mechanisms and ancient interpretive practices. It also briefly surveys modern literary theories on ‘mind-reading’ and their implications for interpreting literary texts, in order to establish a framework for analysing character psychology

The Chronographia is an original, experimental, and uneven work, an imaginative exercise in interpreting the past through a rhetorical performance that expands into scenes to intensify and frame events. The skills of the rhetor are summarized. The text’s interplay of voices and roles, especially the imperial role, will be examined, together with the range of emotions felt and modelled, the spaces highlighted, the structuring of scenes, and their audiences inside and outside the action. Each reign dictates its own directions, each is assessed by its embodiment in the emperor: the Body Politic being the tacit underlying metaphor in a text unusually rich in metaphor. The aim is to discover how Psellos experiments with the material and finds out its possibilities; how the work develops to accommodate the increasing pressures of his own presence and self-presentation; how the empathetic, volatile, sensibility described by Papaioannou in Psellos’ rhetoric functions in the genre of history, and, from Book Six, how the Platonic idea of indirect rule by a philosopher (Kaldellis) fares, given the interfusion of the tragic and the comic in its course.

Two things drove and animated Psellos’ Chronographia to make it the extraordinary history it is: the divided feelings towards Constantine IX that had made him reluctant to begin it, and the skills and sense of his own life he had developed as a rhetor-philosopher. The first led him to enter the history in his own person and required a dialogue of genres connected with that person. The second required the skills of rhetoric and the calling of philosophy to be adapted to the needs of history: an adaptation that stimulated a further play of genres and mimesis, and, in particular, the development of skenes and drama. The two factors work together but unevenly.

The Introduction positions the book’s argument – literary representations of climate control promote a hitherto neglected awareness of anthropogenic climate change – within the fields of nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities. It argues that the space-time compression of the fin de siècle afforded not only social and geopolitical but also environmental volatility. The chapter posits that the catastrophic climate event of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and the spread of domestic climate technologies such as the greenhouse (early nineteenth century), the radiator (mid nineteenth century), and air-conditioning (late nineteenth century) provoked symbolic connections between an ever-accruing control of the local climate and an ever-increasing chaos of the global climate. A range of literary authors expressed a desire for global control by pursuing different narrative modes – speculative, utopian, and modern – to represent the deliberate intervention into the global climate of the deep future, ensuing utopia, or the literary exegesis itself.

Once the external borders of Germany’s overseas territories have been largely fixed – most notably through the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty – the Reich began to conquer them by militarily. This gave rise to internal frontiers: shifting zones of conquest and contestation within closed spheres of influence. During this period, the leading role passed from political entrepreneurs to the Schutztruppe – Germany’s colonial troops – whose campaigns established permanent bases that became the nuclei of colonial states. As detailed in this chapter, colonial state formation proceeded through long chains of delegation, reaching from Berlin to governors to district officers, each exercising wide discretionary powers. This arrangement produced chronic principal–agent frictions, centred on balancing autonomy and control. Everyday rule also relied on public, often violent, enforcement and on local intermediaries, blurring any tidy divide between direct and indirect rule. The result was a state apparatus that extended its reach unevenly, improvised under logistical constraints, and remained structurally fragile even as it deepened.

Romanos’ funeral freights the reign of Michael IV with the burden of Michael’s past, his betrayal of Romanos, false oath, deception of Zoe, and rumours of collusion in Romanos’ death. Psellos knits these elements together with Michael’s fine performance as emperor to produce a conscience-driven, tormented figure trying to save his soul and serve his people. It is a new departure, unrepeated, into a psychological analysis of guilt, shame, and the hidden aspects of the human psyche, with Michael’s illness a metaphor for what can and cannot be known or said. Book Five draws the reader out of the dark psychic region of Book Four, through a brief, paranoid, and jerky reign characterized by poor theatricals, to an energizing, open, and collective action with a telos. Having exiled his benefactor John, Michael V tonsures and exiles Zoe, and the City rises as one to tear the imperial buildings from the earth and reset the social contract. Psellos portrays the rising as divinely inspired and articulated, with the demos assuming the empire. Imbued with ironies, their movement is neos, gives rise to lacrimae rerum, and restores the Macedonian line.

This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

The conclusion looks at how contemporary newspapers begin the effort to historicise 1859 and effectively level out the contours of a very distinctive year, along with some of that year’s voices. There is little here on voting reform or the war in Europe, though the Rifle Volunteers are warmly celebrated. This shows what a year book can achieve in putting lost details and voices back into the narrative, thus becoming an important act of witness, but also showing how specific acts of omission go to make up our history and can slow down change. The first parts of The Mill on the Floss were written during 1859, and we see how that year feeds directly into Eliot’s work. The conclusion ends by suggesting that nature in Eliot is a form of collective inheritance that acts as a synecdoche for custom, which in turn is the foundation of her creativity.

This chapter offers an account of the concept of technē in classical Greek culture, with particular attention to its social, epistemological, and pedagogical dimensions. It draws on literary, documentary, and art historical sources to reconstruct technē as a lifelong, economically embedded profession characterized by specialization, teachability, and use of rationality. Four core aspects are emphasized: (1) the low social status of dēmiourgoi; (2) the close relationship between technē and teaching, including apprenticeship; (3) the necessity of specialization, with practitioners typically mastering only one trade; and (4) the rationality of technē, evidenced through causal reasoning, written protocols, and the use of mathematics. The chapter also explores the contested status of elite practices – such as warfare, poetry, and rhetoric – as technai, and the sophists’ self-presentation as professionals. By situating technē within the lived realities of ancient Greek labor and education, the chapter sets the stage for Plato’s philosophical use of the concept.

Social scientists need to employ a comparative approach if they want to explain cultural variation from a cross-cultural perspective (Smith et al. 2012). The fundamental analytical problem is that the modern era simply does not encapsulate enough of the variation for how humans have lived or in fact do live. Although a few economists have attempted to include premodern economies into formal modeling of economic systems (Dow and Reed 2022), the collection of evidence on premodern economies and its interpretation primarily is the job that anthropologists and historians must undertake. This volume undertakes the challenge of developing a comparative understanding of premodern economies. We feel that economists often misrepresent modern economies by oversimplifying processes by not considering many earlier economic relationships of labor and exchange that continue into the present day. We envision economies as historically developed, adding new processes related to scale and changing objectives over time. As a first step, we should clarify what we mean when we discuss premodern economies.

This chapter traces how the issue of mass emigration in the nineteenth century served as a catalyst for Germany’s colonial movement. Advocates of overseas colonies argued that emigrants should be redirected into German settlements abroad, where they could preserve their national identity rather than swell the ranks of rival nations. Settler colonialism was thus imagined not only as a way to relieve social pressures at home but also as a means of extending the nation’s boundaries beyond its ancestral territories. This programme of imperial nationalism, however, clashed with Bismarck’s Europe-centred priorities, which undermined the prospect of timely implementation. While the colonial movement pressed for the acquisition of an overseas empire, the Reich leadership focused instead on consolidating Germany’s national empire, created under Prussian leadership during an earlier phase of empire building.