Since its very beginnings, a central narrative of European integration has been that only a form of profound cooperation between the European states will allow the promotion of prosperity and social security. The narrative of prosperity is one of the oldest and most constant meta-arguments of regional European integration. The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 already stated that the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) would contribute to ‘raising living standards’.1 In the European Union’s (EU’s) self-portrayal, prosperity, growth and employment are still among its hardly questioned and fundamental goals, as former President of the Commission Emanuel Barroso put it: ‘Today the raison d’être of our Union is also the same that was there sixty years ago: peace, democracy, to be freed from fears, mistrust and divisions, to share security, stability and prosperity.’

Empire, in the Western tradition, was a unitary and universal thing. There was and could be only one empire at any one time, and it was, in principle at least, a world empire. In this case, all roads led to and from Rome. Herodotus had introduced the idea, if not the term, of translatio imperii, the transfer of empire from one ruler to another. In his account the succession was from the Assyrians to the Medes, to the Persians. Later writers saw the Macedonians, in the person of Alexander the Great, as successor to the Persians, and later still it was relatively easy to see the Romans, with their admiration for Greek culture, as heirs to the Hellenistic empire of Alexander.

This chapter examines the major rebellions that occurred in Spanish America during the era of North American colonial protest and rebellion against British policies and government. It focuses on the revolt of the city of Quito in 1765, the Andean rebellions started by Tupac Amaru in 1780, and the 1781 Comunero rebellion in New Granada, set in the context of Spanish administrative and fiscal reforms under Charles III and Spanish geopolitical conflict with Britain between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of independence. The principal purpose here is to enquire into the origins of the rebellions, their organization and social composition, and the political attitudes and ideas of their participants. In addition to comparing the Spanish American rebellions in terms of their causes, political cultures and political impacts, it also reflects on their contemporaneous relationship to the American Revolution and their place in the wider challenge to European monarchies during the Age of Revolution.

Chapter One shows how intersections between science and antiquarianism in the eighteenth century renewed Europeans’ awareness of the hidden depths of history. This re-discovery of deep time contributed to Romanticism’s modern, historicist consciousness by expanding the time scale, secularising and destabilising fixed chronologies, and providing writers with a rich array of source materials from pre-history, Classical and Eastern Antiquity, and the Middle Ages. Using late-Romantic poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s’ ‘The Marl Pit’ as a guiding thread, it addresses Baron d’Hancarville’s archaeological work in Naples, the Comte de Buffon’s natural history, the Forsters’ travel accounts of their tour around the world, and early volumes of Herder’s Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Humanity. The chapter then evokes the meeting in Rome of Nicolas Desmarest and J.J. Winckelmann to demonstrate how natural historians and antiquaries joined forces to understand the past. Contrasting William Blake’s imaginative interpretation of medieval history as a source of national identity with Horace Walpole’s sceptical view, it concludes by addressing the growing rift between a Romantic and more rigorously scientific apprehension of the past.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

Translation plays a significant role in Chapter Ten, which maps out women writers’ contributions to a transnational European culture, focussing on British and French fiction. Although not exclusive to the Romantic period, connections between literary women were particularly productive. If Staël served as an important model, other influential women whose lives and works complicate notions of a distinct national literature also contributed to an international Romantic culture, including Brun, Genlis, Charrière, and Krudener. Popular genres that engaged with the foreign in the 1790s included émigré novels and travel writing. Women also participated in the public sphere through the unfairly trivialised salon culture. After reviewing a number of salons, including those of Albrizzi, von Kurland, Varnhagen, Moira, and the Hollands, the chapter then explores female contributions to education theory, including Madame de Genlis’s British legacy; women’s place in the novel market, contextualising Austen by placing her side by side with two little known novelists, Mary Charlton and Elizabeth Meeke; female translations as important forms of cultural mediation, particularly those of Isabel de Montolieu; and, finally, female-edited or -authored periodicals, concluding with Sarah Harriet Burney and her possible translation of Feijoo’s defence of women.

On 3 October 1990, something very strange happened. The European Community (EC) expanded without formally acquiring a new member. The reason for this was the reunification of Germany – on this day, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) acceded to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). As a result, the FRG gained five new federal states, which then also became part of the EC.

In 2020, ‘strategic autonomy’ became a buzzword in Brussels. The phrase catches different meanings, ranging from the self-sufficiency of the European Union (EU) to the management of interconnectedness in a globalised world. In EU parlance, ‘strategic autonomy’ is used in a sense that aims to be different from the traditional concepts of sovereignty and power, but should, however, not be read in contradiction with free trade. ‘Strategic autonomy’ seems to have been articulated first by President of the European Council Charles Michel in two speeches in September 2020. But in reacting to the clichés that US President Donald Trump voiced against the EU in January 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had already expressed her desire for European autonomy in declaring that ‘we Europeans have our fate in our own hands’. French President Emmanuel Macron has regularly used the related concept of ‘European sovereignty’ since his speech on Europe at the Sorbonne in 2017. Regardless of the origin and meaning of the phrase, ‘strategic autonomy’ touches therefore on a perennial motif of European integration that largely predates the 2010s, namely the place and role of the EU in a globalising (or globalised) world.

The decade-long process of European monetary integration has been the most ambitious, and probably the most controversial, project of its type.1

The Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s reinforced the scepticism toward monetary integration experienced not only by populist politicians but also by disillusioned academics. Belke and Verheyen, for example, argued in 2012 that: ‘It is time to admit that under the prevailing structure and membership, the euro area simply does not work successfully.’