This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles, essays, and correspondence. The very best of these – the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s – command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself that Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically, they trace the rise and fall of his career from the publication of This Side of Paradise in March 1920 to his final years in Hollywood. In accepting This Side of Paradise for publication, Editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner asked Fitzgerald for a photograph and some publicity material. “You have been in the advertising game long enough to know the sort of thing,” Perkins added (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 21). In fact, Fitzgerald had worked only four months for the Barron Collier agency in New York, from March to July 1919, but he did understand how promotion could help sell books and was eager to cooperate in the enterprise. In a letter presented at the American Booksellers' Convention and included on a leaf added to several hundred copies of the novel, he began to establish a public personality designed at once to shock and attract his audience.

Through much of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, scholars in China and in the West debated the nature of Chinese nationhood. In the West, the once dominant view was promulgated by Joseph R. Levenson and like-minded scholars, who depicted Chinese identity in terms of “culturalism,” that is belonging to a universalizing and inclusive civilization, defined by a common Confucian culture. A concept of national identity conceived in ethnic or racial terms was considered a modern phenomenon, closely related to China’s entrance into the world of nation-states.1 In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, this view was criticized by scholars who demonstrated the existence of traits of exclusive ethnocentric Chinese identity back in the past. Some went as far as to postulate racism as pertinent to Chinese civilization from its earliest stages.2

This chapter explores the gendered terrain of nationalism in two institutional locales: national museums and national militaries. We visit a major site in each of these destinations and find that they are historical and contemporary scenes of masculinist hegemony. While women have achieved some representation in many contemporary political institutions, they are up against a powerful history of male preeminence and female marginalization. Just as men and manliness are, and have long been, dominant features of national landscapes, women remain relatively invisible, ignored, and underrepresented except in instances of gender trouble, such as equal rights litigation, sexual assault prosecutions, and protest movements. The chapter argues that there has been some movement toward women’s inclusion in modern nations and states, though women’s presence often has been used to buttress the powerful masculinist foundations upon which national institutions rest.

This chapter recasts America’s revolutionary origins as an imperial crisis brought on by changes in the Atlantic. It surveys Atlantic-wide developments over the course of the eighteenth century to suggest that the issues British Americans grappled with in the 1760s were not exceptional. The watery space was transformed by the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas for all. Slavery and the slave trade were the catalysts to systemic change. With these changes, the Atlantic became an entangled space. War heightened the stakes for domination of the oceanic system. Imperial reform was the result. All creoles throughout the Atlantic world experienced similar tensions over relations with their respective metropoles, and consolidation of the Atlantic created similar conflicts within all Atlantic societies. The chapter then explores how and why the British case diverged from the Atlantic-wide model and how a crisis over systemic consolidation became a civil war that fractured an empire. What we know as the American Revolution represented the fallout from these tangled dynamics.

Britain had a substantial Atlantic empire during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. Only some of their Atlantic colonies joined in the colonial rebellion that led to the creation of the United States. The end of the American Revolution signaled a new period in the history of the British Empire, but it was far from a period in which the Empire’s geographic center moved decisively to the East from the West. The British colonies in the Atlantic World that either remained or were acquired during the Atlantic Revolutions were vital parts of a changing geopolitical and economic order in which Britain solidified its global dominance in the period economic historians have termed the Great Divergence (when the West overtook the East in economic power). The British West Indies and Canada were central to the Atlantic Revolutions from the period of the Seven Years’ War until the end of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. Expansion in the British Atlantic after 1783 showed how valuable West Indian colonies continued to be to British geopolitical and economic policies and how Canada was rapidly becoming a set of colonies that were developing into vibrant settler societies.

This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.

Describes the phenomenon of “Sister Republics” and shows that it was limited until the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. To better understand the interactions between the “mother” Republic and her “daughters,” this chapter studies their constitutions and bills of rights, which reveal that some of them were shaped by native patriots, while others were forced upon them by the French government. In a way, the “Sister” Republics became a “constitutional laboratory” for France. All these changes did not happen without chaos and violence. In the “sister” republics too, force and coercion were necessary to implement the new regimes and to silent the factional struggles and the counter-revolution. Thanks to the French army, however, revolutionary terror did not win the day at least until 1799. In spite of all these problems, the young republics experimented new institutions and improvements for the time being and for the future. But, by a strange irony of fate, the only true “sister” republic was the republic of the United States, that is the only one which was not really influenced by the French Revolution, and which was to become a model in the following revolutionary waves.

The narrative of European integration was long dominated by the role of the participating member states, as personified in their respective presidents and prime ministers, in forging an ever-expanding set of institutions and an increasingly dense legal framework. This orthodox view saw nation states at the centre of the process, gradually pooling sovereignty to construct an ever-closer union. Analyses have differed as to the driving forces behind these processes. Debates in the 1990s between advocates of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism as the guiding explanatory frameworks still focused on an apparently self-contained European context, although the role of non-state actors did begin to feature more in the analysis. In contrast, more recent scholarship has contested the way the history of European integration has generally been framed in isolation from wider social, economic and political developments. Repositioning the processes of European integration in a global context requires that Europe as an historical entity be ‘provincialised’.

Germany can serve as short-hand for the “Holy Roman Empire” in the eighteenth century. Long dismissed as a constitutional “monstrosity,” the Empire in reality proved a surprisingly durable fixture of Europe’s Old Regime political and dynastic firmament. Within its confines there existed a multiplicity of sub-units that ranged in size and importance from the Great Powers of Austria and Prussia, to tiny independent principalities and city states. Some of these might be considered vibrant, and others stagnant. Some were ruled by princes who deserved the label “enlightened,” whilst others were governed by despots. A generalization that holds for the Empire as a whole is that it encouraged a political culture distinguished by its legalism and its localism. These characteristics were hardly effective when confronting the challenges posed by the French Revolution, whose real impact on Germany began in 1792 with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. These wars ultimately destroyed the Empire, thereby paving the way for the transformation of Germany that occurred under the hegemony of Napoleon.

Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the so-called “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century.

Gupta’s conviction indicates that Indian nationhood had earlier beginnings than has generally been supposed. The “Mutiny-Rebellion” of 1857, long regarded as a key transformative event, being hailed as the “first war of Indian independence” having “national” elements, was situated within a longer genealogy. This underscored the evolutionary process through which Indian nationhood developed. It also highlighted the multivalence of the revolt. It at once symbolized “power,” Indian agency, and collective identity: cutting across caste, class, and communal divisions. By connecting the revolt with the imperial glory of Mughal Delhi, Gupta mediated the many meanings of 1857, and linked it with a long patriotic past that evoked the idea of India despite endless fragmentation. His remarks hold the key to understanding how the many stories of Indian nationhood converged at complex levels.

Just as Rome opened up its Pantheon to gods of every race and put men with black skin on the imperial throne […] Europe should declare itself ready, by virtue of these very roots, to include every other cultural and ethnic contribution, since openness is one of its most distinguished cultural features.’

As in Umberto Eco’s appeal to European cultural inclusivity on the basis of Roman history, Europe’s narrative about its culture(s) is almost as rich as its past. And it is similarly complex and convoluted, with the European Union (EU) appropriating the idea of ‘Europe’ as a unifying signifier that awkwardly balances the EU’s official motto ‘unity in diversity’, as it aims to be representative of the current twenty-seven constituent member states’ cultures. Yet this conceptual framework leaves out, for instance, European countries that are not EU members, as well as tendentiously the non-European ethnic and cultural minorities that have found a home on the continent and have historically contributed to the region’s culture and history.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was every 5′3 ½″ a lady, but she outdrank men from Montgomery to Manhattan to Marseilles. Her short stories were so good that, sometimes, they appeared under her husband Scott's name. She was a gifted painter whose work was mostly bought out of pity, lost forever because it was unsigned and often given away, and burned by a protective, possibly jealous sister. She was a gifted dancer who began in earnest too late and never got a real chance. She was an early feminist heroine. She has inspired classic fantasy-action video games, lines of clothing, agenda-driven biographies, and novels from the beautiful to the damnable. She is catnip to movies and television series and is the current subject of two major biopics, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. The legends of Zelda go on and on, from shortly after her birth in 1900 to the present day, and surely beyond. Yet the truths of Zelda, as we can find them, are much finer and more meaningful than all the legends they still beget. It is time to realize how much they can round out, and also increase, the legend.