This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the Middle Ages conceived the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures. The first, according to which humans are a unique kind of animal (in the Latin word’s sense of “living being”), is available primarily to the learned, whereas the second, widely attested in lay usage and practice, concerns the difference (or lack of it) between humans and “beasts.” The chapter explores the complication of both relationships in the French and English romances of William of Palermo (late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century and mid-fourteenth-century, respectively), in which one aristocratic protagonist is turned into a werewolf and others disguise themselves in the skins of bear or deer. Human exceptionalism appears to condition the story’s coding of social dysfunction as animalization, but the romances equally show medieval aristocratic and chivalric identity embracing its proximity to “beasts,” for example, in the notion of sovereignty, in the symbolic languages of heraldry and dreams, and in moments of explicit self-identification. The chapter concludes by arguing that the way these romances build their fiction with reference to animals is materialized in the manuscript books that transmit them, made up as they are of parchment pages, that is, of processed animal skins.

Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. “In the beginning was the Reich,” declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, “that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has … its origin.” Winkler’s judgment reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany’s premodern “state,” the empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers.

Nowhere are asymmetrical power dynamics between humans and animals more evident than in systems of captivity. This chapter assesses literary responses to animal capture, with particular emphasis on zoos. It considers the colonial networks of trade that help to populate Western zoos and examines questions of spectatorship and subjectivity behind and in front of the cage. The discussion is structured around a series of vignettes staging different attitudes toward captive animals. These focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Franz Kafka’s ape Red Peter, Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, Marie NDiaye’s fish-woman, and Lydia Millet’s benighted zoogoer, paying special attention to texts inspired by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – the world’s oldest civil zoo, which opened during the French revolution.

Lovers of opera and classical music will not find it hard to think of scores strongly associated with their authors’ national identity, such as Chopin’s mazurkas (c. 1825–1849), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (1868), Smetana’s Vltava (The Moldau, 1874), or Sibelius’s Finlandia (1899). The connections between the traditions of art music and nationalism are manifold, and the nineteenth century, the age of musical Romanticism, in particular produced a substantial output of “national works,” the most successful of which are still in the repertory today. As a result, scholars of music have been debating the theme of “music and the nation” since the nineteenth century itself, when the discipline of music historiography first emerged.

Chapter Sixteen argues that late-Romantic literature also reflects Europe’s new global consciousness, a product of the modern nation-state rather than of cosmopolitanism. What Goethe referred to as Weltliteratur is updated here as global literature. The chapter first defends the historical and theoretical application of globalisation to the Romantic context, linking it with the development of nationalism and imperialism, and in particular the increasingly transnational book trade. It then analyses this ‘global imaginary’ from a British perspective in Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Felicia Hemans’ Records of Woman. These texts show among other things how Britons reacted to their nation’s new global power and interconnectedness, which made them feel more dependent and vulnerable, but also contributed to a sense of ‘global sociality’. The last section briefly looks at how other European literatures likewise reflected their national as well as imperial anxieties in the wake of Napoleon, examining Scott’s influence abroad in a novel by de la Motte Fouqué.

In an all-too-brief professional career of approximately twenty years, Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories, most of them for sale to commercial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty-nine of these stories were collected in four separate volumes, one accompanying each of the four novels that Scribner’s published during Fitzgerald's lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was the companion volume for This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) for The Beautiful and Damned (1922); All the Sad Young Men (1926) for The Great Gatsby (1925); and Taps at Reveille (1935) for Tender Is the Night (1934). In addition, he wrote a play, The Vegetable, published by Scribner in 1923, and scores of nonfiction pieces, many of which appeared in commercial magazines during his lifetime. At the time of his death he was working on an elaborately conceived novel, The Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously in 1941 as a fragment with Fitzgerald's own notes. When he was not writing for publication, Fitzgerald wrote about his life and about his observations on life in his ledger and in his notebooks, both of which are now available in book form. In spare moments he wrote letters – letters to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner; letters to his literary agent Harold Ober; letters to literary acquaintances, friends, and family – letters, often about his writing, that now fill four substantial volumes. Above all else, Fitzgerald was a writer, a literary artist, who shared early with Edmund Wilson his immodest goal of becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 70).

From the late eighteenth century, Europe started rising to the top of the world. The first industrial revolution in Britain gradually spread over the continent and the first important steps of a second industrial revolution, partly by Germany, were made after the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1870, Europe produced 45 per cent of the world’s total income. Around the turn of the century, however, Europe lost its leading position, and produced only 27 per cent of the world’s total income by 1913. The combined per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the overseas West (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was already more than 70 per cent higher than that of western Europe.

Hungary was by far the largest constituent part of the Habsburg Monarchy, and a considerable European state in its own right. The relationship between the Habsburg ruler and Hungary’s assertive, noble-dominated estates was characterized by a traditional duality between “crown” and “country” which limited the monarch’s ability to raise taxes and mobilize resources. Maria Theresia (1740–1780) skillfully managed this system, while her radical son, Joseph II (1780–90) openly challenged it. He introduced a blizzard of reforms in pursuit of an efficient and unified Habsburg state. His uncompromising reform drive provoked resistance, verging on open revolt by the end of his reign. This chapter argues that effective resistance to Josephist absolutism originated in a group of disillusioned Hungarian officeholders and that these cannot simply be dismissed as dyed in the wool conservatives. Under the new ruler, Leopold II (1790–2) a compromise was reached: the traditional duality was restored and the bulk of the Josephist reform programme was jettisoned. Nonetheless, three key reforms were incorporated which helped to unify the Hungarian élite and made the country, and ultimately the Habsburg Monarchy, better able to face the challenge of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

On 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi declared in front of a group of about 200 London business people that he would do ‘whatever it takes to save the euro’.1 These seven words have been analysed to have made all the difference.2 By doing so, the European Central Bank (ECB) effectively ended a long period of uncertainty and indecisiveness. The markets needed a strong signal so that they knew that the young European currency would be supported politically and economically.

After summer 2012, the euro area did not experience the same level of crisis, although the sovereign debt crisis was truly resolved only in 2015 and there were still challenging times until then.

In 1877 George F. Keller (1846–1927?) commented on America’s ethnic melting pot and exclusionism by drawing “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” showing a chaotic dining scene (see Figure 34.1).1 Uncle Sam is served (uncooked) turkey by an African-American domestic and is accompanied by nine male diners. All have food in front of them: the Frenchman has frogs and wine, the German sauerkraut and sausages, the Russian holds a bottle with a label saying “Acid,” and, to the disgust of the Irish (having potatoes and whisky) and the Englishman (having pie and tea), the Chinese is eating a rat.2 This was not the first time that nations and peoples were pictured by means of foodways.3 In 1803, for example, English cartoonist James Gillray (1757–1815) drew a party of five German men who ferociously devoured sauerkraut and sausages (with beer jugs pell-mell on the floor).4 Later, typecasting nations through food occurred regularly.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

The cultures of sensibility explored in Chapter Four authorised women to write, but as the chapter shows, the concept was equally influential among male writers, and contributed in significant ways to Romantic-period aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Eighteenth-century aesthetics reflected a new interest in the body and the senses. Like Romantic nature, Romantic sensibility is presented as a story of co-becoming, in this case between body and mind rather than between mind and nature. After discussing the difficulty of defining sensibility, the chapter provides a history of eighteenth-century neurophysiology, including the ground-breaking work of Haller, the electrical experiments of Galvani, and Bonnet’s invention of psychology. Steiner then turns to Rousseau to demonstrate the transition from medical to moral sensibility, and how sympathy operated as a central principle among Edinburgh’s moral sense philosophers. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey helped spread moral sympathy across Europe, linking it with the feminisation of culture and with various reform movements, as shown in examples ranging from Chateaubriand to Jean Paul, a Danish anti-slavery narrative to the ‘Revolution debate’ in Britain. The chapter ends on an ambivalent note, using the Pygmalion motif to address the often-criticised connection between sensibility and narcissism.

This chapter revisits the latest trends in the historiography of gender in the Age of Revolutions in current Latin America and proposes the need to put politics at center stage. Based on new scholarship on the rise of political actors in the viceroyalty of Peru in these transitional years, the text argues that the Era of Revolutions saw the emergence of a new patriarchal order that brought about a new masculine identity tightly connected with force, action, and modern politics. While new men found unprecedented opportunities to take on positions of authority and power, this process led to a renewed exclusion of other masculine identities, homosexuals, and women from public and political arenas. Moreover, this exclusion brought about a mysoginistic and machista discourse that dominated reform projects, legal documents, the press, arts, and theater. Studying this discourse, the chapter argues, is crucial to understanding exclusionary practices in politics that remain in place in the region to this day.

In July 1944, delegations from forty-five nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods to devise a monetary regime for the post-war world that aimed to replace the currency warfare of the 1930s and to provide a firm basis for the restoration of a multilateral world economy. Between 1971 and 1973, this system fell apart – and during the fruitless attempts at reform, the European Economic Community (EEC) took initial steps to move from the customs union and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to monetary union. This shift in priorities is usually explained as an internal European process, but this chapter indicates that it needs to be understood within a wider context of the design flaws of the Bretton Woods system, failed reform by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and growing European criticism of the American response.

When the Haitian Revolution entered its final years, the leaders of this French colony had to grapple with two main questions. First, should they grant the newly emancipated slaves full control over their lives, or should they curtail the freedom of field hands in the name of economic recovery? Second, should Haiti (Saint-Domingue) remain under direct French rule, or should it seek some political autonomy or even outright independence? Toussaint Louverture, who dominated Saint-Domingue’s politics from 1798 until his exile in 1802, embraced a middle course, forcing field hands to toil as semi-free cultivators on their old plantations while maintaining loose political ties with France. Napoléon Bonaparte, who sent massive expeditions to French Caribbean colonies in 1802, tried to reinstitute direct French control over the colonial empire; he also restored slavery in Guadeloupe and French Guiana and seemed poised to do the same in Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines ousted French forces in 1803 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, albeit maintaining the cultivator system that restricted the freedom of freedmen.

The American Revolution had a significant impact on the non-British islands in the Caribbean. Especially during the first three years of the revolutionary war, the French colonies of Martinique and Saint-Domingue and the Dutch island of St. Eustatius played an active role in furnishing arms and ammunition to the Patriots. The subsequent formal declarations of war by France and Spain against Great Britain moved the war’s center of gravity to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Combined French and Spanish naval power there more than matched that of Britain, leading to the conquest of several British islands. In those islands that revolved around plantation agriculture based on slavery, the war created military possibilities for the growing group of free men of color and, by reducing food supplies, induced marronage. Free and enslaved nonwhites thus engaged in their own quest for freedom and equality in the shadow of the North American independence war.