This chapter explores the constitutional ramifications of the French Revolution’s transformation of the old regime of property. It reinterprets the abolition of feudalism as part of the revolutionaries’ larger attempt to draw a conceptual and legal line of demarcation between property and power. Their double aim was to make property truly private by stripping from it all attributes of public authority and to make power truly public by eliminating its former patrimonial characteristics. The attempt to implement this demarcation in practice was still underway decades after the Revolution had formally ended feudalism. Over time, it largely succeeded. From this distinction between property and power flowed some of the key conceptual binaries – the political and social, state and society, public and private, sovereignty and property – through which we still apprehend the world. The abolition of feudalism was thus much more than simply the eradication of an archaic form of property. Rather, it played an essential role in shaping the conceptual building blocks from which modernity was built.

Beginning in the 1760s, white women’s political activism and agency grew and developed as a result of Enlightenment theory, religious revival, and the politicization of the household economy. Revolutionary fervor created new political spaces for women as they engaged in political protests and boycotts. The circumstances of the war further refined Americans’ perceptions of women’s fortitude, political allegiance, piety, and self-direction. These factors combined to create a new foundation for white women’s participation in the republican political culture of the United States as the guardians of moral and political virtue. These new notions of women’s political connection to the state through moral authority and motherhood, however, created increasingly separate political spaces for women and men. Despite the development of women’s political agency during the Revolution, by the early 1800s many Americans began to look to the patriarchal family to restore order and social authority. Men abandoned the idea that women could be competent political actors and instead promoted a specifically masculine ideal of citizenship. State legislators and jurists revised their ideas about women’s citizenship, inheritance, and allegiance to the state. This refashioning chipped away at most claims women had to economic independence or direct political participation.

This chapter proposes that the representation of animals in contemporary writing is best understood as “literary zoontology”: the portrayal of animal existence, and of sociality among animals and humans, as an intertwined story of the reality of more-than-human life and literary meaning. The framework adopted is principally literary-theoretical. By analyzing some key contemporary critical approaches to making sense of animal life, I argue for attention to the “animal form” of contemporary texts, in which literary animal lives are not dissected into their actual and imaginary, embodied and aesthetic, parts. The analysis then opens onto a key example: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animal form of Animal Farm configures together what are normatively understood as essentially different “kinds” of living and being: human and animal, species and individual, speculative and actual, aesthetic and real. Indeed, focusing through the lens of literary zoontology offers us new ways to discover Orwell’s literary animals within the history of human-animal relations. As such, it is one way that literary reading can take us beyond the human-animal divide.

Ideas of citizenship have changed considerably since the concept was first envisioned in classical antiquity (Greece and Rome). For a long time, it remained an uncertain and undefined area – so that, for instance, Aristotle saw no general agreement on a definition of citizenship.1 The citizenship laws of Athens distinguished between citizens, slaves, and non-slave residents (metics), including prosperous and affluent merchants.2 Eventually, the Citizenship Law introduced by Pericles (451 bce) extended the status of citizen to offspring whose parents were both Athenians.

Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations.

The age of Atlantic revolutions brought hope for fundamental change, a scarce good in the early modern world. Change was achieved through the creation and legal incorporation of rights, which differed from privileges, as they transcended all structures of authority and were thus common to humankind. Yet inequalities persisted, especially inequality of property and religion. What did change was the ability to voice one’s opinion. Slogans used in national debates were utilized by people across social boundaries in countless local settings to express their political views or personal interests. This instrumentalization in turn reverberated on the national level. To succeed in achieving political goals, the mobilization of public opinion became indispensable. Likewise, revolutionaries agreed that the regimes they built had to be supported by some form of popular control over the government. But the actual people – rather than the abstract one that was a source of legitimacy – was feared nonetheless. Most new regimes were republics, while royalists tended to uphold the status quo or pursue their goals without overthrowing the government, although royalism did not necessarily denote a progressive or conservative ideology.

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

Over recent years the traditionally Eurocentric field of nationalism studies has changed, so as to include Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although there have long been prominent exceptions to these regions’ previous neglect in studies of nationalism,1 such accounts have had a limited impact on the field’s theory building. This earlier marginality was all the more lamentable considering that these regions’ histories are central to the historical question of why and how the nation-state became something like a global gold standard of political organization during the past 250 years – and with reinvigorated speed in the two decades following the Second World War, during which many European colonies in Asia and Africa gained independent statehood.

This chapter traces the origin of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland to that great destabilization in the Atlantic world provoked by Britain’s stunning victories in the Seven Years’ War, and the consequent acquisition of a worldwide Empire. These impacted on Ireland in that the quest for recruits to garrison this empire led directly to a repeal of many of the most stringent Penal Laws against Catholics, for Irish Protestants, a deeply unsettling development. In their turn, these triggered a continual political crisis in Ireland that was sharpened by the American crisis and the attendant whiff of British vulnerability. The French Revolution sent out mixed but powerful messages. Its Jacobin promise of liberty and equality found an eager audience in Ireland and elsewhere among those who were educated but marginalized. Among some Presbyterians the incredible events in France were viewed as a preliminary to the downfall of the Anti-Christ and as a prelude to the Second Coming. For many Irish Catholics, the message was also clear: the Jacobite moment had come and with it the real prospect of deliverance by a French invasion force. These mixed, sometimes contradictory strands led inexorably to armed rebellion in 1798.

In November 1968, the finance ministers of the Group of Ten, comprised of the leading industrial nations, convened in Bonn for an emergency meeting. It focused on recent monetary turbulence in the markets, particularly the rampant speculation against the French franc and the British pound, but also on the weakness of the American dollar, a core issue of international monetary diplomacy throughout the 1960s. The finance ministers of France, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States, representing the major Western allies of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), exerted strong pressure on the Germans to revalue their currency so as to stop the speculative movements against the weaker currencies. (Throughout this chapter, unless specified otherwise, ‘Germany’ and ‘Germans’ refer to the FRG.) Their efforts were to no avail. The proceedings, humorously described in many ex-post accounts, soon bordered on the farcical and ended with complete disagreement.

Chapter Eighteen introduces us to Scandinavian Romanticism, which helped Denmark, Sweden, and Norway imagine themselves as independent nations by drawing on Old Norse and medieval sources, contributing to a shared sense of identity. The chapter explores its origins in Mallet and eighteenth-century antiquarianism, drawing parallels with Ossian and Percy, and discussing Ewald’s Rolf Krage. It then looks at some of the defining features of Scandinavian ballads, including the figures of elf and shield maiden. Sweden’s loss of Finland led to an ‘Old Scandinavian’ turn in which the Viking became a common topos, as we discover in works by Tegnér and Wergeland. It also led to calls for a new mythology, answered among others by Ewald, Grundtvig, and Oehlenschläger. Other writers include the young Ibsen, who began his career with plays about Norse mythology, and Erik Gustaf Geiger whose stories idealise Nordic liberty. Fairy tales were also an important Romantic genre. Möller discusses the motif of the Isle of Felicity in works by Almqvist and Atterbom before turning to the characteristic features of Andersen’s tales. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of Scandinavian Romantic fiction, including male-authored historical romances but also domestic novels written by women that look towards realism.

This chapter argues that the European Communities (EC) and then the European Union (EU) rapidly became an international political actor which, despite the lack of military tools, did not limit its actions to the exercise of soft or civilian power.

Since the 1990s, numerous political scientists have debated the nature of the EU as an international actor, proposing the similar concepts of civilian power, quiet superpower, normative power, transformative power and liberal power. Many debated and reappraised these definitions. In the last 20 years, several historians have added their contributions to studies about the international political role of the EC/EU, revealing how the EC polity increasingly asserted itself as more than just an international economic heavyweight, with some successes, some failures and several limitations.

This chapter explores the varied meanings of “youth” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Traditionally, this theme has been examined to the writer’s disadvantage as evidence of his unfortunate investment in adolescence and young adulthood and his dread of senescence, which for him usually set in at the age of thirty. This survey argues that age consciousness was endemic throughout early twentieth-century American culture, with psychologist G. Stanley Hall in particular defining youth as a period of fiery intensity soon lost to the enervating compromises of middle age. Fitzgerald’s literary treatment of this issue helped rewrite the adolescent experience, but his fear of growing old created curious anxieties about sexuality and sex itself, which is why his fiction typically fixates on the kiss instead of coitus.

Two of the most influential concepts of the long nineteenth century developed in a complex and entangled relationship that cannot be reduced to a mere dichotomy. At first sight, however, liberalism has often been interpreted “as both logically and morally incompatible with nationalism.”1 This incompatibility has been derived from the perspective of the early twentieth century when from the early 1920s onwards liberalism seemed to come under increasing pressure from both Bolshevism and fascism. Whether in its Italian version of fascism or in German National Socialism, European fascisms as the culmination of radical nationalism seemed to rely on the ultimate negation of those values and institutions which had been identified with the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, such as personal liberty, free trade, or a constitutional order. Hence the search for the early origins of the apparently obvious dichotomy between liberalism and nationalism followed the logic of retrospective teleology.

As they had in early modern Spain, Africans and their descendants across the Spanish Empire were able to achieve freedom through a variety of legal means. In the seventeenth century, as European competitors contested Spain’s claims on the Americas, free black military units became key to the defense of Spanish territories and the Spanish Crown recognized and rewarded their service. After a French monarch assumed the vacant throne of Spain in the eighteenth century, Bourbon administrators established Disciplined Militias offering additional protections and privileges to the African descended men who joined their ranks, and to their families. In return, this expanding free black class often expressed its loyalty to the Spanish Crown. The French and American Revolutions that rejected monarchy and disseminated new ideas such as the Rights of Man and constitutional forms of government forced Africans and their descendants to re-consider their options. Some rejected monarchy. Others, however, continued to trust in the monarchical system that had benefitted many generations of African descended families. Those chose royalism over rebellion. Africans and their descendants continued to face such choices as independence movements sprung up across Latin America in the early nineteenth century and as Spain sent armies to crush them.