This chapter will chart the early turbulent years after the Treaty of Managua, which gave Nicaragua sovereignty over an autonomous Mosquito Reserve. As Nicaragua attempted to consolidate and control the transit route, it pushed for greater incorporation of Greytown and the Reserve within the Republic. This chapter will follow the tense standoff between Nicaragua and the Mosquito Kingdom, which would ultimately be brought to international arbitration through British initiative. In this context, the opening of the Suez Canal sparked off renewed American interest leading to the Lull survey of 1872–1873, which underscored the paradoxical reality that as the struggle over the canal route and Mosquito Reserve threatened to become an international issue, the local conditions of Greytown were slowly making the entry point of the proposed canal route unnavigable. Ironically, Nicaragua’s efforts to leverage U.S. interests in the canal led to conflict with Guatemala’s aggressive unionism, undermining ideals of regional unity.

Pablo Neruda lived in the crossroads of the cultural Cold War and its influence in Latin America. At once an ardent defender of the Soviet Union and the policies dictated from the Politburo, but also falling prey to the tensions that those directions generated in Latin America, the Chilean poet made the attempt (and ultimately failed to bring it to completion) to reconcile his views on democracy with the more radical members of Salvador Allende’s government. After the coup, amid the raids against all members of the political left, Neruda became a thorn in the side of the junta, and a potential menace that needed to be neutralized. The ensuing controversy regarding the judicial process to find the real cause of his death, not complete in its totality as of yet, contextualizes the rest of this essay.

Part II of the book turns to the field of history-writing more specifically and includes three chapters that approach the categorisation of history as universal or local in three different ways. Chapter 4 introduces early Islamic universal history-writing and the key concerns and interests of authors and compilers of such works down to the end of the fifth/eleventh century. It begins with a discussion of what a universal history was in the early Islamic world and moves on to look at the contexts and purposes of universal history-writing. The chapter ends with some consideration of whether universal histories are really any less parochial than local histories in their concerns.

1927 was a critical period in Pablo Neruda’s life. At the time, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Rangoon. He was a promising poet and a young diplomat hungry to see the world. Southeast Asia represented a season of solitude that he alleviated with his marriage to Maruca, with whom he would have his only daughter. The girl would die at an early age. In this region, he envisaged Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933). Through the letters to his friend Héctor Eandi and his travel chronicles, we learn the inner landscapes that occupied Neruda’s creative mind. A memorable poem written in this period is “El tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), which describes his tempestuous relationship with Josie Bliss. This period has been revisited lately due to the confession of a sexual assault of a young Tamil woman under his service expressed in his memoirs.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

This chapter focuses on the decisive moment that led to the creation of the Panama Canal and the waning of Nicaragua as the site of a potential transisthmian canal. The apparent abruptness of the decision to build the canal in Panama in 1902 belied the steady buildup of a new American way of looking at the world – emerging in the context of the Spanish–American War – that was heavily informed by the American press. The final turn towards Panama profoundly altered the course of Nicaraguan history and effectively stymied dreams of regional unity.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.

This chapter explores the intense debate over the proposed parliamentary union between Ireland and Britain in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. It examines competing visions of representative government, with unionists advocating for Ireland’s integration into a larger British polity to secure stability and prosperity, while anti-unionists defended the autonomy of the Irish Parliament as a symbol of national liberty. Key themes include the clash over sovereignty, the role of Catholic emancipation in the union debate, and the economic implications of integration. The chapter also analyses the pamphlet war that erupted, revealing how public opinion was mobilized through arguments about political equality, economic benefits and sovereignty. Ultimately, the Union’s passage in 1801, marked by political manipulation and broken promises, set the stage for Ireland’s turbulent relationship with Britain in the nineteenth century, framing subsequent struggles over governance and representation.

There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.