The chapter studies Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man (1896). Drawing on the pictorial and literary reception of the Thames Tunnel and the Parisian underground, the chapter investigates how the material change of subterranean space in nineteenth-century Britain and France stimulated the conception of a “new” underground associated with the technological future. Comparing the two authors’ intersection of the new underground with climate control, it ventures that Bulwer-Lytton Lytton demonstrates the calamitous aesthetic consequences of climate technology employed by an underground race. In contrast, Tarde portrays the flourishing of decadent underground civilisation prompted by the heat death of the sun. The chapter concludes that the discursive network turning the underground into an inorganic, climate-controlled place peaks in Underground Man, where the climate becomes an engineerable simulacrum, spelling out a progression from dystopian to utopian depictions of deliberate climate change.

This chapter studies how J.-K Huysmans represented climate control on the scale of the individual – the universe of protagonist Jean des Esseintes – in Against Nature (1884). While French poets such as Théophile Gautier and Stéphane Mallarmé used a climatological vocabulary in reflexively describing the character of decadence, Huysmans formulated an understanding of climate as something always already artificial, always already anthropogenic. Imagining a range of fictional climates – from the distant skies of the South Seas to the rainy colossus of London – the protagonist takes the climatological imagination to the extreme, explicitly fantasising about a decadent Anthropocene in which the planet’s atmosphere becomes a piece of art. Studying how Huysmans’s decadent fiction portrayed climate control as an imaginative faculty, the chapter contends that the author presented a nascent epistemology of anthropogenic climate change, making it into a form of art.

Chapter 6 offers an empirical analysis of stewardship disclosures under the UK Stewardship Code, using text analytics – including text length, readability, phrase overlap, lexical similarity, frequency analysis, and structural topic modelling – to examine reporting under the 2012 and 2020 iterations. It reveals shifts in narrative style, thematic focus, and institutional engagement. Topic modelling shows a move from governance-centric narratives in 2012 to a broader thematic repertoire in 2020, including ESG integration, multi-asset stewardship, and systemic risk. While the UK Code 2020 prompted more reflective disclosures in some cases, others remain formulaic, relying on generic language and procedural reporting. Patterns of convergence and divergence reflect institutional type, resources, and stewardship capacity. The analysis underscores both the promise and limits of stewardship reporting – highlighting its role in fostering innovation and reflection, while exposing challenges in achieving consistent, meaningful implementation. By unpacking form and substance, the chapter contributes to debates on institutionalising stewardship as a credible mechanism of investor accountability and long-term public value.

This chapter concentrates on two authors, two contexts, and two works: US schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and British-Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Extrapolating the techno-social emergence of female ballooning in the nineteenth-century United States and India, the chapter argues that the two feminist utopias intersect social and environmental freedom. Lane employs the underground setting popularised by Bulwer-Lytton to house a techno-feminist civilization controlling the climate at will, while Hossain describes the diffuse, oneiric terrain of Ladyland in which climate control supports a garden world. Comparing the two different feminist utopias and contexts, both marked by feminist aviation and atmospheric interventions, the chapters showcase the socio-political character of anthropogenic climate change: Hossain’s climate utopia is caring, inclusive, and decolonial, whereas Lane’s is cynical, exclusive, and imperialist.

This chapter introduces Governance by Emulation, a framework analyzing how public law models, particularly administrative and constitutional mechanisms like individual rights adjudication, are reproduced in private and regulatory governance. Focusing on corporate-controlled content moderation, it examines the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) under the Digital Services Act and Meta’s Oversight Board–conceptualized as Emulated Guardians. These institutions borrow the legitimacy of courts to regulate novel, bureaucratic private power structures while addressing public demands for accountability. Grounded in law, sociology, and political science, the chapter outlines the book’s methodology and contributions. It delves into four inquiries: the actors involved, their tasks, the power they seek to discipline, and how public law principles are adapted for private governance. These dynamics highlight emulation’s duality: it promises innovation yet risks performative legitimacy devoid of substantive reform. By situating Emulated Guardians within broader global governance challenges, this chapter frames content moderation as a microcosm of future issues in sectors like AI, biotechnology, and space exploration. It concludes that while governance by emulation addresses urgent accountability demands, its efficacy depends on public engagement and institutional evolution, offering a critical lens to assess emerging accountability structures beyond state control.

This chapter argues for custom as the predominant historical and experiential form in 1859 and looks at its treatment in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Eliot’s Adam Bede. In Dickens, custom acts as a measure of the violence of the revolution; in Mill and Eliot, it is at the heart of their examination of identity and culture. Mill sees the ‘despotism of custom’ as essentially opposed to progress and individual liberty, but for Eliot, it is at the heart of community and needs to be recognised and accommodated by her most exemplary characters; it is a historical category that is commonly available and universally participated in. It enables all citizens equally to access the discourse of the historical and the experience of ‘society as incarnate history’. Eliot argues implicitly in Adam Bede that custom is fundamental to all human experience.

This chapter studies H. G. Wells’s integration of climate control as the atmospheric background of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia. In the Victorian period, dubbed the Crystal Age, British engineers such as Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (case), John Claudius Loudon (conservatory), and Joseph Paxton (palace) all built glasshouse structures, increasingly fit for human inhabitation, hoping to construct the climatological statis of eternal summer on a regional scale. Engaging with the aesthetic, architectural, and ideological development, the chapter argues that Wells examined the anthropogenic climate of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia in the short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), the novella The Time Machine (1895), and the novel A Modern Utopia (1905), speculatively thematising the long-term socio-biological consequences of the planetary greenhouse.

In conjunction with reshaping the imperial office, the challenges of colonial governance brought about broader changes in Germany’s system of government. The states represented in the Federal Council were increasingly sidelined as emerging Reich agencies came to dominate this body by sending their own representatives through the Prussian delegation. As this chapter explains, the colonies deepened the states’ marginalisation in the legislative process. With its chronic lack of funds and recurring scandals, the overseas empire gave the Reichstag a powerful lever for strengthening its position in national politics. From 1892, when colonial expenditure was made subject to parliamentary approval, the Reichstag increasingly compelled the Reich leadership to justify its policies. This dynamic contributed to early forms of a federal government with de facto cabinet ministers who, though lacking constitutional accountability, acted as counterparts to parliament. Yet parliamentary power remained sharply circumscribed. As the wars in South West Africa (1904–07) and East Africa (1905–07) revealed, the Reichstag could debate, criticise, and expose misconduct, but ultimate authority lay with the kaiser.