This chapter examines how Germany’s colonial empire reshaped the imperial office and its public displays. Although constitutionally a primus inter pares among the German monarchs, the kaiser gained additional authority through the Colonial Act of 1886 and its later amendments, which tied the protectorates directly to the imperial office. In the Wilhelmine period, Germany increasingly embraced its role as an overseas power. The kaiser assumed a more prominent role in public life, using colonial politics to stage himself as a national monarch, while the colonial administration expanded in tandem. In 1890, a Colonial Department was established within the Foreign Office, and the Colonial Council introduced a corporatist structure that linked state administration with the colonial lobby. Abroad, Wilhelm II pursued an interventionist foreign policy, culminating in the occupation and lease of Jiaozhou Bay in 1897–98. Naval expansion under Tirpitz, beginning with the 1898 Fleet Act, anchored these ambitions and enhanced Germany’s standing as a maritime power. Under the banner of Weltpolitik, Germany came to define itself as an imperial nation with global aspirations, claiming its ‘place in the sun’.

This chapter examines Meta’s Oversight Board, a pioneering experiment in governance by emulation that adapts individual rights adjudication to the private governance of social media platforms. Operational since 2020, the Board has been celebrated as a step toward greater accountability while also criticized as a superficial PR strategy. Through its structure, practices, and public perception, the Board blends public- and private-law principles, presenting itself as operationally independent and adjudicating disputes based on international human rights norms. However, its circumscribed authority raises questions about its capacity to elicit substantive structural change at Meta. The chapter situates the Oversight Board as an Emulated Guardian, designed to mimic adjudication but primarily serving as a performative tool to lend legitimacy to Meta’s content moderation. While initially dismissed as symbolic, the Board’s incremental expansion of its guardianship role highlights its dialectical potential: it is both limited by its private nature and empowered by its adjudicatory appearance. This case study progresses through six analytical steps, exploring the Board’s origins, institutional structure, decision-making processes, and practical impact, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities of regulating private power in a globalized digital environment.

Chapter 7 develops a multidimensional typology of investor stewardship, offering a framework to interpret its expanding scope and practice across the investment ecosystem. It identifies five dimensions: levels of intervention (micro, portfolio, system, and macro); stewardship actors (direct and indirect, across the investment chain); targeted assets (extending beyond public equity to debt, infrastructure, and real assets); motivations (financial value, ESG risk, and sustainability goals); and operational means (capital allocation, engagement, collaboration, and escalation). The chapter introduces the concept of blended stewardship to capture how institutional investors increasingly operate across levels and strategies to address complex, systemic challenges. Drawing on qualitative insights from the second-generation UK Stewardship Code disclosures, it shows how stewardship is diversifying in form, focus, and asset class. Framing stewardship as a pluralistic and relational practice – shaped by institutional roles, market structures, and normative expectations – the chapter provides the analytical foundations for rethinking how stewardship can meet the governance demands of the twenty-first century.

This chapter studies how Mark Twain moved the representation of climate control from the intra-diegetic plot to the extra-diegetic level of authorial narration in The American Claimant (1892). Drawing on the nascent practice of large-scale climate control by business-minded engineers such as Edward Powers and Robert Dyrenforth, backed by the US government, Twain granted the reader of his proto-modernist novel climatic agency at the same time that the influential mapmaker and publisher Levi Walter Yaggy was granting climatic agency to US pupils through his interactive representation of the planet in his Geographical Study (1887) and Portfolio (1893). Making anthropogenic climate change a narrative form, the chapter concludes that Twain’s proto-modernist work shows how fiction prescribes our understanding of climate, but also how the notion of climate control influenced his fiction: the novel’s universe becomes susceptible to readerly change, providing a proto-modernist challenge to the stable diegetic confines of the realist novel.

November 1859 saw the publication and initial serialisation of some of the most influential and enduring books of the nineteenth century, including The Woman in White, which began serialisation in November; the first parts of Beeton’s Book of Household Management; Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The chapter considers the reception of Darwin’s work before looking at how each of these texts is centrally concerned with modes of change, and history. It argues that Beeton and Smiles show how custom can enable change, and that Darwin and Collins share an interest in a non-religious world-view that might in itself force change. All these texts also provoke questions of originality and adaptation, and raise the question of how far originality is actually a possibility. A Shakespeare burlesque shows how texts, along with custom itself, mutate over time.

This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.