The 1850s saw Britian involved in large-scale combat in India and the Crimea, which left it ill-equipped to intervene in Italy’s war against its Austrian rulers. Though sympathetic to Italy, Britain was more concerned about France’s participation and what was seen as its manoeuvring for greater European power. Britian responded with a massive volunteer movement which wasn’t always taken entirely seriously, and which seeded the potential for the year’s military activities being seen as a literal theatre of war. Charles Kean’s Henry V attempted to ignite pride in Britain’s martial history, but this was countered by the ignominious experiences of British troops in China, and the ‘Pig War’. Barbaric treatment of British soldiers by the military authorities diminished the distance between Britain and its ‘uncivilised’ enemies, and provided a fertile ground for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which celebrated in King Arthur another figure from the past.

Chapter 3 investigates the evolution of institutional shareholder activism, focusing on how a diverse range of investors – including pension funds, asset managers, hedge funds, and index funds – have moved from passive holders to more assertive and strategic actors in corporate governance. It traces the theoretical roots of shareholder activism, from the exit-versus-voice framework to the economic constraints and tactical shifts that define modern engagement. Using a typology of firm-, portfolio-, and system-level activism, the chapter explores a broadened strategic repertoire – illustrating a shift from adversarial tactics to more collaborative, coalition-based engagement – and examines how activist goals have expanded from financial returns to encompass ESG and systemic concerns. Drawing on a hand-collected dataset of UK activism campaigns (2010–20), it maps evolving trends in actors, agendas, and tactics, and analyses how ownership concentration and investment horizon influence outcomes. The chapter concludes by situating shareholder activism within policy debates, contrasting ‘engaged’ and ‘transient’ investors, and reframing shareholder voice within a pluralistic model of stewardship.

For financial and personal reasons, Eliot was keen that Adam Bede should be popular, but that aspiration necessarily brought the novel into competition both with popular culture and the popular fiction by women that Eliot had criticised in 1856. Adam Bede explicitly recognises the challenges of its publishing context, and seeks, whilst exploiting some of the interests of popular fiction, to educate its readers both about the responsibilities of the novelist and their fiction to practise a responsible form of realism, and the readers’ own capacity for more substantial fare. The overwhelming popularity of Mrs Poyser and her home-spun wisdom sites the novel’s popularity in the nostalgic appeal of country life, but primarily, as the reviewer Anne Mozley argues, in its developing the reader’s sympathy with ordinary people, and in establishing a link with the reader based in the harmonious creation of memories of familiar places and emotions.

Chapter 4 reconceptualises investor stewardship by tracing its historical, conceptual, and economic roots and advancing a theory of stewardship as delegated, relational power. It unpacks the evolving meanings of stewardship – from early moral connotations to contemporary use in corporate governance and investment management. Rejecting a narrow principal–agent lens, it reframes stewardship as a multidimensional practice embedded in complex delegation structures and layered accountabilities. The chapter introduces a tripartite model of stewardship – as power exercised by institutional investors, on behalf of clients and beneficiaries, and for the benefit of wider, often unseen, stakeholders – and a four-part relational model: client stewardship, end-investor stewardship, asset stewardship, and sustainability stewardship. These relationships expose the plural and sometimes conflicting responsibilities investors bear within a fragmented investment chain. It also considers the economic rationale for investor stewardship, highlighting incentives, constraints, and portfolio dynamics. Finally, it introduces the enlightened steward as a pluralistic figure balancing private mandates with systemic effects.

Voting reform was as much concerned with creating the right kind of voter as with extending representative opportunities. It was debated at length before competing party interests conspired to defeat the possibility of reform, and a general election was called. Despite winning additional seats, the Tories were defeated in a vote of confidence by united Liberal interests who formed a new party. Other forms of collective action were seen in strikes that spread through the country in the summer. They were condemned by Samuel Smiles as they ran counter to the ethos of his book, Self-Help, which came out in November. These topics indicate disturbances in traditional class demarcations, also seen in fictional depictions of young professionals. At an unsettled time, the country was further distressed by the passing of the great engineers Brunel and Robert Stephenson, though the widespread success and popularity of Adam Bede offered a more positive collective experience.

The Introduction positions the book’s argument – literary representations of climate control promote a hitherto neglected awareness of anthropogenic climate change – within the fields of nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities. It argues that the space-time compression of the fin de siècle afforded not only social and geopolitical but also environmental volatility. The chapter posits that the catastrophic climate event of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and the spread of domestic climate technologies such as the greenhouse (early nineteenth century), the radiator (mid nineteenth century), and air-conditioning (late nineteenth century) provoked symbolic connections between an ever-accruing control of the local climate and an ever-increasing chaos of the global climate. A range of literary authors expressed a desire for global control by pursuing different narrative modes – speculative, utopian, and modern – to represent the deliberate intervention into the global climate of the deep future, ensuing utopia, or the literary exegesis itself.

Once the external borders of Germany’s overseas territories have been largely fixed – most notably through the 1890 Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty – the Reich began to conquer them by militarily. This gave rise to internal frontiers: shifting zones of conquest and contestation within closed spheres of influence. During this period, the leading role passed from political entrepreneurs to the Schutztruppe – Germany’s colonial troops – whose campaigns established permanent bases that became the nuclei of colonial states. As detailed in this chapter, colonial state formation proceeded through long chains of delegation, reaching from Berlin to governors to district officers, each exercising wide discretionary powers. This arrangement produced chronic principal–agent frictions, centred on balancing autonomy and control. Everyday rule also relied on public, often violent, enforcement and on local intermediaries, blurring any tidy divide between direct and indirect rule. The result was a state apparatus that extended its reach unevenly, improvised under logistical constraints, and remained structurally fragile even as it deepened.

This chapter reflects on the future of governance in an era where corporate-driven, private arrangements increasingly dominate key sectors, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and beyond. While public power still contributes through research funding and normative frameworks, the sheer scale and speed of private actors often surpass traditional regulatory capacities. Governance today rests to a considerable extent with the internal factions of corporations—engineers, compliance teams, and public relations—who shape techno-normative frameworks with little public accountability. The chapter argues that governance by emulation offers a pragmatic, albeit imperfect, path forward. Emulating public law principles—such as accountability, self-governance, and due process—into private contexts can inject public-minded values into profit-driven structures. However, traditional private law mechanisms, such as contracts and fiduciary duties, need repurposing to address the scale and public significance of corporate governance. Similarly, the role of infrastructure, code, and technical frameworks in shaping governance must be acknowledged alongside conventional normative tools. While these developments hold both promise and peril, they also mirror the incremental evolution of liberal public institutions. By embedding public law ideals into emerging governance constellations, we may foster accountability structures capable of addressing the complexities of modern global power dynamics—marking a critical step toward a more balanced and responsive future governance framework.

The conclusion looks at how contemporary newspapers begin the effort to historicise 1859 and effectively level out the contours of a very distinctive year, along with some of that year’s voices. There is little here on voting reform or the war in Europe, though the Rifle Volunteers are warmly celebrated. This shows what a year book can achieve in putting lost details and voices back into the narrative, thus becoming an important act of witness, but also showing how specific acts of omission go to make up our history and can slow down change. The first parts of The Mill on the Floss were written during 1859, and we see how that year feeds directly into Eliot’s work. The conclusion ends by suggesting that nature in Eliot is a form of collective inheritance that acts as a synecdoche for custom, which in turn is the foundation of her creativity.

This chapter traces how the issue of mass emigration in the nineteenth century served as a catalyst for Germany’s colonial movement. Advocates of overseas colonies argued that emigrants should be redirected into German settlements abroad, where they could preserve their national identity rather than swell the ranks of rival nations. Settler colonialism was thus imagined not only as a way to relieve social pressures at home but also as a means of extending the nation’s boundaries beyond its ancestral territories. This programme of imperial nationalism, however, clashed with Bismarck’s Europe-centred priorities, which undermined the prospect of timely implementation. While the colonial movement pressed for the acquisition of an overseas empire, the Reich leadership focused instead on consolidating Germany’s national empire, created under Prussian leadership during an earlier phase of empire building.