‘Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94): A Chronology’ provides a timeline of the key events in Maconchy’s lifetime.

This chapter provides an account of the types of contact and spread associated with the growth of English beyond the United Kingdom. It describes the main linguistic outcomes of these contacts, including pidgins, creoles, English as a second language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), English as Lingua Franca (ELF), Immigrant Englishes and hybridities arising from code-switching and electronic and social media. It also gives an account of how different scholars have tried to make sense of the immense variety within ‘the English language complex’. Particular attention is paid to Kachru’s Three Circles model, Schneider’s Dynamic Model and its current refinements, Mair’s World System for Englishes, Mesthrie’s Contact-Contingency model, and insights from Corpus Linguistics, Language Contact and Language Ecology.

Located across a large swath of land in the north of Australia, the Gulf Country has a history encompassing lives where race has featured predominantly. In the context of European colonization from around the mid nineteenth century, relations between people who have become known colloquially as Whitefellas and Blackfellas have been central to the region’s society, cultural mix, and economy. As understood in everyday language, Whitefellas are known to have no Aboriginal ancestry, while Blackfellas are descended from forebears belonging to one or more of the Indigenous language groups connected to traditional lands.

This poses the question as to why the American air arm began World War II with excellent offensive bombers but mediocre defense fighter planes, which was seemingly in contradiction to a national policy of isolationism and defense. The standard explanation for this dichotomy is that doctrine shaped force structure. I disagree and believe it was a combination of technology, economics, the Army procurement system, and personalities that played the determinant role.

Like Europeans all over the Global South, settlers and administrators in East Africa used the concept of race as a weapon to oppress, elevating themselves and for decades enjoying the luxury of immunity from having their “race” used against them. However, in the context of post-independence, whites came under an uncomfortable spotlight as many Kenyans of African descent questioned their entitlement to belong to the nation in light of their enduring and extreme privilege. The typification of whiteness in the Kenyan discourses traced here thus emerges as a backlash against a history of colonial theft and frames whites as outsiders, conspicuously Other. Time is folded and flattened in these formulations; even whites born long after independence, or who bought their land from Africans, become “white settlers” or “land-grabbers,” and decidedly not “Kenyan.”

The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765) records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas, and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

This chapter provides a description of two language varieties spoken in Hawai‘i: Pidgin, an English-based creole, known exonymically as Hawai‘i Creole, and Hawai‘i English, the regional variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i. While Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are treated here as separate entities, we also acknowledge the continuum between them. Our description of linguistic variation in both varieties is based on analysis of speech from informal interviews. We present findings from work that examines variation in linguistic forms, including postvocalic /r/, and we focus especially on variation among vowels. The acoustic analysis of over 8,000 tokens of monophthongs has allowed us to examine and discuss how the vowels of Hawai‘i English and Pidgin have changed over time.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.