The conclusion to the book considers the significant contribution of Kenya’s worldmakers to the anti-colonial cause and the place Tom Mboya rightly holds within the pantheon of Kenya’s great nationalist leaders. He is held dearly in the memory of Kenyans as the personification of the potential for a successful Kenyan multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan democracy. His legacy has been invoked regularly at moments of political crisis in the decades following his death. But the conclusion argues Mboya’s legacy was more complicated and interesting than this posthumous memorialisation allows. He shows instead how the practices of worldmaking ran alongside those of gatekeeping. Mboya and others like him had little choice but to adopt this dual strategy of global engagement because of the context of the Cold War. Drawing on Mary Dudziak’s work on the civil rights movement in the United States, the conclusion considers in detail the influence of the Cold War on the politics of decolonising Kenya. Although the Cold War helped enable decolonisation, it also acted to limit the possible trajectories states such as Kenya could adopt once independent.

‘What is a woman?’ Beauvoir asked in her 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex. Her answer is that woman has been constructed as ‘the Other’ vis-à-vis man: she is nothing in herself, she is just not a man. Her situation is the result of historical and social processes, which many people, including herself, erroneously perceive as natural and unchangeable. Is Beauvoir’s presentation of women still relevant to today’s world? Chapter 4 argues that, although she referred to 1940s European and North American societies, a substantial portion of her critique remains surprisingly pertinent. This chapter, while offering a general presentation of The Second Sex and its reception, focusses on some of its most philosophically interesting aspects, including the obstacles that society and culture pose to women’s self-creation. Busy with reproduction of life, notably domestic chores and motherhood, for Beauvoir, women do not pursue authentically held goals. Her view that women’s liberation can only be achieved collectively, through a transformation of society as a whole, can still play an extremely relevant role in debates not only about women but also any oppressed group.

The concept of “scale” has become central to environmental debate. The challenge is that issues of a planetary nature resist being treated adequately, or even sometimes perceived, at the individual, national, or regional levels on which human thought, attention, and politics almost always operate or “make sense.” Such scalar dilemmas, practical, cognitive, and ethical and political, have been the focus of a small field of “scale critique” (Woods, 2014) and “scalar literacy” (Horton, 2019) studying how underexamined supposed norms of scale determine or pre-structure so many issues. In a literary context it is notions of realism and of genre that are most in question. Various literary exercises in scale are considered – poetry by Gillian Clarke, Gary Snyder, and Evelyn Reilly, novels by Jeff VanderMeer, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. The issues resist reduction to the dogma of there being one “right scale” at which to approach the complexity of environmental scenarios. Questions of scale have even a trickster element, best received as a spur to debate, against evasion, whether intellectual, political, or moral.

Mboya’s engagement with the AFL-CIO was a critical stage in his development as a nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader. Cultivated during a hugely successful tour of the United States in 1956, his relationship with figures connected to the American labour federation would last until his death in 1969. But Mboya’s network in the United States stretched beyond the labour movement. By following Mboya on his 1956 tour, the chapter shows his rapidly developing and deep connection to the American Committee on Africa, which had emerged out of the civil rights movement. Mboya returned home to Kenya as a hero, and decided to capitalise on his fame by standing for election to the colony’s legislative council in 1957, the first opportunity Kenya’s African population had to vote for their representatives. Mboya’s charisma, record as a trade union leader and policy platform certainly made him very popular in his Nairobi constituency, but the financial support his American allies provided was also a significant reason for his success. Mboya also leveraged his international profile on the Pan-African stage too, most notably when chairing the All-Africa People’s Conference held in Ghana in 1958.

Propaganda and storytelling are key themes of this chapter. It examines the important roles of providence and martyrdom in constructing stories of the Irish rebellion and beyond, whether in the depositions or other accounts, including print. Both themes were important in building the rebellion and subsequent warfare as a confessional conflict, with providence and martyrology used for polemical purposes: to demonise the enemy, demonstrate divine favour for one’s cause and support co-religionists in their struggles. This played a crucial role in articulating the period as one of religious conflict above all, as violence, suffering and other ills were narrated and understood through recognisable confessional vocabulary, imagery and tropes. The chapter also considers the importance of martyrdom and martyrology in the emerging imperial context, with victims of violence in colonies – including Ireland – described in martyrological terms that contributed to justifying empire and disguising the violent intent and reality of imperial ventures.

This chapter explores the deep connections between speculative fiction and the Anthropocene, arguing that their histories and futures are mutually constitutive. While the concept of the Anthropocene gained prominence in the early 2000s, speculative fiction has long engaged with planetary-scale ecological imaginaries, from proto-science fiction shaped by colonial expansion to twentieth-century narratives responding to nuclear threat and environmental crisis. The chapter traces how speculative genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the gothic – have mediated Anthropocene consciousness through extrapolation, allegory, and affect, encompassing dystopian, apocalyptic, and utopian visions. It examines the emergence of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), tensions around genre boundaries and literary prestige, and the emergence of counterhegemonic narratives that foreground racial capitalism, colonial histories, and Indigenous futurisms. Recent trends such as hopepunk, solarpunk, and visionary fiction signal a shift from despair toward ecological and social resilience, reflecting broader discursive moves toward climate optimism. Ultimately, the chapter contends that speculative fiction is not merely a response to the Anthropocene but a constitutive force in shaping its cultural imagination, and that this reciprocal relationship will persist as both evolve.

In the last decade, the number of youths engaged in transnational jihadism has been increasing, with many of them joining armed forces in the Iraqi–Syrian conflict zone and committing acts of violence in France or abroad. The terrorist attacks on the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan concert hall and surrounding cafés in 2015 can be seen as France’s 9/11 and a turning point in its counter-terrorism policy: the war on terror had reached French soil. Against this socio-political setting, French legal institutions have been extensively mobilised. A two-year state of emergency was introduced between 2015 and 2017, gradually becoming part of common criminal law. The number of trials against individuals involved in armed groups on the Iraqi–Syrian front has reached a level unprecedented in the history of French criminal justice: terrorism has become a phenomenon of mass prosecution.

The introduction brings the reader into the world of seventeenth-century Ireland. It offers a brief overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the legacies of rebellion and violence that were present at the opening of the study in 1603. It considers broadly English understandings of and policy towards Ireland across a wide timespan, before introducing some of the key differences that emerged in the early seventeenth century. It offers a survey of important historiography and a reflection on source materials, particularly the 1641 Depositions and associated materials, before concluding with an overview of the book’s structure.

This chapter looks at the work of John and Michael Banim, who emerged as important Catholic novelists in the late 1820s. Their work attempted to capture the energy of O’Connellite politics in fiction, blending rhetorical set pieces with melodramatic incident. Public speech and oratory become centrally important to their work, and the influence of Richard Lalor Shiel on John Banim in particular becomes clear on reading his work.

This conclusion reflects on the importance of studying the two world wars as moments of interconnectedness, when societies, economies, and cultures interacted with one another across national boundaries. It insists on the importance of moving beyond solely diplomatic, military, and political histories to instead prioritize transnational and transimperial perspectives, acknowledging groups and individuals above and below the level of states. Several categories are particularly useful in this endeavor: home fronts, colonial mobilization, captivity, occupations, and neutrality. Taking stock of these helps to highlight new frameworks of experience spread across the world. Finally, there is the important question of the relationship between the world wars and globalization. By their nature and by the reactions they prompted, these two global conflicts were ultimately the agents as much as the opponents of that process.

This chapter looks at a minor controversy in the life of Charles Robert Maturin to consider his work in the light of sectarian tensions during the ‘Second Reformation’: the energised push by the Church of Ireland to convert the Catholic population in the 1820s. The role eloquence plays in Maturin’s work will be looked at and considered in relation to wider issues surrounding religious rhetoric and Gothic writing.