This chapter focuses on the cultures of war victory in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and their successor states, a topic which illustrates global themes in the history and memory of war in the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War left a complex legacy of societal division, conflicting experiences, memories, continuities, and ruptures. This chapter shows how a complex legacy evolved in the twentieth century, and how it was reshaped by successive regimes and political orders to better fit shifting political interpretations of global history.

This chapter examines ideas of belonging, the self and identity through the prism of ethnic and religious categories. It explores the complexities of seventeenth-century Irish identities, especially surrounding changing confessional and national markers, together with evolving concepts of race, and how these could generate violence and conflict. It uses a number of case studies. One is the attempt to convert a large number of Protestants to Catholicism, and the violence surrounding it that showcases the knotty nature of religious and ethnic groups, as both those who refused and those who conformed were subject to bloodshed. Irish Protestants are also considered, as a group who straddled these two categories, with evidence that they were subjected to particular pressure to convert, as being ‘in keeping’ with their Irishness. Finally, the expulsion of the Irish from several Munster towns and cities in 1644 is addressed, with Lord Inchiquin’s status as an Irish Protestant of particular interest in his justification for the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish violence that was central to this episode.

National memory cultures, military doctrine, and until recently historiography have treated total war in Europe and violence in the colonized world as unrelated concepts. But these were intertwined phenomena that escalated as they did in part because of their mutual connections. From the nineteenth century, the mass death of indigenous people through conquest, expropriation, and disease lent credence to ideologies of racial struggle while new technologies of warfare were tested and honed against enemies of empire. After the First World War intensified resource extraction and labor exploitation in the colonies, colonial logics of race, population, and territory were essentially shared by the liberal and fascist powers. The Second World War dramatized the need for restraints on state violence but also raised new barriers to effectively imposing them in the colonies.

Mboya’s assassination in July 1969 remains one of the most traumatic and controversial episodes in Kenya’s post-colonial history. This chapter sets his death in its political context. It first shows how the returns on his network-building were diminishing, both for Kenya generally in terms of foreign investment and personally as Kenyans reacted against his close ties to the United States. Nevertheless, Mboya remained committed to working globally, seeking to influence international debates about development at the United Nations, the Economic Commission for Africa and in other settings around the world. At home, he was still determined to extract political advantage from the funding his international network continued to provide. Although Odinga was marginalised by 1969, Mboya’s reliance on external funds now set him at odds with Daniel arap Moi, the vice president and Mboya’s great rival to succeed Kenyatta. The two men were battling to win influence within KANU ahead of a general election due in 1969, the outcome of which would likely determine any process to appoint a new president in the event of Kenyatta’s death. It was in this context that Mboya was assassinated.

This chapter examines the imbrication of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century discourses on race and class, and thus of the formations of colonialism and capitalism, both within and beyond England as center of global empire and capital.  It performs readings of this imbrication in John Clare’s protestations against land enclosure in Northamptonshire in the Romantic period, and it shows how this nexus in Clare anticipates Palestinian protestations against the dispossession of ancestral land since 1948. In doing so, it juxtaposes resonant moments in connected histories of modernity and modernization that inform the history of global capitalism, which still enacts in many ways the racial antagonisms in Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

In this chapter, we give the various properties and parameters of the Shrikhande graph; these have all been introduced earlier.

Vertices, edges, regularity The Shrikhande graph has 16 vertices and 48 edges. It is regular with degree 6. It is strongly regular: any two vertices have two common neighbours.

Symmetry The Shrikhande graph is vertex, edge and flag transitive. Its automorphism group is (Z4)2 : D12, of order 192, and has two orbits on non-edges.

Euler and Hamilton Since all vertices have even degree, the graph is Eulerian.

It is also Hamiltonian. Consider the description in Section 2.6. By using only four of the six types of edges given there

Further developing the theme of competition between Mboya, Odinga and their respective international networks and domestic power bases, this chapter explores the impact of the cultural Cold War on the politics of newly independent Kenya. Although mainly focused on the organisations and activities supported by Mboya’s network, most notably the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, it also discusses rival efforts by Odinga to use the press, publishing and training to strengthen his own position within Kenya’s fractious post-colonial politics. The chapter details the extent to which Mboya’s activities received funding through CIA front organisations. The chapter is particularly concerned with the ways in which Kenya’s debates about development, which were the source of the disputes between the KANU government and Odinga’s new opposition party, were shaped by the publications and organisations aligned to Mboya. As public awareness of the origins of Mboya’s funding grew from 1967, the chapter concludes with an examination of the increasing criticism made of him from both the left and right in Kenyan politics and the enforced closure of the EAISCA.

This chapter rearticulates its Romantic origins as a specificity of modern critical philology by turning to Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 novel Lucinde and Schleiermacher’s 1800 reading thereof in Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. It discerns in this pair of texts a founding scene of critical philology, in which the rules and criteria for interpretation are no longer assumed to be given in advance but are rather derived from the practice of the text in question. König distinguishes such philological practice in early Romanticism in Germany from later positivist philological practices in the nineteenth century. He traces the return and repetition of such critical hermeneutics in the work of late twentieth- to twenty-first-century philologists known for work on corpuses ranging from Greek tragedy to Paul Celan’s poetry to Sanskrit classics and their legacy in modern India, namely Peter Szondi, Jean Bollack, and Sheldon Pollock. He thus demonstrates the legacy of Romantic philology for the reading of world literature.

This chapter examines the infrastructural turn in the humanities through a literary-critical lens, focusing on energy infrastructures as central to the Anthropocene. It foregrounds an expanded method of “reading for infrastructure” (Martens and Vermeulen, 2021) that moves beyond material visibility to legibility, encompassing affective, temporal, and socio-psychological dimensions. Through comparative readings of contemporary oil fictions, David Huebert’s Oil People (2024) and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), the chapter explores how petro-infrastructures shape subjectivities and imaginaries across Global North and Global South contexts. While Oil People reflects the normalized, ‘boring’ presence of settler-colonial oil infrastructures in Canada, Oil on Water foregrounds the violent legibility of neocolonial energy infrastructures in the Niger Delta. The comparative reading demonstrates how legibility, temporality, and affect reshape utopian/dystopian registers: invisibility yields complacency, while stark visibility foregrounds rupture and agency. Ultimately, the chapter argues that literary‑critical attention to hard energy infrastructure uncovers the geopolitical stakes of the Anthropocene and invites a more accountable, decolonial imagination of infrastructural futures.

Religion had a privileged place in the culture of the British Army. This was reflected in Queen’s Regulations and (less formally) in the treatment of religious conscientious objectors, and even prospective clergy, in the era of National Service. Religion also played a notable part in the Army’s cherished regimental system, inflecting regimental identities and traditions and helping to shape the identities of relatively new creations such as The Parachute Regiment and the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Sectarianism also had a role to play in the regimental tribalism of the British Army, especially in Scottish and Irish regiments. While the Army’s extensive network of churches and chapels advertised the continuing importance of religion in the institutional life of the Army, officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst inculcated its importance among the Army’s future leaders. In addition, the very public (but religiously inclusive) Christian faith of Elizabeth II fortified the role of religion in the Army, reinforcing its importance in an increasingly secular age and illustrating the historic (if now diluted) ascendancy of the Church of England.

Let n be a positive integer. A Latin square of order n is an n × n array whose entries are taken from an alphabet of size n, in such a way that each row or column of the array contains each letter in the alphabet precisely once.

The “letters” in the alphabet could be letters, numbers, colours or indeed any distinguishable symbols. Figure 6.1 gives two examples.

As far as we know, the first person to study Latin squares was the Korean mathematician Choi Seok-jeong (1646–1715), in his book Gusuryak (Fig. 6.2). The name was given by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83); we will see why he chose this name later.

Central to religious life in the British Army were the ‘padres’ of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD), whose pre-eminence was enhanced by the demise of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment in 1947 and by the slow decline of auxiliary religious welfare agencies. Supported by sending Churches which were also shrinking, and whose approach to Army chaplaincy was often (and for various reasons) ambivalent, the RAChD (like the all-professional Army) generally struggled to find recruits. The duties of chaplains were varied, ranging far beyond the stated requirements of Queen’s Regulations. They were also fulfilled under the umbrella of an organisation that was, until ‘Convergence’ in the early twenty-first century, divided along confessional lines, and whose ethos and training was widely considered archaic and even inadequate. However, the McGill Report of 1999 was a catalyst for change. Its emphasis on efficiency and on chaplaincy’s ethical contribution laid the foundations for an increased and more ubiquitous chaplaincy presence, an improved training regime and for institutional Convergence. The fruits of these changes would quickly become apparent in the War on Terror.

This chapter interrogates the conceptual and methodological trajectories of Anthropocene literary criticism over the past decade, focusing on its persistent blind spots around race and anti-Blackness. While efforts to diversify the Anthropocene literary and theoretical canon have foregrounded Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors, these gestures frequently reproduce extractive logics, instrumentalizing racialized texts as speculative resources for imagining so-called “otherwise worlds.” Drawing on Afropessimism and a recent strand of negativity in the environmental humanities, the chapter argues that Anthropocene criticism must reckon with anti-Blackness as the structural grammar of modernity rather than treating race as an additive category. Through examples from contemporary criticism and archival readings, including William Wells Brown’s Clotel, the chapter calls for a radical reorientation: reading for race in ways that resist the gentrification of Black literature and confront the ontological foundations of the Anthropocene itself.

The historically overlapping discourses of romanticism and aesthetics frequently draw criticism for being mere ideology. “Ideology” here refers to a restricted worldview that misrecognizes itself as universal and suggests why romanticism is crucial to debates about world literature. Insisting on aesthetics as universal, romanticism helps to initiate a Eurocentric conception of world literature. But this criticism ignores the often-conflicted character of romantic writing in which an aesthetic machinery exposes universalism as built on exploitation. To fully grasp the stakes of such breakdowns one must further consider romantic-era texts that are not European. An exemplary instance is Hérard Dumesle’s 1824 political travel narrative Voyage dans le Nord D’Hayti. Drawing on European models, it proves paradoxically revealing in its account of Eurocentric aesthetics. Endorsing and ironizing universalism, it opens onto alternative conceptions of world literature by marking the limits of translatability and refusing to belong to any one world.

The clergy – both Catholic priests and Protestant ministers – are the subject of this chapter. They were both targets for violence and could be among its perpetrators. A core argument here is that Protestant ministers were subjected to violence in large part because of their profession, as against motives such as moneylending that were emphasised in previous scholarship. As leading Protestant figures, they were both symbols of and key actors within Protestant ‘civilising and converting’ that was so central to the decades before the rebellion, helping to explain Irish Catholic hostility towards them. Similarly, violence against Catholic priests drew from longstanding patterns that viewed priests as seditious, troublesome and violent, thus justifying their persecution and even killing. Examining the clergy as symbols as well as people, alongside the study of violence against sacred objects and spaces, reinforces the strong religious character of violence during the rebellion and its continuation in the decade of conflict that followed.