George Lippard popularized a new form of novel whose thickly interlaced plotlines and generic layering conveyed social and moral dimensions of urban experience inaccessible to more conventional literary and journalistic modes of depicting cities. Dwelling on various forms of nefarious association tethering and tainting Philadelphia’s citizens, Lippard’s sensational novel, The Quaker City (1845), focuses on two social “shapes” urban participatory sin can take, structural complicity and network complicity. It devotes major plotlines, each featuring a distinct narrative form, to the investigation of each. Each kind of complicity imposes crucial aesthetic constraints on its own narrativization, and these constraints are overcome, the novel suggests, only when these two narrative forms are subsumed within a totalizing vision of Christian eschatology, or apocalypse.

Between 1830 and 1850, anti-Catholics in the United States fixated on the ritual of Catholic confession and priests’ alleged sexual interrogation of young women, especially Protestant teenagers in convent schools. Protestant propagandists tied the moral and sexual contamination of confession to Rome’s supposed political and religious designs in the United States. This chapter examines how female sexual speech, public testimony, and the Protestant press were seen to abet this conspiracy. The first half of the chapter centers on Maria Monk’s blockbuster convent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), and its sensational delineation of young women’s subjection to and participation in confessional sex talk and systemic convent turpitude. The second half studies the dilemma that preoccupied every Protestant publisher who sought to expose the purported sexual dangers of Catholicism and confession: How could one contain Rome’s defiling designs if by exposing Catholicism’s contagious carnality one risked infecting readers and adding them to the conspiracy’s ranks? The chapter’s final section examines the media storm around the Protestant publication of Catholic confession manuals.

This chapter focuses on an alleged rebellion by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1776. A broader global perspective on the American Revolution, one beyond the thirteen rebelling mainland colonies, underlines how freedom and unfreedom intertwined together in complicated, surprising, and sometimes horrific ways in 1776. The chapter argues that calls for liberty on the mainland tightened the noose of slavery in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, the American Revolution gave even more force to already powerful waves of racist fear and violence, making dismal slavery even grimmer. Enslaver anxieties centered on control of arms and violence against white women. Moreover, what happened in Jamaica affected the course and shape of the American Revolution. The events of 1776 in Jamaica also highlight that the Age of Revolutions was equally an age of racism and retrenchment as it was one of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Against the rise of fascism, American literary modernists confronted the psychodynamics of conversion that underlie pernicious forms of conspiracism and racist public discourse. William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Jean Toomer’s unpublished writings on racial psychology, for example, reverse-engineer the psychodynamics of racism by putting readers in the uncomfortable position of seeing themselves from the point of view of the other (whether a literary text or another human being). Forcing a kind of double consciousness upon the reader, Faulkner and Toomer provoke disgust toward conspiracism’s self-appointed vigilantes. The paranoid public sphere is thus the diametrical opposite and sinister shadow of the pluralistic public sphere that James theorized. By fracturing and fragmenting the monolith of race, Faulkner and Toomer render epistemological doubt a powerful ally to critical thought.

Disappointed by this second defeat, Catiline formed a conspiracy to overthrow the government and install himself in power. He acted in league with C. Manlius, who had gathered a band of Sullan veterans and other malcontents in Faesulae (in Etruria). Cicero’s warnings to the senate were at first disbelieved. But when the conspirators’ rising in Etruria was independently confirmed, he obtained the senatus consultum ultimum authorizing him as consul to act in the defense of the state. The waiting continued until, on the night of 6–7 November, assassins appointed by Catiline appeared at Cicero’s door. He had, however, been forewarned and denied them entry. That event spurred Cicero to denounce Catiline in the senate (Catilinarian 1), leading Catiline to depart Rome. Though further conspirators remained in the City, Cicero was able to obtain evidence against them and a decree of the senate calling for their execution, which he supervised.

The paragraphs of article III of the Convention set out four ’other acts’ governed by the Convention: conspiracy: conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. The first three of these are ’inchoate’ offences in that the crime of genocide is not actually committed. If a conspiracy succeeds, the relevant offence is genocide, or complicity in genocide. A conspiracy that does not succeed is punishable under article III. The same holds for attempt and for direct and public incitement. Incitement that results in genocide is punishable as genocide, or complicity in genocide. Complicity in international criminal law is developed in the statutes of the various tribunals and by case law, although there is no unanimity as to its form. The ad hoc tribunals developed a doctrine known as ’joint criminal enterprise’ whereas at the International Criminal Court complicity may be addressed as ’co-perpetration’ or ’indirect co-perpetration’. It is also possible to prosecute genocide under the superior or command responsibility doctrine.

The introduction describes the principal arguments of the book. The first argument is that the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy was defined by the Brazilian High Court as sedition, which was defined as public disloyalty to the monarch. Taking sedition seriously allows us to see how people made public spaces into sites where people strategized and studied revolution together. The second argument presented is that the Tailors’ Conspiracy was not isolated but was rather the coda to three prior resistance movements across the empire: one in India, one in Angola, and one in Brazil. The Tailors’ Conspiracy was thus part of an empire-wide development in which the Portuguese had to contend with groups of revolutionaries who were racially, ethnically, and financially different and who all wanted greater political recognition from the empire. The third argument is that relations between and among people from all ranks of society was the baseline of political action. Differences in rank between conspirators were apparent when men were outlining the goals of the conspiracy. The political culture that sustained them was thus based on relationality, not cohesive demands.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.

In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

Spying in South Asia’s conclusion addresses the impact of the end of the Cold War, and the onset of a ‘war on terror’, on British and American intelligence relationships with India. It explores the rationale behind Indian governments’ softening of anti-CIA rhetoric from the mid-1980s, and the implications for New Delhi’s intelligence agencies of the precipitous collapse of the USSR, and the abrupt conclusion of the Cold War. It assesses factors underlying the post-Cold War recovery of Western secret services from the position of public pariahs in India to that of New Delhi’s principal partners in intelligence and security matters. In 1947, as the Cold War dawned and the newly independent subcontinent confronted formidable threats to its stability and security, New Delhi turned to London and Washington for covert support. Some half-a-century later, after decades of what might best be described as circumscribed cooperation compromised by conflict and conspiracism, the intelligence services of India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, once more found compelling reasons to put their differences aside, and work together as close partners in a new secret war.

This chapter discusses general principles of liability as they apply across the various offences and provide for the doctrines by which a person may commit, participate in, or otherwise be found responsible for those crimes. They include forms of liability such as aiding and abetting, which are familiar to all domestic criminal lawyers, as well as principles like command responsibility, which are specific to international criminal law.

We consider changes (Persianizing one) that Alexander made to his court from mid-330 BCE onwards, as well as opposition to it (and him) in the form of conspiracies and other clashes. Discussion is framed by a brief look at changes introduced by previous kings, as well as at new evidence from archaeology in north Greece that alters our understanding of early Macedon. It also takes into account the Greco-Roman literary topoi that overlay our sources, particularly with regard to major conspiracies, conflict, and the ‘mutiny’ at Opis – all in an effort to excavate the original underlying Macedonian perspective, insofar as we can.