This chapter concentrates on the ways that writers improvised with the discourse of what Amy Kaplan first described as “manifest domesticity”—a discourse pressing domestic life in the US into the service of empire-building. Their improvisations are a courageous attempt to do nothing less than insert queer lives into the national narrative. Beginning with Walt Whitman’s antebellum fiction, the chapter takes readers all the way into the twentieth century, collating a wide range of writers (some canonical, others now obscure) who shared an interest in queer lives avant la lettre—before, that is, same-sex desire was codified and transformed into an identity rather than a behavior. What emerges astonishes the twenty-first–century’s commonsense of nineteenth-century America: a culture surprisingly open-minded about non-normative desires that is, in many ways, less restrictive than our own; models of domesticity that challenge, rather than reinforce, the rapacious elements of empire; gay sex published and, in some cases, canonized.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, a writer with the last name “Du Bois” helped articulate the shifting contours and geographies of Pan African and Black anti-imperialist literature. This chapter charts the evolving understanding of Black anti-imperialism within evolving geopolitical conjunctures in W.E.B. Du Bois’s, Dark Princess; Shirley Graham Du Bois’s journal articles, short biographies, and political speeches; and David Graham Du Bois’s novel …And Bid Him Sing. This Du Bois genealogy exemplifies the shifting terrain of Pan-African literature and the politics of Black anti-imperialism in the era of Three Worlds. The chapter tracks the awakening of Black anti-imperialism in the context of global 1930s, the Third World terrain of the 1950s, and the African American Third World left of the 1960s and beyond.

This chapter is about the global epistemological politics of religion illustrated through a study of the transnational history of Pakistan and Israel. It argues that the entangled nature of these state-building ventures contributed to the circulation of particular understandings of ‘religion’ and its relation to the state, that this structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and the Palestinian Jews, and that it both limited and enabled the claims to the nations and states that came to replace them. The case study focuses on two key individuals in the history of the Indian and Palestine partition and the Pakistani and Israeli independence that followed: Reginald Coupland and Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. It asks how they, the institutions they represented, and the ideas they carried, circulated, and influenced changed over the final decade before independence. It shows how claims for the recognition of religion in international relations are not separate from these forms of colonial epistemological politics but are intimately connected to them.

Did classical antiquity connect ethnicity, moral worth, and skin colour? The conventional answer is ‘no’, but then conventional Classics tends to stop, chronologically, before things get interesting. This chapter explores a set of texts from the Roman period and late antiquity that point towards an emergent if elusive epidermal racism. The drivers of this seem to be both empire, with its systematically reductive approach towards human diversity, and Christianity, with its theologisation of white light and black darkness. Late antique texts are, however, inconsistent: Some (e.g. Heliodorus) portray Blackness as noble and idealised, but others (e.g. Nonnus) certainly connect it with defilement and the infernal. Even in late antiquity, then, there is no coherent, thoroughgoing epidermal racism; but we undoubtedly find what Cord Whittaker has called a ‘shimmer’.

This chapter explores the legacies of indenture for international law in Asia through a survey of the existing scholarship and points to new directions for research. Focusing on indentured labor from India, which comprised the majority of labourers recruited under this system in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it shows how indenture shifted definitions of emigrants and foreigners, shaped discourses on welfare in migration, and left its mark on international relations as they emerged in the aftermath of the two world wars. The chapter also discusses how questions of nationality and citizenship in the postcolonial period often overlooked the plight of the descendents of indenture in Asia, and concludes with speculations on what the new form of indenture is and the limits of drawing these historical analogies.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses the origins of modern climate science in nineteenth-century projects of empire, and shows how literature both promoted and contested the imperial impulses of emerging climate science. The chapter examines, first, how imperialism – the enlargement of a single country’s jurisdiction across large tracts of land and sea – facilitated scientific methods and data. It then turns to literary justifications of imperial and scientific expansion, with accounts of the Arctic expeditions of John Franklin – Franklin’s narratives, the poetry of Eleanor Anne Porden (who became Franklin’s wife), elegies, and ballads – providing a case study. Staying with the mythologization of the explorer as a conqueror of climate, the chapter takes up the question of climate determinism (the idea of climate’s agency in shaping physiology and psychology, and the attendant myth of British colonizers’ resistance to such agency). Yet, from Richard Burton’s travels to Rudyard Kipling’s fiction, Victorian literature reveals, sometimes unwittingly, that the imperial explorer did not remain untouched by climate.

British imperial expansion reinforced expanded white supremacy from the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. Rather than weakening after the loss of American colonies, British concepts of racial superiority intensified through colonial encounters in India, Australia, and beyond. In India, British East India Company rule shifted from early trade partnerships to domination justified by claims of innate European superiority. In Australia, colonizers treated indigenous peoples as obstacles to be removed, implementing policies of displacement and ethnic cleansing in Tasmania. Meanwhile, emerging scientific disciplines like craniology provided justification for racial hierarchies, with researchers across Europe collaborating to measure and categorize human differences. Though the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) in the British Empire marked significant humanitarian victories, these reforms did not challenge underlying assumptions of white supremacy. This period established enduring patterns of imperial rule based on presumed racial difference, whether through direct violence or supposedly benevolent administration.

The traditional narratives of Austrian constitutional law are evolving. Long decried by scholars and practitioners to be ‘in ruins’, the Austrian Constitution has recently been lauded as ‘elegant and beautiful’ by Austria’s President, thus attempting a paradigm shift in the Austrian public’s perception of its constitution. While some textbooks claim it (still) is a merely formal, ‘value neutral constitution of game rules’ much in the spirit of Hans Kelsen, the Austrian Constitution and its interpretation show more and more signs of converging into a principled, value-oriented and purposive approach common in many other countries. The multinational legal legacy of the Habsburg Empire and its potential for understanding the European integration have been recognized as an asset, just as the ensuing creation of the world’s first constitutional court is of pride and the Austrian Constitution’s leading export.