The transformations of the modern era have led to today’s vast social divisions between wealth and poverty, but also created a human community that is interconnected on a global scale, processes that are examined in this chapter. Major economic and political changes, such as industrialization and de-industrialization, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the rise and collapse of communism, and the expansion of nationalism, have intersected with social and cultural changes within a framework of rapidly increasing population and human impact on the environment. International movements for social justice have called for greater egalitarianism and understanding, while ethnic, religious, and social divisions have led to brutality, genocides, and war. Technological developments in agriculture, medicine, and weaponry have both extended human life and extinguished it at levels unimagined in earlier eras, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing long-standing social hierarchies and cultural patterns.

The afterword explains why Louis Bieral’s life matters. He had an almost unique set of experiences. He illustrates the importance of violence to the operation of nineteenth-century American society. He also suggests the difficulty of establishing the rule of law, replacing the veneration of physical might with the celebration of persuasion.

‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

This chapter provides an overview of the entangled history between the discipline of Classics and the biological concept of race. Section I.1 outlines the emergence of problematic claims about the alleged White nature of Graeco-Roman antiquity from the modern era to the present day that have helped substantiate biological conceptions of race. Section I.2 examines scholarly work in critical race theory and early modern studies that offer more nuanced definitions of race beyond the biological. Section I.3 summarises work on the study of race in Classics, and Section I.4 discusses the contents of this Companion.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

The Roman Empire was rooted in violent acts. The spread of Roman control over the provinces was a lengthy process, but one that fundamentally changed the nature of political relationships. Settlers extruded from Italy. Large amounts of wealth changed hands. Land tenure was reconfigured. The population was divided first into provinces, then into assize districts. Subject populations were registered, counted, and taxed. The process put immense amounts of strain on the internal structures of communities. Roman governors were tasked with administering this new political landscape, where their position was tenuous. They distrusted new local elites who, along with Roman settlers, were prone to take advantage of local people. These same people were also responsible for tax collection, which, along with keeping the peace, was the governor’s ultimate responsibility. This systemic tension opened a space for provincial legalism.

Four: I turn from the cormorant itself to the bird’s natural product, guano, a resource that in the nineteenth century brought the Pacific into the global economy, profoundly affected the environment worldwide and enriched Europeans through the de facto slavery of thousands of Chinese indentured labourers on the Peruvian guano islands. Beginning with the filthy riches made from the guano trade by the UK-based Gibbs family, I outline the chemistry of guano, the European capitalisation of guano, and the conditions of labour of the guano workers. I then turn to the James Bond novel Dr No, locating Ian Fleming’s interest in guano and his transposition of the guano trade from Peru to the Caribbean in his banking family’s close connection with the Gibbses. I conclude with a discussion of the origins in the history of guano of the idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

The introduction addresses the double erasures of the story of the Nicaragua Canal and the history of the Mosquito Coast as a result of the triumphalist narrative of the Panama Canal. Arguing that the Nicaragua Canal route has historically been an imperial staging arena, the chapter suggests that exploring the entwined history of the Mosquito Coast and the Nicaragua Canal can help us visualize the shadowy limits of imperialism and sovereignty in the nineteenth century.

This chapter surveys almost 170 years of historical practice of and writings on irregular warfare to stress several points. It provides an empirical basis for assessing current and future irregular warfare based on codified doctrine, including best practices and observations. From the American Revolutionary War to the Second World War, several key themes emerge, including the necessity of force, the counterproductive nature of brute force and the value of objective as opposed to subjective assessments of contextual conditions. In doing so, this chapter seeks to deflate some of the influence of ‘presentism’, a bias that suggests recent experiences are unique and indicative of the future of irregular warfare. In stressing historical continuity, it acknowledges continuous elements in irregular warfare while recognising context differences.

This chapter presents an overview of the ways in which multinationals have been enmeshed with notions of imperialism in India. It outlines the significance of the English East India Company in shaping interpretations of multinational-related imperialism in India and the divergent perceptions and strategies of British and non-British multinationals in colonial India. Independent India’s tryst with multinationals and the perceptions of Indian multinationals since the mid twentieth century are also explored and the chapter shows the interconnections between multinationals and imperialism that can be valid for other regions as well.

This chapter highlights the careers of Save the Children’s principal field officer in Nigeria, Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Irvine Neave and the African Development Trust’s, Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock to explore the legacies of mission and empire. The former viewed poverty as a product of individual ignorance; the latter argued that it was due to the structural injustice of racist legislation across Southern Africa. Despite these differing imperial and political outlooks, both were, however, ‘techno-missionaries’: products of both the missionary past and the technocratic future of development. Mission stayed on after the empire, but it was transformed by the rise of the modern NGO and the humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It resulted in a ‘third colonial occupation’ of volunteer aid workers alongside the experts and technocrats of social and economic development.

While the rest of the book takes the form of a constitutional law text largely based on discussion of theory and court precedent, the prologue provides the lived, empirical day-to-day context out of which the project arose by sharing the stories of the ordinary people on whom the topics discussed have primary bearing. Moreover, given the grounded, ethnographic method from which the prologue’s scene-setting stories draw and the ‘constitutional ethnography’ to be applied more broadly as a methodology throughout the book, the prologue draws inspiration from qualitative scholarship’s emphasis on the need for researchers to state their positionality vis-à-vis the research. The prologue therefore describes the global transdisciplinary approach adopted in and through the book project which primarily builds upon critical Black, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship developed in the Global South and by marginalised communities in the Global North.