The story of Brexit in Scotland was about whether – and, if so, how – Scotland’s vote to Remain in the EU was to be acknowledged. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, was it to be through the exercise of voice – a role for Scotland’s representatives in influencing the form of EU withdrawal and its domestic implications or through exit, by triggering a second independence referendum? In the end it was neither. The UK-wide majority to Leave the EU prevailed, with no concessions to the Scottish government’s preferred form of Brexit and no second independence referendum. This result exposed radically conflicting visions of the nature of the UK’s territorial constitution – a Union State based on Scottish popular sovereignty, or a Unitary State based on the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. A Brexit premised on the restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty and the desire to ‘take back control’ laid bare the subaltern nature of the Union-State account and the fragility of Scotland’s constitutional protections within the Union. Devolution in Scotland has been left diminished and the pathway towards independence mired in uncertainty.

Starting in the late 1820s, African American poets began to write in concert with the abolition movement, and their work began to appear in anti-slavery periodicals. In these efforts, they translated the aesthetic theories of European Romanticism, and imagined Black consciousness beyond the confines of slavery and racism. Especially in the two decades before the Civil War, poets such as George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, Joseph Cephas Holly, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper undertook a wildly various range of formal experiments in the service of ending slavery and reconstructing Black cultural life. This chapter undertakes a survey of a number of the antebellum period’s Black poets, with the idea of thinking through the prophetic scope of their claims on history. It argues that in taking this posture, the Black Romantic poets anticipated more recent claims about the long-durational character of the Black radical tradition.

Bieral’s enlistment in the US Navy during the Panic of 1837 marked his transition from urban rowdy to global adventurer. Serving aboard the U.S.S. Columbia, he participated in a diplomatic and punitive expedition across Asia and the Pacific, including a retaliatory assault on Sumatran villages. The chapter details the brutal discipline aboard naval vessels, highlighting the normalization of corporal punishment and racial integration among sailors. Bieral’s promotion and survival amid disease and violence underscore his resilience. The voyage exemplifies the intersection of nationalism, violence, and racial fluidity.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

The Introduction offers the reader a way into the 1810s through Anna Letitia Barbauld’s bleak, prophetic satire, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812). A poem written amidst the tensions of war, famine, unemployment, food shortages, and economic decline, it also serves as a record of the peculiarity of this decade as one caught amidst a flurry of new ideas, beliefs, and concepts, but without a clear sense of how such newness might be understood, interpreted, or even accepted. The chapter reads Barbauld’s poem as a framing device to introduce the twelve chapters that comprise the volume and their shared concerns with sexuality and identity, religion and politics, race and gender, disability and the environment, aesthetics and philanthropy, communication and confusion, and social and interspecies relations.

Food acts as a proxy for different political agendas in the Gulf states. For governments, it is a means to reproduce nationalism and identity; it is a vehicle for citizen upgrading. Questions of environmental sustainability and consumption pervade food and agriculture, and in the Gulf, this is managed through a techno-political discourse. The development of indoor farms that utilise technology presents farming as a means to produce food that is free of its social and ecological dimensions. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the way in which boycotts provide Gulf societies with a means of expression and agency.

This chapter shows the evolution and tenuous persistence of white supremacy from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. It begins by analyzing racial terrorism and lynching in the USA. It connects these acts of violence to broader patterns of economic exclusion and political dominance across English-speaking societies. The analysis reveals deep connections between American segregation and Nazi Germany, demonstrating how racist ideologies reinforced each other globally. While civil rights movements achieved significant victories, white power structures adapted through subtler forms of oppression, including discriminatory policing, housing discrimination, and coded political messaging. The chapter shows how anti-colonial and civil rights movements worldwide recognized their common struggle against a global system of white supremacy. The election of Barack Obama marked a crisis point, triggering an intense backlash that culminated in Trump’s presidency and Brexit. These recent manifestations of white nationalism, while politically successful, may represent desperate attempts to preserve a crumbling system rather than signs of strength.

This chapter explores Bowen’s relation to Ireland in literary and cultural criticism over the past half century. It charts how developments and trends in literary criticism – the rise of postcolonial studies and Irish studies, the development of ‘Irish modernism’ as a critical category – have shaped how we understand Bowen as an Irish writer, and her fiction as Irish literature, in the twenty-first century. In particular, it examines whether Bowen’s work readily corresponds to the nationalist and statist concerns that the category of Irish literature often implies. Through a reading of how Bowen figures Ireland and Irishness in A World of Love (1955), I suggest that Bowen’s Irish modernism operates beyond the limits of national and nationalist history, a circumstance that enables a reconsideration of some of the limits and ideologies of the category of Irish literature.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.