In this book, we have interpreted the long-term economic trends of recent decades through the lens of structural dynamics, based on what the available data may (or may not) reveal. Clark’s (1940) analysis of capitalist economies, which established the foundation for the structuralist approach, identifies three dominant sectors at different stages of development: agriculture first, followed by manufacturing, and finally services. This approach has also been articulated in terms of dualistic development from the beginning: Lewis’s (1954) model highlighted the challenges that can arise in transitioning from ‘traditional’ to ‘advanced’ sectors and underscores the positive and active role the state can play in facilitating these transitions. Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) explicitly discussed the need for ‘big pushes’ by public authorities to avoid vicious circles that can hinder structural change, specifically towards industrialisation.

This chapter qualifies Randall Jarrell’s assertion that all of Bishop’s poems have ‘written underneath it, I have seen it’ by examining those similes which simultaneously enable and defy visualisation. Drawing especially on Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis, it examines similes in Bishop’s ekphrastic poems that are at once moving and still. This chapter also considers her use of self-reflexive, paradoxical similes, which are often used in metaphysical poems, and goes on to demonstrate how Bishop’s use of this simile would influence subsequent American and Northern Irish poets. Also considered are: the effects of psychologising similes in her dramatic monologues; Homeric similes in her poems of war and violence; and her use of what C. S. Lewis, in an essay on Dante, described as similes that work by dint of their ‘unlikeness’. Criticism of simile often stresses the likeness made between tenor and vehicle; here, the view is proposed that, conversely, many of Bishop’s similes rely on a marked unlikeness for their effects.

Chapter 4 shows that while one cannot deny Swift’s use of a Tory “conspiracy thesis” in foreign policy tracts like The Conduct of the Allies, Swift relied more heavily on legitimate arguments and sources of international politics and law that have been underrated: Aristotle, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel Pufendorf. Aristotle taught a concept of foreign policy centered on constitutionalism, geography, naval power, self-defense, and public reason. Grotius and Pufendorf provided a foundation of natural and international law, as well as just war theory, that was secular yet grounded on classical learning and Christian ethics. Grotius’s underappreciated influence undermines the idea that Swift’s politics were purely Hobbesian, realist, or authoritarian. Swift had a realist and an idealist strain but “Grotian rationalism” predominated in the controversy over the Utrecht Peace. Grotius also fed Swift’s growing skepticism about the Whig concept of the balance of power.

Chapter 5 examines Swift’s major foreign policy writings, particularly the Conduct of the Allies and the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. It differentiates his neoclassical balance-of-power theory – which pointed toward the need to negotiate peace – from modern, nonnormative, militaristic, and pseudoscientific versions of the theory, which his contemporaries used to justify continuing the war. Swift condemned militarism even when exhibited by his own country. He opposed the attempted subjugation and domination of an enemy country as unwise policy that would lead to international power imbalances and unintended consequences, and thus threaten both domestic constitutionalism and international security. He adopted a mixed qualitative-quantitative method of argument and revealed the conceptual flaws of the quantitative or military-statistical approach adopted by the pro-war Whigs. While his arguments facilitated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French delays in implementing the peace terms left Swift with little more than satire in his last Tory pamphlets.

Chapter 6 shifts the scene to Ireland, where Swift returned after his four years writing propaganda for the Tory government in London. It reasserts the allegorical reading of Part I of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a defense of the Peace of Utrecht, and more importantly the underlying principles. In light of Swift’s international politics and thought, the war between the fictional lands of Lilliput and Blefuscu can be seen as a tripolar model of international relations – not bipolar, as widely believed, since Gulliver acts as arbiter. This model centers on Swift’s neoclassical balance-of-power theory, which also underscores a defensive blue-water foreign policy that contrasts starkly with offensive policy, “reason of state,” imperialism, and colonialism.

Swift learned about foreign affairs from one of England’s greatest diplomats, Sir William Temple, friend of William III and champion of balance-of-power foreign policy. But he became chief apologist for the notorious foreign policy maneuver by which Britain abandoned William's Grand Alliance to negotiate a ceasefire with archenemy France. The Whig opposition accused Swift and the Tories of ushering in foreign hegemony and domestic absolutism – and most critics today insist Swift was an authoritarian political thinker and devotee of Thomas Hobbes. Yet Britain and France negotiated the Peace of Utrecht (1713), a milestone of international cooperation, the first major treaty to include “balance of power” in its provisions, and the inspiration of Enlightenment philosophical projects of “perpetual peace,” ultimately including the European Union. This paradox reveals the need to study Swift’s views on international politics in both theory and practice. The key lies in his universalist conception of balance of power.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

Chapter 2 discusses Swift’s statement of political principles, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions (1701), and shows how international relations proved essential both to his fully developed, neoclassical balance-of-power theory as well as his practical political objectives in contemporary debates about the constitution and emerging War of Spanish Succession. Swift wrote against the Tory majority in the House of Commons and thus attacked the tyranny of the majority – but he also took a more realistic and permissive view of popular political participation than has been acknowledged. That view reflected his belief in the voice of the people and consensual government, including when discovering the national interest within the international context. The masses helped to rescue England from French imperialism, just as threats of French hegemony put the domestic political need for power-sharing into perspective. Swift defends executive action for the sake of national security but does not abandon constitutional constraints.

Minerva Historicals told something like a sequential counter-history of England from the earliest attacks of the Vikings to the Monmouth Rebellion against Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Focusing on moments of crisis, conflict and war, they debated pressing contemporary issues of monarchical succession, political legitimacy, power, violence, loyalty, treason, ambition, war and civil war in disguised censor-evading ways. Centering their fiction on family relationships within and between noble or royal houses gave these histories a domestic cast, but this accurately reflected the historical reality of monarchical and baronial government before Parliament gained ascendancy over the royal household during the nineteenth century, and wrote women at all ranks back into history. The last section shows Anna Maria Mackenzie, Agnes Musgrave and anonymous others answering criticism of the genre by arguing the superior truth of historical fiction to supposedly “true” conjectural histories and teaching readers how to evaluate an historical narrative’s relation to fact.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

This chapter offers readers perspective on ideals and practices that shaped health-related treatment of former service members from the Revolutionary period through the end of the Cold War. Studying how veterans fought for and accessed health services over two centuries offers a compelling view of the wide-ranging impacts of military endeavors on policy and politics and on the individual lives of service members and civilians. It also brings into sharp relief the extent to which norms of civilian society – for example, changing perceptions of how diseases are classified and what constitutes proper care – influence wars and perceptions of them. Broadly, the chapter shows that, while veterans’ care became more bureaucratized and institutionalized over time, some realities were constant: the nature and extent of available services, and the ways people interpreted them, were dictated by former service members’ advocacy, as well as prevailing notions about governmental responsibility, illness and disease, disability, and medical practice. Most broadly, the history of veterans’ experiences related to health care reveals that war and society are inextricably and intricately linked.

Why was Britain the first country in Europe to experience economic growth, with sustained technical change and the invention of machines that cut costs by taking over tasks previously done by hand? Cotton spinning is a striking example. In the 1700s, the world’s best spinners in India put in 50,000 hours to spin 100 pounds of cotton. By 1835, workers with machines took only 135. Technical change also generated new products and affected far more than the textile industry. Examples from 1700s would include the steam engine and new ways of making iron. One explanation for why Britain took the lead here was that its high wages boosted the demand for inventions of machines that could substitute for expensive labor. But closer inspection fails to support this argument. Rather, Britain had a more abundant supply of the skills and ideas that made technical change possible. We can see how they favored Britain by comparing two likely candidates for early industrialization: Lancashire in Britain and Normandy in France. The comparison highlights other advantages that benefited Britain as well, from agglomeration effects to the greater toll that land war took in Continental Europe.

Agglomeration effects and an abundant supply of skilled workers were not the only reasons Britain industrialized first. Its political institutions also gave it a century’s lead over the rest of western Europe. By the early 1700s, it had a national representative body – Parliament – and something approaching a unified legal and fiscal system. Parliament could pass legislation valid anywhere in Britain, and it allowed Britain to raise more tax revenue and borrow at a lower cost. The revenue let Britain win wars and garner the lion’s share of intercontinental trade as spoils of victory, which spurred innovation. Parliament also facilitated lobbying by entrepreneurs, and it could pass acts that rearranged property rights to improve transportation and agriculture, with a credible promise of compensation for property owners. The legislation helped entrepreneurs build canals and toll roads, which greatly improved transportation. The rest of northwestern Europe had wait until at least the French Revolution to have similar institutional advantages. The delay took a significant economic toll on agriculture and on transportation in Continental Europe, as French evidence shows.

It is argued that war, conquest, and slavery fueled northwestern Europe’s precocious economic growth. But that argument is wrong. Slaves and colonies were not necessary for growing cotton or for industrialization. Rather than being prerequisites for economic growth, slaves and colonies were the results of northwestern Europe’s rising economic and military might. They did certainly harm economies in Africa and the Americas and thereby contributed to the great divergence. As for warfare, it damaged economies, including in northwestern Europe. But it brought indirect benefits to Europe. It created strong states and representative institutions. It encouraged urbanization and agglomeration effects as businesses sought shelter from the fighting inside walled cities. It stimulated technical change in war-related industries, such as metalworking. And it helped keep western Europe politically fragmented. That kept new ideas circulating and made it harder to stamp them out. What else kept northwestern Europe fragmented? Western Christianity’s popes and northwestern Europe’s distance from the Eurasian steppe nomads, who might otherwise have conquered and unified all of Europe.

Integrating insights from chapters 2 and 3, I study the strategic problems at the origins of great power rivalries under the assumption that state motives are tied to principles. I find that great power rivalries rationally unfold in one of two ways: delayed (rather than immediate) competition if emerging threats hold expansive aims, and delayed peace otherwise. While the top-line result is simple, my qualitative signaling mechanism explains four of the most puzzling aspects of how great powers forge rationalist threat perceptions and how these perceptions influence patterns of competition, hedging, and peace. Specifically, I explain: (1) why status quo powers are reassured by a rival’s early diplomatic promises of limited motives; (2) why status quo powers are willing to make repeated concessions even as a rival makes violent demands, takes territory, rapidly militarizes, or seeks to undermine the status quo in other ways; (3) punctuated (rather than gradual) changes in status quo powers’ beliefs about a rival’s strategic motives; and (4) why some cases end in competition following a specific demand, while others end in stable peace.

Researchers expect that the origins of great power rivalries are especially conflict-prone because emerging threats must militarize to pursue their core interests, and status quo powers are uncertain about their rivals’ strategic intentions. These researchers are puzzled because historical great powers often avoided conflict entirely (e.g., Anglo–American relations circa 1900), or for years, even as one state rapidly militarized and took territory (Anglo–German relations circa 1940). I review the strategic challenges emphasized in the two main theoretical approaches used to study this setting, and the remaining puzzles each approach reckons with: the trust problem studied by realists and the commitment problem studied by power transition scholars. I argue that important insights are gained by studying the interaction of these two strategic problems. I develop a new formal model that produces the interactive trust and commitment problems commonly observed in historical cases of great power rivalry, affording a structured way for future scholars to study them.