This chapter studies the history of European expansion in the oceans and the seas stretching east from the Cape of Good Hope. It aims to look at European violent activity here within the broader context of the history of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South Chinese Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In this short chapter, only a few major developments can be traced. Roughly three phases can be distinguished: first, armed vessels – sea power – opened the door for later European success. Then overseas bases – factories – were consolidated by the construction of fortresses. Finally, the Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French – became drawn into military enterprises inland. This chapter, though, focuses on the naval aspects of European expansion, more specifically on the use of warfare to support overseas trade or to prevent competitors from trading.

One of the harshest criticisms the Court of Enquiry made of Cadorna was his organization at Udine which figured as some kind of feudal court cut off from the world outside. Inhabited by a circle of the faithful few whose privilege it was to live in daily contact with the overlord (Chief of Staff) and rigorously policing the coveted access to his person, it also housed a large population of ill-organized employees and heads of office, as well as an intermittent throng of postulants seeking audience (generals of combatant units, the occasional envoy from a foreign army, or delegates from the government in Rome). Decidedly, the Supreme Command was anything but a modern centralized command structure catering swiftly to the needs of a mass army.

Previous scholars claimed there were no women in the African Association (AA); however, from at least the early 1930s a significant percentage of several chapters’ formal membership was made up of women. It is possible that some of them were inspired by the AA’s message of redemptive pan-Africanism, but Chapter 5 argues that the practical pan-Africanism strand was often most enticing for the women who joined. Many of these entrepreneurial female activists found a pan-African identity useful in helping them meet specific needs, accomplishing personal or collective objectives, or gaining a voice in the largely male-dominated political sphere and access to governing authorities. But the women and men of the AA did not always agree on the proper way to build the African nation and the Association served as an arena of contested space. This chapter unpacks the implications of this rare example of a mixed-gendered political organization in colonial Africa.

Christian Wolff develops a theory of Enlightened absolutism and a paternalistic interventionist state on broadly Leibnizian promises, assigning to the state the role of promoting happiness amongst its subjects as material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving. He posits a state of nature characterised not by conflict but by stagnation. The duty of self-perfection impels individuals to leave the state of nature and to surrender their natural rights, and the state assumes the duty of co-ordination and steering of individual efforts, consistently with cameralist political economy. Herder reads Leibnizian monads as collective or national subjects, each contributing to the progressive realisation of species-capacities, and in principle harmoniously integrated with all others. He gives rise to expressive Romanticism, where self and world correspond, in contrast to ironic Romanticism, where such accord is in principle impossible, and to idealism, where the accord is a practical task.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the African Association (AA) utilized the political concept of umoja to build an organizational structure that would create the unity needed to create progress in their various spheres of action: local, territorial, regional, and global. The organizational pinnacle of their African unity were five Association-wide conferences with continental aspirations. However, the continental vision and project of the AA was dramatically altered in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to both changing geopolitics and interassociational feuds that spurred territorial self-interest and the splitting of the Association. Using a framework of competing nationalisms, the chapter demonstrates how the moves from a continental African nationalism to territorial anti-colonial nationalisms were contested and not inevitable. Thus, the creation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanganyika and the Afro-Shirazi Party in the Zanzibar Protectorate stemming out of the AA were not natural progressions but constituted a shrinking of vision and reengineering of aspirations.

Humility is neither a virtue of caring nor an enkratic virtue, but consists in an absence or dearth of concern for the pseudo-good of self-importance, the kind of personal “importance” that people seek in being envious, vain, domineering, conceited, and arrogant. Self-importance is not the same as the true importance of persons, the kind that is affirmed in people’s loving and respecting others. The vices of pride are important because they spoil or exclude the virtues of caring. Their absence purifies and liberates the personality to love the good, and that is the moral value of humility. Proper pride is a sense of one’s importance as a person where ‘importance’ refers to the real dignity and excellence of oneself as expressed in one’s concern for the good. The absence of the vices of pride that are expressed in self-display – for example, vanity and pretentiousness – is sometimes called modesty, but the more general term for this virtue is ‘humility.’

This chapter introduces the concept of punctuated equilibrium from paleontology, showing that contrary to Darwin’s theory, the history of biological evolution tends to be characterized by fits and starts, protracted periods of seeming stasis to be followed by sudden, large leaps of transformation. This process characterizes many other aspects of the natural and physical world as well as human affairs.

Chapter 4 identifies one of the most troubling developments in copyright law over the past generation: the surprising and remarkable story of how its exemption from First Amendment scrutiny has enabled powerful interests to cynically weaponize copyright as a forceful, state-backed vehicle of censorship to silence critics and suppress dissent. Thus, copyright has a growing free speech problem – one that threatens to undermine both the vitality of our regime governing the use of creative works and our most basic free speech rights. After surveying the growing use of copyright law to stifle legitimate discourse on issues of racism, religious discrimination, reproductive rights, gay rights, corruption, torture, and police brutality, the chapter examines the conditions empowering such lawfare and considers how we might better ensure that copyright law stops serving as a transparent censorial proxy enabling the powerful to silence the powerless and, instead, returns its focus to vindicating the appropriate economic interests of rightsholders.

After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.