This chapter outlines the tactics, including the cultivation of influence as much as authority, that were used by 'pioneers' to negotiate a growing role for women officers within existing structures. It demonstrates that senior women officers achieved considerable success in creating their own professional networks that cut across individual police forces. The chapter discusses the ideological contexts of gender politics and in relation to the impact of total war in the first half of the twentieth century. Policewomen's roles and working conditions were carefully negotiated with their chief constables during the First World War and the inter-war period. The concept of the 'feminine' continued to be a point of reference during the Second World War, although some members of the newly created Women's Auxiliary Police Corps (WAPC) were deployed to undertake more 'masculine' activities.

Feminine occupations tended to encourage women workers to project a heterosexual identity at work and were therefore environments which proved insignificant to and problematic for the construction of a lesbian identity. In a conflation of the patterns of development of the lesbian and the career woman, both were women who had failed to develop a maternal instinct and thus mature beyond the adolescent phase of homosexuality. The influence of medical discourses characterising lesbians as emotionally abnormal and potentially predatory, meant that single women teachers were increasingly regarded as poor role models for girls. Cultural associations of masculinity and women-only environments with lesbianism meant that the women employed in such workplaces were constructed as potentially sexually deviant. Under the leadership of Margaret Damer Dawson and Mary Allen, both of whom were lesbians, the Women Police Service (WPS) made an important contribution to women's policing during the First World War.

This chapter discusses variations in the nature of migrant journeys. It presents cases of forced migration, including the migration of Vietnamese refugees and the traumatic journeys of the Jews and Irish people. The migrations of the Jews and the Irish represent the largest European migrations of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, both the emigration of the Jews from the Russian Empire and the horrors of Irish famine emigration are discussed in detail.

This chapter examines issues relating to language, accent, and cultural traditions. The linkage between accent, identity, and hostility is apparent from the testimony of Scots who arrived as youngsters in the United States. The chapter focuses on the issue of dual national attachments and considers if broad ethnic identities differed according to the divergent societies migrants found themselves in. Most Irish and Scottish migrants were more intrigued with the novel foods they encountered in their new destinations rather than attesting to their continuation of Irish fare. Apart from holding to various cultural aspects of their ethnicity, migrants were also conscious of jointly belonging to their new homelands. The novelty of aspects of Scottish culture for other ethnicities seems to have prompted some Scots to powerfully emphasise this particular element of their national identity. The popular ethnic stereotypes, rather than cause division, served to foster friendly relations among various national groups.

This chapter focuses on three aspects of collective experience among young French-North Africans in Seine-Saint-Denis: the banlieue, the quartier and racial discrimination. While the banlieue and the quartier are often considered as predominantly socio-economic categories, the chapter argues that they can be seen as representing an interface between social and more cultural forms of identity. The chapter discusses interface between the socio-economic and the cultural in relation to the interviewees' narratives of racial discrimination. The notion of belonging to a community which is primarily defined in terms of an antagonistic relationship between Paris and la banlieue is a fairly prevalent phenomenon among the young people who took part in the fieldwork. In addition to a strong sense of identity with regard to the banlieue, which is simultaneously conceived as a socio-economic and cultural 'imagined community', some interviewees reveal that they enjoy close ties with their immediate quartier.

This chapter focuses on the works of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy (1960–64) and McGahern's The Dark (1965) were banned due to their portrayal of sexuality. The chapter also discusses the reform of literary censorship and the contribution of these novels to the cultural reconfiguration of sexuality and social change in Ireland.

In the thoughts and imaginations of most people, siblinghood has been stripped of its eighteenth-century functionality. Conjugal family forms have become ascendant in contemporary conceptions of family life, but sibling ties have become the definitive language for much of current social, religious, and political thought. Georgian siblings, in all of their rivalrous and friendly glory, inhabited a different time. As the Georgian period ended there was a decline in siblings' material and economic interdependency and a simultaneous intensification in the literary portrayal of their emotional connections. The Travell siblings' lifelong economics, both emotional and material, were, in Leonore Davidoff's words, a central element in active kinship. Sibling relationships were intricately complex, and understanding siblings is necessary to understanding early modern family and gender relations, and equally necessary to appreciating the role of family relations in social interaction.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourses. Reading the Urizen books against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution (1791), this chapter puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter discusses the further connotative development of the word “organization” in The Four Zoas, which picks up on the use of the term in British responses to France’s imperialist military project in the Revolutionary Wars. The chapter ends with a discussion of how after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages, Blake came to envision political change in terms of regeneration and rejuvenation instead of gestation and birth.

The British Labour government announced a withdrawal from Aden in 1966, departing from the previous Conservative government's commitment to maintain a formal defence link with its allies in the Federation of South Arabia. Britain's withdrawal from Aden was premised on the Federal Administration, along with the South Arabian Army (SAA), taking over internal security from British forces as they transitioned towards independence in 1968. In a secret memorandum to the Foreign Office in the days leading up to withdrawal, the High Commissioner Sir Humphrey Trevelyan hoped that the SAA, which he recognized as being ‘more closely aligned with the NLF than with FLOSY’, could occupy the rebellious Crater district and seize control ‘with or without the collusion of some of the Sultans and/or more of the Opposition parties’. The notion of colluding with local moderates was a recurrent theme in Britain's small wars, as too was the often contradictory (and utterly clandestine) negotiations with extremist insurgents and terrorists. This chapter explores the disharmony in civil-military relations on the question of withdrawal from Aden, arguing that, in dodging the bullet in Aden, Britain opted to come to terms with its relative power in the world.

Chapter 4 delves into the mechanisms behind social tipping points and transformative societal change, drawing on insights from complexity science, psychology, and historical case studies. At its core, the chapter illustrates how societies often get stuck in harmful states due to cognitive rigidity, conservative feedback mechanisms, and the influence of elites invested in maintaining the status quo. However, these rigid systems lose resilience over time, becoming increasingly susceptible to abrupt transformation triggered by seemingly minor events. The author introduces a graphical model of tipping, where societal shifts are catalyzed once a critical mass adopts new attitudes—often beginning at the societal periphery. Analogies with systems in nature, like earthquakes and deglaciation, reinforce the universality of tipping dynamics. The chapter also discusses how belief systems become entrenched, how perceptions are manipulated, and how technologies and norms evolve. Network theory explains how transformations spread through interconnected systems, where cascading change can lead to widespread societal shifts.

The Phaistos Disk is an enigmatic object, imprinted with a text in a script found on no other object, though the script does contain a number of signs in common with Linear A. In Chapter 8, the text on the Disk is analyzed against Linear A in an effort to determine whether the two scripts encode the same language. As a control, a Cypriot Syllabic text analogous in size to the one on the Disk is analyzed against Linear B in the same way, with the results demonstrating an overwhelming probability that both scripts encode the same language (which we know they do, as both scripts are deciphered: they both encode Greek). The Cypriot Syllabic text is also analyzed against Linear A, demonstrating an overwhelming probability that the two scripts encode different languages—that is, that Linear A (for a second time) does NOT encode Greek. The analysis of the text on the Disk against Linear A, however, demonstrates a similarly overwhelming probability that both scripts do encode the same language.