Britain's military campaign in Afghanistan has become one of the most complex and enduring small wars of modern times. Initially deployed on a short-term mission in 2001, with the aim of toppling the Islamist Taliban regime from power in the Afghan capital Kabul, British forces soon found themselves re-deployed in the summer of 2006 to the southern province of Helmand on a stabilisation and reconstruction mission, a deployment which encountered tremendous friction when faced with high intensity insurgent opposition. Unlike the intervention in Iraq, military operations in Afghanistan were conducted under a United Nations (UN) sanctioned peace enforcement mandate from the outset. While the operational experience of Britain's armed forces in Afghanistan must be situated amidst the evolving threat posed by the Taliban, one must not lose sight of how this intervention fits into the broader historical context of Britain's other small wars since 1945. Of particular note are the lessons military commanders and defence policy-makers drew from Malaya and Northern Ireland in crafting anti-Taliban operations. Continuing with the theme explored in the previous chapter, it is asked here whether the misapplication of the tactical and operational lessons learned in previous campaigns almost led to Britain's strategic defeat in Afghanistan.

A considerable amount of myth and misunderstanding has grown up around security force operations in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. As this chapter demonstrates, like all good myths, these ones lack firm foundation in empirical fact. Thus, the misapplication of colonial policing techniques had led inexorably to the alienation of the Catholic population in the early 1970s. Moreover, that Kitson transmuted his vast wealth of knowledge on colonial policing to his troops when he was Commander of 39 Infantry Brigade was a moot point because, in Northern Ireland at least, the lessons from Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden were irrelevant. Finally, the Army's counter-insurgency campaign lasted for only for five years between 1971 and 1976; thereafter, the military instrument was firmly subordinated to a civilian-led policing strategy. As this chapter reveals for the first time, Margaret Thatcher risked much politically by continuing with a policy concocted by her Labour government predecessors, even if it did eventually lay the foundations for future strategic success against the Provisional IRA.

The US serial drama Deadwood charts the birth of an American frontier town at a time when 'the forces of social order and anarchy are still in tension'. Following many prior examples of the Western from television and film, Deadwood is concerned with the fundamental theme of settlement, exploring the creation and closure of the frontier as a line between urbanised, civilised society and untamed wilderness and wildness. The series is distinctive in its sustained and intricate use of this thematic opposition to explore borders and boundaries. It achieves depth and complexity in its handling of established generic demarcations; in turn it is alert to the boundaries of roles performed within the Western genre, in the diegetic social enclave of Deadwood town.

This chapter discusses the immigration policies that were implemented to prevent colonial stowaways from entering Britain. It describes the attempts of the British government in the 1950s to stop the illegal movement and permanent settlement of West Indians and West Africans in Britain. The chapter also presents case studies that feature narratives of other Nigerian migrant journeys that highlight the treatment of early settlers in Britain.

Partly based on a detailed case study of the province and city of Siena, this chapter examines the function and activities of members of the regular forces of Benito Mussolini's police in Italian communities. As well as considering the impact of the dictatorship on the working lives of police personnel, the chapter analyses how fascism determined their relationship with the public. Many of the daily activities which the police undertook during the fascist period were barely different to those of the liberal era. In liberal Italy, police officers and officials had spent a good part of their energies controlling mass political and labour movements. The policing of communities during the fascist period, though often highly oppressive, should be considered in the broader context of the regime's desire to generate consensus, particularly among the most disaffected.

Never before has humanity been able to see its past so clearly. And never before could we foresee the long-term consequences of consumption and pollution so well. Science has been a game-changer in many ways. It has given us the atomic bomb, new medicines, the Internet, the smartphone, and social media. Humanity’s history of invention and transformation has brought us a lot. Arguably we live in the best of times. Over the past two centuries, people have been living ever longer, and the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty has shrunk. Progress has been highly unequal, but things have become better overall. This is also true for the way we treat each other. The abolition of slavery, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the emancipation of women, and the legalization of gay marriage are just some examples. Of course not everything is ideal, and there are occasional setbacks, but historical progress is undeniable. Remembering this is important because it is a source of hope. Hope is different from optimism, the belief that things will turn out well. Like pessimism, optimism invokes a passive attitude. By contrast, hope is the belief that things may turn out well if we do the right things. Hope implies that we see the future as open rather than predetermined. Hope invites agency. History provides good reasons for hope. We have achieved great things that we now take for granted, forgetting that they were the fruits of Enlightenment, science, and technology. And we forget that major social breakthroughs were invariably brought about by decades of activism.

Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes was honored with a royal wedding attended by the king and his family, and the celebrations afterward included the whole court. A classic criticism of royal favorites was that they were greedy. The anti-Luynes pamphleteers declared that Luynes had accumulated a huge fortune often to twelve million livres by adding to Concini's already enormous fortune, which the king had given him. The imprisoned prince de Condé resigned his government of Guyenne at the king's request. Luynes wanted a provincial government, but he did not want Guyenne because Bordeaux was too far away from Paris, and his favor depended upon seeing the king often. There are several widely accepted myths about Luynes's greed and ambition. Contemporaries described Luynes as courteous, kind, and affable, someone who was charming and deferential.

This chapter discusses the progress made in the newcomers' economic integration during the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the political dimension of the refugee problem, and analyses the fall of the Bloc of Expellees and Dispossessed Persons (Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten, BHE). Waldemar Kraft, the BHE party's leader between 1951 and 1954, was willing to form a coalition with any of the major parties, arguing that the BHE could only improve the refugees' economic and social position if it was in government. The chapter explores the changing relationship between the expellees and the major political parties from 1950 to 1972. It assesses the role of the expellee associations during the post-war period. The chapter also discusses the relations between the refugee and native populations from the early 1950s until the present day, exploring the newcomers' search for a new identity in post-war Germany.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book states the bracketing of oral and 'hands-on' wisdom alongside 'pure' scientific knowledge seems arbitrary. It represents the kind of society, or emblematic site of interaction, for Industrial Enlightenment. The book focuses on the role of the Birmingham savants in helping both to generate and to manage the flow of experimental scientific knowledge during the eighteenth century. It explores the links and overlaps between the popular market for science facts, discoveries and inventions, the Lunar group of natural philosophers, and the wider international web of knowledge purveyors. The book explains the relationship between religious beliefs, scientific enquiry and industrial activity in an effort to reach some broadly applicable conclusions. It offers a convincing explanation of why the ingredients of Industrial Enlightenment should be present in abundance in Birmingham and the Black Country.

This chapter unveils the utopian elements in Jean Genet's post-1968 revolutionary thought, and shows how they were anticipated by the themes and practices of his late theatre. Genet's renunciation of theatre and subsequent commitment to revolutionary politics allowed him to continue his aesthetic project by other means. In an ironic twist that would have surprised Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet was, from 1968 until his death in 1986, the consummate political activist. The two movements that exerted the greatest influence on Genet in the 1970s and 1980s were the Black Panther Party and the Palestinians. Supporting oppressed peoples in the USA and Middle East, Genet was also committed to the plight of immigrant workers in France. Genet's rejection of the imperialist tendencies of the nation-State elucidates the politics of his late theatre. Against imperialism's abstract and incarcerating production of space, Genet posits the transgressive force of the Spieltrieb.

This chapter explores representations of Jewish wartime persecution and extermination in novels by Léo Malet and Hubert Monteilhet from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It locates such fiction as produced during years when Jewish wartime experiences were largely unrecognised in France. However, it argues that the revelation of crimes against the Jewish community in these novels activates complex processes of disclosure and disavowal of French anti-Semitic persecution. The chapter contends that such popular crime fiction can be read as part of an emerging reflection on French wartime guilt and complicity at a time of apparent forgetting.