When the Victorians contemplated the possibility of a 'very big war', as they fairly frequently did the enemies they expected, separately or together, were France and Russia, with Germany more likely an ally than an enemy. The suggestion of help from Germany, presumably, looked plausible in 1894, even though anxiety in Britain about German industrial competition and about Prussian military strength was already keen. Joseph Chamberlain's proposal was badly received in all the countries concerned. By the time he made it Germany had begun to emerge decisively as an enemy of Great Britain, for the Kaiser's Government had committed itself to building a powerful battle fleet. From the turn of the century the Germans were preparing an attack led directly to a movement for compulsory military service, a notion repellent to the Victorian liberal mind and especially unpopular among the working classes.

This chapter situates the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical'. For affect theorists, the prevailing modes of social, cultural and political critique are beholden to the systems of signification, discourse, coding/decoding, ideology, and so on, all of which are preceded by affective phenomena and dispositions. Like the advent of new materialism, the 'affective turn' has developed in part through the rhetorical construction of a hegemonic obstacle, an all-powerful behemoth that only a few visionary critics and theorists are capable of defeating. As one of the most influential strands of what Perry Anderson labeled 'Western Marxism', critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School situates itself in opposition to both the excessively doctrinaire approaches of Marxism in its Second and Third International form, and the politically deficient subjectivism represented by phenomenology and existentialism.

India Office administrators promoted the idea that, although India's society was markedly different from Britain's, it was, nevertheless, possible to translate Indian social rankings into British equivalents and treat them accordingly. It is the social context that is so important in understanding the pivotal role that the India Office played in the encounter between British institutions and Indians in the United Kingdom. The men who ran the India Office lived in a society ranked by class. The two departments most concerned with Indians in Britain were the 'Judicial and Public' and 'Political and Secret' Departments. The Political and Secret Department dealt with intelligence and external affairs aspects of the Raj. Rather than treating racial explanations of Indian social hierarchy as setting it apart from Britain, it is therefore equally appropriate to regard them as an extension of British tendencies to racialise class and ethnicity.

The introduction establishes the methodology for reading sacred space in Middle English literature through an examination of the fifteenth-century text ‘The Canterbury Interlude’, in which Chaucer’s pilgrims arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, visit the shrine of Thomas Becket and argue over their interpretation of the stained glass. The chapter explores the relationship between texts, buildings, visual art, and lay practice in the production of sanctity and sets up the theoretical framework for discussing the church as sacred space. The chapter argues that sacred space is performative and must be made manifest, with reference to Mircea Eliade’s concept of the hierophany, and suggests that sacred space is a powerful tool in the negotiation of social relationships. Finally, the chapter discusses sanctity as a form of symbolic capital in an increasingly competitive devotional environment.

This section presents an annotated critical edition of El casarse pronto y mal , one of the ‘artículos de costumbres’, a type of satirical sketch that was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37).

This chapter analyzes the Supreme Court's decision in Delgamuukw v. The Queen. It argues that the Court's unreflective acceptance of Crown sovereignty perpetuates 'the historical injustice suffered by aboriginal peoples at the hands of the colonizers who failed to respect the distinctive cultures of pre-existing aboriginal societies'. This danger flows from the case despite its extraordinarily progressive attempt to recognize and facilitate indigenous legal pluralism within Canada. The Court negatively uses sovereignty to define the terrain on which aboriginal peoples must operate if they are going to dispute the Crown's actions in Canadian courts. The Supreme Court drew heavily on British assertions of sovereignty in defining the content, protection and proof of aboriginal title. Canadian sovereignty is extended over aboriginal peoples when courts receive and interpret 'factual' evidence from aboriginal litigants.

The emigration of children and adolescents revealed particularly deep divisions not just because of the recruits' predominantly urban origins, but because they seemed to symbolize all that was best and worst about assisted colonization. Most of the evangelical architects of juvenile emigration had died by the First World War, but their achievements continued to be celebrated both in hagiographies and in the fund-raising publications of the agencies they had founded. In the Scottish context, William Quarrier's Orphan Homes largely maintained in their inter-war emigration work the good reputation they had built up during the founder's lifetime. In the Scottish presbyterian churches especially, assisted colonization schemes sat uneasily alongside repeated outbursts of anti-emigration sentiment. Labour opposition became more vociferous with the implementation of the Empire Settlement Act (ESA). The national church's xenophobic hostility to emigration was echoed by the other presbyterian denominations.

Chapter 3 presents a broad overview of the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ positions on the European Union. First, based on Manifesto Project data, it maps the three parties’ overall degree of Europhilia. It argues that a description of the three centre-left parties as ardent Europhiles would be an exaggeration. Second, the chapter provides a short historical overview of the three parties’ relationships with the EU. It explains that in the immediate post-war years, the three parties were rather critical of the European Coal and Steel Community, but that from the 1960s onwards, they took different paths. Labour only started to unconditionally support EC membership in the mid-1980s, almost two decades after the PS and three decades after the SPD’s ‘conversion’ to European integration. Third, the chapter maps out and compares some of the three parties’ recent EU policies as well as their EU strategies. Due to differing and changing domestic circumstances, the three parties focused their attention on different EU policy areas. Overall, it becomes clear that the EU creates challenges for centre-left parties and that in government, social democrats find it difficult to realise their ambitions at the European level.

Historians have long recognized that the Transvaal Crisis of 1899 and the subsequent South African War can together serve as a useful case study for exploring the nature of the British Empire at the turn of the century. This chapter explores how Liberal rhetoric on the Transvaal Crisis made use of the wider anxieties of imperial governance. Specifically, it suggests that two competing Liberal rhetorics of imperial governance were deployed during the crisis: that of good government and that of self-government. As with the rhetoric of good government, the idealization of self-government was not simply applied to the Boer and Uitlander populations respectively, but was presented as a fundamental and exceptional feature of the British imperial model. Leading Liberals both supportive of, and opposed to, the conflict sought to deploy these two ideals in different ways so as to present their respective imperial policies in an essentially Liberal manner.