The late eighteenth century witnessed a growing engagement with natural history in Spain and its American colonies. This engagement was supported financially and institutionally by the Spanish Crown, which orchestrated scientific expeditions, patronised aspiring naturalists and founded museums and botanical gardens. For the Spanish Government, natural history offered a new and enticing source of national glory and material wealth. The collection, classification and exhibition of natural objects had an important figurative value for the ability to amass specimens from across the globe symbolised both the extension of Spain's empire and the effectiveness of its bureaucracy. From the metropolitan centre, the enterprise of natural history collection and classification represented an exercise in economic rejuvenation and imperial posturing. Imperial implosion severed important ties with Europe, disrupting commerce and scholarly networks.

This chapter explores the foundation of various individual hospitals. It considers the physical location of the facilities, the identity of the founders, and the motivation of those founders, along with a discussion of the communal context and jurisdictional structures under which they originally operated. There is a plethora of notarial documentation from cities in the Lombard region that gives evidence for the foundation of hospitals in the area. While hospitals were located throughout the medieval city, early charters suggest that a common feature of many was their location near the gates of the city, and often along major roads. The frequent reference to roads and gates in the documentation of hospital foundations has led some scholars to conclude that the primary purpose of the hospital was simply as a hostel for poorer pilgrims and travellers.

The formation of the British Navy League in 1895 reflected public anxieties about the state of the navy and the stability of the Empire. With a mission to convert the public to navalism, the Navy League targeted the fears of newly enfranchised working men from working-class families. Naval scares awakened the British public to the possibility that British naval supremacy might be illusory and fuelled British anxieties, about the instability of imperial control. In addition to portraying the sea as Britain's imperial highway and the navy as the bulwark of home and empire, navalist discourse propagated images of naval men as rugged but respectable models of imperial manhood. Naval manhood was not only gauged by professionalism, intellect and morality but by an attention to familial responsibilities and domestic life. The navy's heightened profile within society also provided naval men with opportunities to reject older portrayals of 'Jack Tar'.

This chapter seeks to understand why participants value the Do-it-Yourself (DIY) ethic and how this ethic provides DIY punk with 'relative' autonomy from both large- and small-scale punk commerce. It emphasises that DIY punk is 'relatively' autonomous because it is neither entirely void of commerce nor completely autonomous. In line with DIY punk's relatively autonomous status, the chapter aims to explain why DIY activities should be seen as a form of cultural resistance. Although DIY punk exists on a global scale, the chapter considers only the contemporary subcultural movement in Britain. The anti-capitalist element to the cultural resistance is reflected by the punk slogan 'Punk Belongs to the Punx, Not Businessmen'. DIY punk reflects anti-large-scale commerce sentiments and views it as a form of cultural resistance that is fundamentally counter-hegemonic. In 1976, punk was a newly emerging music culture that went largely unreported by the mainstream media.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a comprehensive examination of the foundation, administration, and evolution of the medieval hospital in northern Italy between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. It describes the rise of the hospital movement in northern Italy within the context of the changing religious, social, and political environment of the city-states. The book also provides an analysis of the groups and individuals who administered the hospitals and their affiliations with other larger religious and community entities. It traces the jurisdictional disputes among the city leaders, the community, individual religious orders, ecclesiastical authorities, and larger political forces. The book explores the process of consolidation and bureaucratization of hospitals in the fifteenth century and the emergence of state control over social services.

Irish recruits to the Indian Medical Services (IMS) accounted for as much as 38 per cent of new entrants in the 1870s, and many of these worked in Punjab until the 1890s and beyond. A total of 149 Irishmen served in the British Medical Service (BMS)/ Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in Punjab during the period 1881-1921. Following the annexation of Punjab in 1849, and increasingly when the Crown superseded the East India Company in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny, a series of public works were undertaken in Punjab. Punjab was the preferred posting for brighter Civilians, who regarded themselves, on appointment to that province, as a corps d'elite, somewhat to the chagrin of Civilians in other provinces. In truth, Civilians who served in Punjab were picked men, or self-selected ones as those highest placed in the entrance examination chose their own postings.

Far from being disembodied machinists, private pilots who dashed about the Empire were social creatures. Their individual characters and dispositions were unique, of course, but they were all moulded in late imperial times and traditions. Before Amy Johnson and Jean Batten, the most prominent British women who flew across the Empire were the Duchess of Bedford, Lady Bailey and Lady Heath. A violent thunderstorm between Dodoma and Juba obliged the Duchess's party to land on the Imperial Airways emergency air field at Nimule. Lady Bailey admired French air initiatives in West Africa, and was generally grateful for hospitality in French-speaking Africa. Lady Heath started out from Cape Town for London in February 1928. Before beginning her 6,150 mile flight in a light plane, she gave lectures and flying exhibitions, and helped to arrange an air race in South Africa.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book examines the lives of a sample of women ranged in sites across the British Empire. It focuses on how genteel women articulated, and indeed manipulated, social difference and affiliation. The genteel woman was an element of many a colonial landscape and foregrounding the workings of her life has provided a better understanding of the wider landscape of empire. The genteel woman was the voice of cultural authority and her performance encouraged and stimulated the establishment of like-minded groups, which became powerbases for local society. The intricate connections between genteel performance and the proliferation of material culture have highlighted the contribution made by social elites to the establishment and expansion of both local and international markets. Focusing on the woman's personal and domestic management has also drawn attention to her considerable influence as a prime consumer.

The north-western marches of the Indian subcontinent are among the world's most fateful and turbulent borderlands. Irishmen helped to shape the history of the region. British preoccupation with the area was due to a fear, albeit sometimes politically nurtured, of a Russian invasion through Afghanistan. The tribes living in the frontier area for which Punjab was responsible were called, by the British, Pathans, more properly Pukhtuns or Pushtuns depending on the vagaries of dialect. They were made up of a number of groups, Waziris, Mahsuds, Yusufzai and others whose names were to become well known to generations of British, Irish and Indian soldiers. Richard Isaac Bruce became closely identified with the policy and he himself claimed that he had more to do with the practical execution of the Forward Policy among the tribes than any man in India.

This chapter describes the evolution of the representation of the 'landscape of convenience'. Debates surrounding the utility and value of the landscape and topography of the region had already entered British political and cultural consciousness. While the Portuguese largely ignored or avoided the landscape of the Cape, preferring to sailpast it, the Dutch recognised the inherent potential of the region. Despite the East India Company's reluctance to sanction trading activities in the region, it still required some place of recuperation for its outward- and homeward-bound vessels. In the nineteenth century, when formal British control at the Cape had been confirmed, the prospect of using the colony as a penal settlement resurfaced. Britain's acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope ended 143 years of VOC rule and changed the character of European involvement in southern Africa.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores some of the different ways in which punk has been understood, adopted and utilised since it first established itself in the cultural consciousness from the mid-1970s. It also explores the contemporary punk scene in Russia, concentrating on the nexus between violence, masculinity and subcultural affinity. The book looks at punk's relationship to locality and space, and concentrates on communication and reception. It examines the transgressive concept of 'immigrant punk' to present bands such as Kultur Shock as both reflecting and resisting the processes of postmodernity. The book also examines the representation of punk in film, exploring the diverse forms of 'punk cinema' forged since the 1970s. It explains academic and non-academic interest in the politics of a cultural form that continues to reverberate across the world.

The narratives of the spiritual awakening, training and the passage to India provide various parts of the process which brought Germans to their new place of work and residence. Ships of the East India Company played a large role in transporting people and goods to India, although later in the nineteenth century new companies emerged including the British India Steam Navigation Company. Structural factors as well as networks played a central role in the elite migrations which took place from Germany to India in the century before the First World War. Scholars of the German diaspora have adapted the concept of network migration, even though they may not have done so in an overt fashion. The highly educated elites covered here produced their own ego documents which allow us to establish the deeply personal nature of each decision to undertake intercontinental migration.