This chapter explores locality and empowerment in Mallorca (Balearic Islands) during the eighth-fifth centuries BCE, a period marked by low-intensity colonial contacts in the archipelago. It examines the late Talaiotic and early Balearic periods, focusing on Indigenous traditions and social change through Mallorca-based case studies and drawing on archaeological evidence and existing scholarship. The study discusses the development of Talaiotic settlements, including the emergence of habitation sites with tower-like structures, the so-called talaiots, and the later development of walled villages. It also examines the role of ritual sites, such as the Son Real cemetery, in reflecting social status and evolving traditions.

As the opening chapter of and introduction to the volume, this chapter serves three main purposes. First, it sets out the conceptual and intellectual background of the book as a whole and outlines the rationale for the core aim, which is to foreground local communities and their practices – locality and agency. Second, it outlines three broad topics that organize the case studies and thus provide an overall structure. Third, it briefly introduces the specific local contexts investigated in each chapter and clarifies how these engage with the overall theme and objective of the volume.

An analysis of households and communities in the lower Segura and Vinalopó river valleys between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE provides an in-depth understanding of interactions between Indigenous and Phoenician groups and how people deployed various techniques for the spatial production of locality. In a context of intensive contacts between people of diverse origins, the production of places, economies and rituals of the households and their integration in wider communities and regional networks are considered. Particular attention is given to the role of settlements, neighbourhoods and houses as locales for materializing and structuring social relations within and among households.

Much has been written about the Phoenician colonization of Sardinia, and Phoenician colonial settlements on the island have seen extensive excavation, but much less attention has been given to the local communities of so-called Nuragic culture, despite their millennium-old roots and widespread distribution. Detailed investigation and comparison of two key sites on the central west coast shows that the Iron Age communities of this region drew on the particular ‘power of place’ to sustain their active involvement in shaping both the Iron Age landscape and their interactions with Phoenician outsiders while also affirming and elaborating their deep roots in the local past.

Chapter 2 takes an in-depth look into how area-studies scholarship has explained the wide empirical variation in levels of Eurasian natural gas interdependence across nations and over time. It then lays out the empirical design; it introduces the study’s dependent variable — natural gas interdependence in Eurasia — and discusses the definition, operationalization, and measurement of this dependent variable. Next, it introduced the study’s independent variable, a concept labeled new dominant narratives, and lays out the key independent variables contributing to the rise of new dominant narratives: domestic politics, leaders’ dispositions, and international economic and technological incentives. Finally, the chapter situates the book’s key analytical terms — interdependence, cooperation, gas security, and power in Eurasian gas relations — in the existing literature. It specifies that, in this book, these concepts are not treated as context-less or ultimately “real,” but are seen as historically contingent and understood contextually.

This chapter is devoted to the Romantic women philosophers, and it groups their reflections on subjectivity. This chapter aims to identify a common thread that unites these women thinkers and contributes to the understanding of the Romantic Self. Despite the diversity of their perspectives, they shared a common understanding of the self as shaped by relationships with others and nature, and as incapable of imposing herself on them, a view that echoes arguments presented by the men philosophers of Romanticism. However, these women thinkers tend to focus on a particular point: the possibility for the self to create a space for her own voice and, on occasion, her actions. After the explanation of Sophie Mereau’s notion of agency, and the differences between her and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s political thought, the chapter focuses on Mereau’s and de Staël’s interpretations of Fichte's philosophy and their idea of autonomy. The role of memory and love in Sophie Tieck's and Dorothea Veit’s conception of the self is then analysed. The chapter closes with Günderrode’s and Bettina von Arnim’s notion of subjectivity, and its relationship with nature and society.

This chapter considers constructions of the Argentine operatic canon in the years immediately preceding the First World War, focusing on Mascagni’s Isabeau. Premiered at Buenos Aires’s Teatro Coliseo in June 1911, the reception of Isabeau outlined competing efforts by critics and managements to shape a specifically Italian-Argentine operatic canon: one that could stand in for local compositions while moving away from the conventions of Cavalleria and Pagliacci. These ambitions were also shaped by concerns over the integration of Italian immigrants, in spite of the enduring success of many Italian operas and critical scepticism that surrounded more recent premieres of Wagner and Strauss. From an Italian perspective, meanwhile, Isabeau’s foreign profile intersected with broader questions of citizenship, nationhood and affective belonging that played out within both political and musicological discussions during a period when dual citizenship was legally impossible. Ultimately, the nationalist drives at work during the 1910s influenced the operatic canons we still draw on today, I argue, affecting critical attitudes towards non-Italian and emigrant composers alike.

Minerva Historicals told something like a sequential counter-history of England from the earliest attacks of the Vikings to the Monmouth Rebellion against Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Focusing on moments of crisis, conflict and war, they debated pressing contemporary issues of monarchical succession, political legitimacy, power, violence, loyalty, treason, ambition, war and civil war in disguised censor-evading ways. Centering their fiction on family relationships within and between noble or royal houses gave these histories a domestic cast, but this accurately reflected the historical reality of monarchical and baronial government before Parliament gained ascendancy over the royal household during the nineteenth century, and wrote women at all ranks back into history. The last section shows Anna Maria Mackenzie, Agnes Musgrave and anonymous others answering criticism of the genre by arguing the superior truth of historical fiction to supposedly “true” conjectural histories and teaching readers how to evaluate an historical narrative’s relation to fact.

The site of Incoronata offers a crucial model for understanding the collective sharing of techniques, objects, rituals, images and ideology between an indigenous Iron Age community and Aegean immigrants on the Ionian coast of South Italy in the eighth century BCE. The dialectic between locality and connectivity is explored through an archaeological investigation of themes such as the leading role of the indigenous communities and the contribution of crafts; the creation of a common ‘middle ground’ for ritual actions; and the shared memories of both communities in the construction of elite identities and hegemony.

To gain insight into the political meaning of the Romantic Self, it is essential to consider the relationship between subjectivity and nature on the one hand and the subject and the norms established within a community on the other. These two lines of inquiry converge in the examination of gender, specifically in the question of whether our sexual-biological identity, which constitutes our most nature-bound aspect, affects our subjectivity – that is to say, whether our mode of thinking, feeling, and relating to others is determined by our sexual identity. A consideration of Romantic reflections on gender will complete our investigation about the extent to which Romanticism regards the self as determined by nature or as independent from it. The first part of the chapter explains the meaning of the word Geschlecht (‘gender’ or ‘sex’) in the German philosophical debate at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the role played by women within the Romantic ‘symphilosophy’. It closes with a focus on some Romantic women philosophers and their own idea on the role women should play in the cultural and philosophical debate.

This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

This chapter provides an empirical test of the psychological theory presented in Chapter 4 of Persistent Citizens. The authors use original survey data from Brazil and Argentina to analyze respondents’ willingness to persist in seeking public health care and early childhood education services. The results of the quantitative analysis demonstrate a statistically significant positive relationship between the three "2ei" attitudes – entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy – and the likelihood of engaging in state-centric persistence. The chapter provides robust evidence supporting the book’s core theoretical claim that an individual’s attitudes are a crucial determinant of their actions toward the state. It explores and finds limited evidence for alternative explanations for persistence, such as socioeconomic factors. The chapter also shows that 2ei uniquely predicts state-centric persistence versus other types of behavior.