The Afro-Asian bloc responded in a largely positive manner to Operation Morthor as it represented a significant step towards restoring territorial integrity to the Congo. Through 1961 the events in the Congo had displayed the inability of Britain to influence substantially either US or UN policy on the Congo or on decolonisation. Following Dag Hammarskjöld's death the State Department revised US Congo policy with the aim of strengthening Adoula's Central Government, by advancing the campaign against Katanga. British intransigence over the Congo, and much diminished influence with Afro-Asian countries and within the Commonwealth, closed down avenues of Anglo-American cooperation and increased the determination of the State Department to generate a Congo policy more in line with the Afro-Asians. British feeling that the organisation was a 'damned nuisance' continued to divide Anglo-American opinion even after the Kitona Accords.

The importance of the institutional setting indicates the rational nature to independents' emergence in Irish party democracy. Because there is a particular set of rules in place, it caters for the expression of a political culture that is conducive to independents. This chapter examines this interaction of institutional features of the voting system and independents' electoral performance, not only in Ireland, but also on a comparative level. The primary arguments given in terms of single transferable votes (STVs) causal effects relate to its candidate-centred nature. The election of independents is seen as an almost logical outcome because of the emphasis on personalistic competition fostered and facilitated by this electoral system. The chapter analyses the effect of institutional variables on the independent vote in a quantitative model, using a unique dataset of constituency-level data from STV elections in both countries, namely Ireland and Australia.

The growing list of prominent Chartist leaders arrested throughout 1839 convinced many that the government had set out to violently destroy the movement, further justifying the calls to arms. In the words of Malcolm Chase, 'very few Chartist prisoners renounced their political convictions, but most left prison intent on pursuing a different strategy to secure them'. One of the first prominent campaigns under the new approach was the Chartist intervention in the 1841 general election, with the objective of returning a number of Chartist or pro-Chartist MPs to Parliament. Like William Lovett, Henry Vincent posed teetotalism as a response to the repression of Chartism, the failure of open confrontation, and as a means of advancing the general progress of the intellect until Chartism was unassailable.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. By looking at the women's Orange Order, the book examines much broader questions about women's activism and identity in the British world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Orangewomen became active agents in the public life of their immediate communities and beyond. Working for the Orange Order, women subverted the 'tea and buns' stereotype that characterised many men's perception of their role in the organisation. The book demonstrates the complex set of identities held by female members of the Orange Order in England, Scotland and Canada during the twentieth century. Orangewomen's public and political work also nearly always involved some aspect of identity politics. In Scotland, women used their Orange activism to raise money for potentially besieged Ulster Unionist women and children during 1913, emphasising their commitment to Ireland's position within the Empire.

Elisabeth Bronfen introduces the issue of gender into her discussion of the political and aesthetic deployment of spectral apparitions. Focusing on Queen Margaret’s uncanniness as ‘woman and ruler’, who ‘embod[ies] the political unconscious of her world’, her reading of Shakespeare’s history plays ‘through the lens of contemporary popular culture’ allows her to locate the plays’ ‘Gothic sensibility’ in the ‘ambivalence about feminine political power read through subsequent recycling, resurfacing in contemporary cultural imagination’ such as Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007). At issue in her reading is the Gothic legacy of the monstrous female body as this gives voice both then and now to ‘dark positions in political power games’. At the same time, linking current films attesting to a cultural anxiety about female politicians and Shakespeare’s Gothic warrior queen in his early history plays, she also locates ‘the spectral power on which the mutual implication of dramatic violence on stage and political violence off stage thrives’, as another part of the cultural legacy of Gothic sensibility.

This chapter adds to historical studies of artificial body parts by exploring the reciprocal relationship between fictional texts and the prosthesis industry in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Focussing primarily on prostheses—including artificial legs, dentures, and glass eyes—in relation to female users, it demonstrates that fictional writing was a key component of nineteenth-century prosthesis discourse. The chapter argues that literary stories provided practical advice for readers on the kinds of prostheses that should be avoided for both social and functional purposes. Women in particular were targeted as consumers who should pay special attention when choosing prostheses. Popular literary sources, often packaged as marriage plots, provided kinds of advertisements not for but against certain prostheses. Meanwhile, both entire fictional works and particular representational strategies were used by contemporary prosthetists interchangeably as means through which to subtly disparage the devices of opposing makers, reinforce the proprietary ownership of particular designs, or promote the concealing abilities of particular devices to female users.

Sinn Féin’s elevation to the undoubted voice of establishment republicanism did not come without its ideological challenges which charged it with selling out ideological values of the movement which dated back at least to the 1916 Rising. These initially came from dissident republican organisations (the dissos) like Republican Sinn Féin and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement with links to armed groups still pledged to maintain violent opposition to the British presence in Ireland. Newer groups emerged to challenge older forms of traditional and militarist ideology, specifically éirígí and Republican Network for Unity, who used the Internet and activist media to communicate their positions on the changes to republicanism. Between these two blocs, an interesting group of non-aligned activists emerged in the early 2000s using old media like newspapers and new technology of the Internet to discuss alternatives to Sinn Féin’s reformism and acceptance of the compromises made necessary by the Peace Process. These writers contributed a new strand of dissenting opinion which was supported the peace but was critical of the process.

This chapter draws insight from fieldwork in Manchester where a nurturing approach by an events organisation, working with multiple community groups and stakeholders in the creation of a major civic parade, led to an emergent entity than a directed one. The cultural, political and socio-economic history of Manchester provided important contextual understanding of the city dynamics, together with ethnographies and studies of parades and festivals in other cities. The parade is an aspect of urban dynamics within Manchester as a city, and therefore acts an index embedded in, constituted by and impacting on other relationships, objects and indices. The nurturing emergent parade making process could be developed into a constructive nurturing emergent city making process to address the dichotomous task of both representing the city as democratically appointed officials and enabling and supporting citizens to realise their own ambitions.