This chapter demonstrates the entrenchment of the dominant image of France as weak and poised to tip into revolution. Tensions with the State Department and between Secretary of State James Byrnes and President Harry Truman, the influence of Admiral William Leahy over the intelligence process, and Truman’s preference for military and current intelligence over more comprehensive analyses served to buttress alarmist assessments and legitimized a harder line, even as analysts in the nascent Central Intelligence Group began to question some of the more ominous reporting. In France, anti-communist elements encouraged American attention and aid by warning of secret communist plots involving weapons drops, arms caches, and covert preparations for insurrection, and they themselves as the resistance to these communist plots, willing to act once they received American assistance. Surprisingly, they also advocated for direct American intervention in French affairs, not only in shaping the electoral landscape but also in reestablishing military bases inside France. Meanwhile, other national intelligence services, in their exchanges with US intelligence, also sounded the alarm about communist activity in southern France and questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of the French government. These contacts only reinforced the American belief that France was a weak and unreliable ally.

This chapter shifts the view from the metropole to overseas France. It shows how French officials focused on restoring their empire in the immediate postwar era. The empire was crucial to France’s quest to regain its status as a Great Power; it was also a salve for domestic unrest. The empire provided raw materials and markets crucial to recovery; it also gave a struggling French government a luster of strength. Agitation in North Africa and Indochina threatened to undermine this enterprise. As in the metropole, French officials abroad sought to outmaneuver and delegitimize rivals who threatened their authority through their contacts with U.S. intelligence. They began to tie nationalist agitation in North Africa and Indochina to local communist action and PCF activity inside France. In North Africa, they also traced an apparent evolution in local communist rhetoric from criticism of nationalist activity, to collusion aiming for electoral gains, to support for independence by the end of 1945. And in Indochina, French officials employed the same methods used to discredit de Gaulle’s government in 1944 and 1945. In the months after the war, it also became a crucial component of the basic formula they used to influence American policy.

This chapter depicts France on the eve of Liberation as various factions jockeyed for legitimacy and rightful claim to lead France once Paris was free again. It reveals a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military intelligence, right-leaning French sources, including familiar military, intelligence, political and industrial figures, bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. Thus France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals, as well as the far reaches of the French empire, seeking to influence US policy.

Britten’s two early operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia, were collaborations with two very different librettists. Both were poets, but the first, Montagu Slater, was also a communist, a practised journalist, novelist, editor, and critic, a decade older than Britten, and he brought considerable scenario, playwriting, and theatrical experience to the project; the second, Ronald Duncan, also a playwright, was an anti-democratic pacifist, convinced of the power of poetic expression and of his value as a poet; he was more willing than Slater to adapt to Britten’s demands, but still had very decided ideas of his own. Britten abandoned Slater after Peter Grimes, despite its success, and The Rape of Lucretia proved the only opera he would write with Duncan. This essay provides a detailed biographical and critical outline of each writer’s work up to their collaboration with Britten, showing how their approaches to writing a libretto differed, what they contributed, and why Britten moved on to other writers for his subsequent operatic work.

Faiz’s literary pursuits are difficult to disentangle from the wider political trajectory out of which he emerged and impacted. I argue that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ethical self-fashioning as a political subject was deeply rooted within Perso-Arabic, Indo-Persian, and Urdu literary traditions even as he became increasingly invested in internationalist solidarity. I show that Faiz’s poetry, deeply rooted in Urdu literary and ethical traditions and composed during incarceration and exile, demonstrated his revulsion for the narrow confines of territorial nationalism and the authoritarianism of the postcolonial state.

The controversy over Angāre in the early 1930s has always been interpreted as a contest between religious and secular forces given the furor around the publication for being “blasphemous.” Turning to relevant legislation in the period, contextualizing debates around blasphemy in the legal and literary spheres, and analyzing responses to the text, I problematize assumptions behind seeing the controversy as one about religion vs. secularism. I argue that the text and the reception to it is best read as a crisis over ethics within the colonized, Urdu-speaking Muslim upper classes of urban North India, who were beginning to stake their raison d’etre and sense of selfhood on minority political status. This status had enormous consequences a decade later in the demand for Pakistan. This chapter shows how this early controversy was about how a class of Indian Muslims were identifying as an ethical community, not a religious one.

A historiography of South Asian Muslim nationalism and the place of Urdu progressive literature within a broader political context of independence struggles against colonial rule in India and Pakistan.

The chapter summarizes the book’s main argument. It explains post-communist Russia’s social stratification and relatedly its democratic fortunes with reference to the social structure that predated communism. It locates the genesis of the bourgeoisie-cum-middle class, conventionally regarded as broadly supportive of democratic institutions, in the estate system of imperial Russia, which distinguished between the nobility, the clergy, the urban estates of merchants and the meshchane, and the peasantry. The estate – its juridical, material, and symbolic aspects – simultaneously facilitated the gelling of a highly educated, institutionally incorporated autonomous bourgeoisie and professional stratum and engendered inequalities that persisted throughout the communist period and plagued subsequent democratic consolidation. It demonstrates that the pre-communist social structure has shaped Russia’s stark subnational developmental and democratic disparities as well as national democratic outcomes. The chapter goes on to interrogate theories of class, modernization, and critical junctures, as well as paradigmatic earlier assumptions about the rupture associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. It then proposes causal mechanisms accounting for social resilience and persistence after the Revolution. It also puts forward an alternative periodization of communism in Russia as 1928–86. Sources used – archival sources, memoirs, private papers, interviews, historical census, as well as electoral, demographic, occupational, educational and other data for the imperial, communist, and post-communist periods – are also discussed.

This chapter’s analysis of post-revolutionary professional continuities is sensitive to the logics of the expertise-derived autonomy, leverage, and agency of the professional, the scholar, and the torchbearer of the enlightenment that are characteristic of modern societies, broadly and narrowly, of a totalizing revolutionary order, where those very agents of knowledge are subjected to ideological stigma. A full-variance cross-regional analysis provides baseline evidence of a self-reproducing nature of professional knowledge – in space and in time. While this exercise helps us partially account for regional heterogeneity in the social structure, a linear account would not do justice to the nuances of professional–personal life cycles given the checkered nature of professional reproduction; the heterogeneity in adaptation within employment sites and among social groups; and the horizontal network ties aiding social possibilities and effecting shifts within networks. The chapter provides a conceptual framework sensitive to the formal professional channels of social reproduction, namely (1) the “organization man” channels, capturing the established professions; (2) the proto-professional arenas peculiar to states with a radical social agenda, which I label the “pop-up” sphere; and (3) the “museum society,” where persecuted intellectuals, cultural figures, and the literati found safe havens. It also deploys insights from social network analysis to explore horizontal and spatial aspects of the social ties that facilitated the educated estates’ adaptation.

This chapter breaks with the typical detachment of chroniclers of Russian politics from the social wavelengths that in so many ways defy conventional periodization. Stalin may have proclaimed a classless society, and inconvenient memories were “frozen” out of discourse, yet social distinctions continued to be cognitively programmed among future generations in families and in the realm of the professional, educational, and social institutions to which they were exposed. First, I discuss theorizing on historical memory. This helps us distinguish between articulated injunctions and situational staging on the one hand and unarticulated silences on the other, as expressed in choices, symbols, or artifacts. Next, I present survey results, which corroborate not only hypothesized covariance between educated estate ancestry and white-collar occupations but, intriguingly, awareness of the placement of respondents’ forbears in the imperial estate structure. In the remaining sections, I make sense of these patterns by discussing our protagonists’ journey of ancestral reconstruction; tapping into reminiscences of private spaces and public-oriented practices within them; exploring familial injunctions and artifacts that create mental cartographies and ties structuring exclusion and belonging; and, finally, discerning the descendants’ instrumentalizations of ancestry to actively delineate their place in post-communist Russian society.

This chapter examines the complexity of rights-claiming in South Korea related to the violence on Jeju Island around April 3, 1948. The Jeju case demonstrates that rights claiming and counterclaiming over seventy years shaped the transitional justice process, which can be divided into four distinct periods according to the nature and dynamics of rights claims and counterclaims. I find that rights claims by both sides were not made in a vacuum but within a thick layer of existing discourses and narratives, colored by existing power structures. Over the decades, interesting dynamics of claim diversification and frame resonance occurred depending on the opportunity structures in a particular time and space. I found that rights claims diversify when the counterclaims are strong and the opportunity structure opens up. In addition, frame resonance influences the effectiveness of rights claims.

This chapter presents the first empirical test of the theory using a paired case comparison of two rebel groups that are highly similar organizationally, had the same knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, operated in the same place and the same time in Eritrea, but had two different goals: the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). The ELF leadership articulated moderately transformative goals and although rebel leaders were familiar with the CCP’s governance, they decided to introduce but a partial imitation of it. By contrast, the EPLF articulated more transformative, revolutionary goals and explicitly decided to imitate the CCP’s governance almost exactly, even when the EPLF’s governance provoked violent civilian resistance. Because these two organizations were similar in all ways but the transformativity of their long-term goals, the empirical evidence strongly supports the theoretical claims. The chapter draws heavily from archival materials collected in the United States, United Kingdom and rebel primary sources.

This article considers the significance of geopolitical space to the configuration of the Russian Empire. The spatial possibilities for empire depend in part on what other empires have set in place or ignored. Moscow emerged as a bud of imperial power because at the start no great power was interested in its backwater location. Ambitious princes in this region had a chance to expand and learn how to govern before other powers took notice. Moscow’s leaders also had the good geographical fortune of eventually rubbing up against multiple imperial powers during their history. Their dynasty, the Rus’, had integrated Viking and Eurasian-style political practices on the way to power in Kiev. Kiev bequeathed Muscovites a distinctly imperial state religion – Byzantine-style Christianity with its linguistic tolerance, writing systems, and resplendent art. When the Mongols extended their western empire into the lands of the Rus’, the Muscovites acquired useful administrative techniques and were compelled into expansion to retain their hold as first-rank subordinates of the Chinggisid khans. The subsequent Romanov dynasty and the later communist and post-communist leaders continued the practices of expansion in Eurasian space and inclusion of unlike peoples under imperial protection and discipline. Russia’s rulers kept acquiring military, economic, and cultural skills from a series of imperial competitors – the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Prussians, British and the rest of what became known as the West – over the next centuries and into the present. At the start, distance from great powers gave Moscow time to run over smaller ones, but eventually expansion outward in multiple directions was critical to how Russians put their empires together and ruled them.

Pope Pius XII has been identified as the final pope of the “Modern” or “Leonine” school of social thought, stemming from the time of Pope Leo XIII. Key components of thjis school include support for political democracy, support of workers’ rights, support for moderate social welfare policies, and encouragement of lay movements like Catholic Action. These strategies were combined with a philosophical and theological emphasis on Natural Law, a communitarian vision of the human person, and a hierarchical understanding of church and society. Pope Pius XII brought these teachings to the laity in an effort to promote human welfare. Through the principle of subsidiarity, he offered resistance to totalitarian governments, and most importantly, he defended the family as society’s foundational cell, the “natural nursery and school where the man of tomorrow grows up and is formed.” He continued the Vatican practice of forming alliances with democratic nations, but under Pius the Church formed a much closer alliance with the United States. In so doing this, he largely repudiated the so-called “phantom heresy” of Americanism.

This chapter is an analytical summary of Rerum novarum. Its goal is to illuminate the purpose of the encyclical and the main lines of Pope Leo’s reasoning, his key premises and central ethical conclusions, and in this way, to articulate as clearly as possible the teaching that comprises Rerum novarum. Rerum’s influence on Catholic teaching and practice is most manifest in the Church’s “social teaching,” which in various ways identifies the encyclical as its founding statement. This identification is made in the names and citations of some of the most important papal contributions to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and is pervasive throughout the corpus of CST. And it is revealed in the ways in which the accepted principles of CST are present or anticipated in Rerum novarum. Although the chapter does not undertake the large and formidable task of characterizing CST, it does indicate how these principles figure in Pope Leo’s analysis. It also underlines the extent to which these principles are not the main point of Rerum novarum, but stand in the service of the moral and religious reform urged by Pope Leo.