In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.

When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.

The single biggest driver of the UK’s engagement with its nationals abroad is immediate domestic politics. Thanks to its imperial past, the UK has a relatively large number of nationals abroad. Most are comparatively wealthy and reside in developed, stable states where they often speak the language, such as Australia or the United States. Because of their numbers and independent means, the UK government largely tries to limit its liability for them. Instead, it focuses on providing good information and advice to travelers and expatriates alike, while making clear that it expects them to take care of themselves. In extraordinary circumstances, however, particularly when events abroad attract domestic media, public, or parliamentary attention, it is both able and willing to act much more robustly. Typically this involves measures to support nationals in difficulty by evacuating them from conflict zones or the sites of natural disasters. Its relative wealth and status as a liberal democracy means it rarely tries to co-opt or suppress its nationals abroad. It does make exceptions to this rule, however, for individuals whose status as nationals is in dispute.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

This chapter considers the prominence of and play with temporality in imperial Greek epic through a reading of three poems which thematise time in particularly self-conscious ways: Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen. These epics all return directly to the world of Troy, resurrect Homer’s idiolect and style, and locate their plots before or in-between the timespan of the Iliad and Odyssey. Analysing some key moments of temporal reflexivity in these poems, the chapter outlines the specific ‘imperial Greek temporality’ that they share, which connects these otherwise very different poems and renders them distinct from, for instance, Apollonius’ Alexandrian epic as analysed by Phillips. These poets proudly return to the literary distant past and use this past to convey their own imperial identities, revelling in their paradoxical positions as both pre- and post-Homeric.

Riffing on the narcissism of male grooming, Devin Garofalo discusses the Romantic impulse to “manscape” – that is, to “read… a culturally specific conception of the human into the landscape such that it is invisibilized as the world’s structuring principle.” This culturally specific conception of the human, she clarifies, building on the pathbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter, is that of man as a bourgeois colonialist, a tamer, and a conqueror. He is Hannibal and Napoleon and the Wordsworthian poet all in one. The Romantic nature poem that is the hallmark of early nineteenth–century poetry, then, recruits the ecological imagination as it consolidates and eradicates all threats to whiteness.

Isaiah is resistance literature: The authors of this book knew the claims of different empires, and argued against them. Much of the first thirty-nine chapters of the book were written in the Assyrian period, when the Assyrian empire tried to force the elites of other Near Eastern kingdoms to accept the legitimacy of Assyrian domination. In a carefully-formulated program of subversive reading, passages in Isa 1–39 react against Assyrian claims of empire, arguing that Yhwh, rather than the king of Assyria, is the universal sovereign. “Isaiah and Empire” by Shawn Zelig Aster shows how passages in Isa 2, 10, and 37 react against Assyrian claims of empire. But just as these chapters react against Assyrian claims, so do Isa 40–45 react against the later imperial propaganda of Cyrus. These chapters claim that Yhwh, rather than the Babylonian god Marduk, sent Cyrus, and argue that Cyrus was sent to benefit Jerusalem, rather than Babylon.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.