Chapter 2 explores the reshaping of English history by Latin historiographers writing in the wake of the Norman Conquest. These historians sought to incorporate the Conquest’s political rupture into seamless histories that intimated a longstanding English nation. At the forefront of this movement was William of Malmesbury. In his writing, William, however, must confront the regionalism or “northern-ness” of his chief source and inspiration, Bede, the venerable “Father of English History.” This chapter analyses how William labors to deaden Bede’s northern-ness and, further, how William engages the ruinous North of England, still smouldering from King William I’s “Harrying of the North” in 1069–70. In this destruction of the North, born of its rebelliousness, William of Malmesbury finds a startling microcosm for England. William recalls the North’s glorious Roman past, evident in the wrecked buildings of Roman vintage, that darkly forecast for the Wiltshire monk the potential failures of the larger English nation, such that it will become a ruin itself much like the city of Rome in Hildebert of Lavardin’s poem “par tibi Roma nihil,” which William quotes extensively in his work.

A cliché of Heaney criticism is that his poetry can be divided into two phases: an earlier one of bog and body, a later one of air and spirit. It is less frequently observed that a third phase emerged in the late Heaney. His poems no longer treat body or spirit as a binary but explore the catalytic relationship between them, and the constant movement, between time and eternity, between the past and the present, between the represented and the representation, between history and memory, between filiation and affliliation. His poetry never erupted into a fulminating rage against the killings of the Troubles as an inevitable consequence of a rancid politics. A therapeutic function is fundamental to Heaney’s poetry. Violence enters his poetry as painful and wounding divisions, to which his poetry is applied as a healing ointment.

This chapter dons political economy glasses to review Madagascar’s economic and political history from precolonial times to the present day, drawing on the theories developed by North and his co-authors (2009 and 2012b), Acemoglu and Robinson (2005 and 2012) and Khan (2010), and applies the concepts they have fashioned (institutions, social orders, control of violence and rents, elite coalitions, etc.) to the Malagasy case. Significant changes have taken place and we have seen the gradual expansion of the elite political and economic circle. At the same time, democratic aspirations have surfaced and found a voice to speak out against the different regimes’ abuses and precipitate their fall. Yet the fact remains that the system and practices at the highest levels of the state have barely changed. Each regime has systematically sought to increase its power by concentrating it, personalising it and securing the support of a small group of influential players. Unable to think outside of the short-term box, none has sought the support of the masses by trying to meet popular aspirations.

This chapter discusses the country’s key structural assets: control of violence; formal institutional capacities as shown by the dual economic and political transition as well as bureaucratic accomplishments; and expression of the population’s democratic aspirations.Episodes of violence are flare-ups rather than deliberate political strategies. In the light of the country’s long history, no non-state organisation appears to have any real power to whip up violence. Although violence exists in Malagasy society, it is largely repressed and, when it does surface, it tends to take the form of infrapolitical eruptions expressing a discontent that does not clearly pinpoint its causes or directly designate those responsible.Depending on the period, Madagascar posts capacities and achievements that could place it at an advanced stage of natural state in all three economic, bureaucratic and political arenas. Three examples illustrate this: the success of the export processing zones, significant results in the fight against bureaucratic corruption and the process of democratic transition.Last but not least, population matters. Changes of government have often been driven by large-scale movements. Escalating economic and unfulfilled democratic governance aspirations are a major source of popular frustration and potential mobilisation.