The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

This work is a history of ideas, not a history of science. It uses the past to answer the questions of whether the Darwinian Revolution comes from ideas already prevalent in Victoria society – or is it a work of rebellion? – and whether the Darwinian Revolution was truly revolutionary – or is this a mistaken judgment made by historians and others?

A slave society needed different laws from those of the ‘mother country’ and from the earliest days legal systems demarcated between the free and the enslaved. The Whig hegemony based on consent that Long had grown up with could not be practiced in Jamaica: only dominance and coercion were possible. An almost absolute authority for the slave-owner over ‘his property’ was required, but with the additional support, when necessary, of the colonial state. Two years after Long had settled on the island, a major rebellion, Tacky’s rebellion, broke out and was only defeated with the aid of the British army and navy and the Maroons. This hardened Long’s understanding of racial difference and the security needs of a slave society. An active member of the House of Assembly, his representation of it in the History was designed to clear the slave-owners of all blame and he named a particular group of Africans, Coromantees, as the villains. At the same time he struggled with metropolitan authority, believing in the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’. What autonomy could be secured for the colonial state in its mission to defend white planter power?

The modern usage of cool was developed by jazz musicians as part of their in-group slang in post-World War II New York City. This linguistic fact remains unrecognized within scholarship on jazz, etymology, and popular culture. For jazz musicians, cool signified a calm state of mind, a relaxed style of performance, embodied composure, and a melodic low-key musical aesthetic. The roots for these meanings of cool are to be found in West African languages and drumming practices, rather than English language precedent. During the Cold War, European authors embraced jazz as a key element of rebellion against totalitarianism, with the jazz musician elevated as a literary figure of American existentialism. The cool musical aesthetic became a global style through Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker, and then through the bossa nova. Once the term and concept was adapted and appropriated by white writers and jazz fans, “cool” became a generalized emblem and synonym for rebellion.

Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

This chapter interrogates what it means for heavy metal to identify as ‘outsider’ music in the 2020s and beyond. Resistance, transgression and rebellion have long been central to metal’s generic identity, where metal has long traded on a reputation as ‘outsider’ music, a genre populated by proud pariahs who exist on the edge of acceptability. However, such rebellion has been troubled by metal’s commercial success, geolocal diversification and generational shifts amongst fans, where ‘resistance’ takes on different trajectories as metal manifests within multiple political zeitgeists and contexts. This chapter then explores how metal’s politics of transgression have played out in varied ways as metal communities worldwide negotiate shifting ideological contexts and markets, calling into focus questions of performative transgression and commodified dissent. This chapter thus leads with a central provocation: Is it still possible for metal to be rebellious in the twenty-first century? And has it ever really been?

Emma Stone Mackinnon explores the different ways in which the leaders of the Algerian Revolution, Ferhat Abbas, Mohammed Bedjaoui and Frantz Fanon, deployed history, and in particular the French Revolution of 1789, to support the idea of rightful rebellion against French colonial rule. Critically reviewing Reinhart Koselleck’s identification of the French with the ‘modern’ concept of revolution, Mackinnon shows how the Algerians sought variously to present their revolution as the fulfilment and supersession of the legacy of 1789, and the ‘rights’ it had proclaimed. One route, taken by Bedjaoui, was to adapt the arguments for national liberation championed by the Free French theorist René Cassin during World War II (though Cassin then opposed Algerian independence). More radical, Fanon argued that Algeria must cast revolution in a new form. In each case, temporality and history were crucial: in asserting a ‘right to rebellion’, the Algerians were not invoking universal ideals, but contesting and disrupting the narrative of a gradual diffusion of such ideals from a European centre.

All aspects of war in China were surrounded by religious activities, ranging from rituals to predict the future and guarantee success in war and the safety of its participants to rituals dealing with the bloody aftermath of war.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

This chapter makes the case that Abu Hanifa’s relationship to politics and rulers was a key catalyst for the rise of discourses of heresy against him and, perhaps, the most consequential. Abu Hanifa’s alleged involvement with three rebellions flew in the face of a basic tenet of proto-Sunni traditionalist orthodoxy, namely, political quietism. It shows that politics and the state were implicated in evolving conceptions of orthodoxy and heresy, and how the growth of proto-Sunni traditionalism was in some ways fostered by political elites and representatives of the state.

This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of nihilism in the works explored. An overview is given of the different versions of the problem of nihilism that the thinkers and writers examined here have sketched. This is followed by another comparative overview of their different proposals for solutions to nihilism. A section is also dedicated to showing the many ways in which the thinkers of the nineteenth century anticipated key elements of twentieth-century existentialism. Among the elements discussed are the realization of the nothingness, authenticity, existential freedom, rebellion, the existentialist hero, and the absurd. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the relevance of nihilism in the twenty-first century.

This chapter revisits the classic issue of the origins of Latin American independence and questions a set of prevailing historiographic assumptions. From a review of political conspiracies and mobilizations in eighteenth-century Latin America, it argues that Spanish and Portuguese colonial sovereignty faced significant challenges well before the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807; that the role of popular sectors was crucial to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the eighteenth century; and that the conflicts in Iberian American territory were linked to wider political dynamics in the Atlantic world. Without adopting a determinist argument that Bourbon reform or American identity explains Latin American independence in the nineteenth century, the chapter disputes the idea that a stable and legitimate “old regime” only unraveled after 1808. It also suggests that significant patterns of political contestation in the late colonial period found new expression in the novel context of the early nineteenth century.

Historiography has long relegated women’s roles in Latin American independence to stories of heroines who left home to support the movement only to return once battles were won. This chapter argues, by contrast, that shifting models of femininity and masculinity were central to a political transformation from colonies governed by paternal monarchs to republics that celebrated national fraternity among male citizens. Using intersectional analysis, it traces the multiple ways in which roles for both women and men of various social strata were in flux from the eighteenth century through independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideologies of separate spheres became dominant, allowing elite and middling women to extend their maternal influence into educational and charitable endeavors, but only by mobilizing as women. Poor women and women of color could neither live up to domestic ideals nor earn rights, like their male peers, through military service or as household heads. Rather than simply a colonial legacy of patriarchal domination, then, gender norms changed as women went from sharing with men differentiated ranks as colonial subjects to their exclusion from citizenship.

When studying insurgency and civil war, understanding different exit pathways from violence could, ideally, help to prevent the resurgence of that violence. But criminologists have long stated that desistance from violent groups is notoriously difficult to measure: people might disengage from violence but still be committed to their group in other ways, or they might disengage temporarily, only to rejoin the group or commit violence in other ways or with different groups later on. Understanding why people join violent rebellions is not enough to understand the full trajectory of participation in armed activity – especially when a lot of that understanding is built on why men join violent rebellions. It is also critical to understand why both men and women stay, why they leave, and/or why they return after having disarmed. Desertion, perceptions of threat, and armed group fragmentation also cannot be understood at only the organizational level, nor at only the individual level. This chapter discusses how these phenomena are linked together: how these groups frame reality and threats to build cohesion and collective identities, and how their recruits interpret or dispute these frames.