Milton’s poem, “Lycidas,” written in memory of Edward King, who drowned sailing from England to his native Ireland, represents a turning point in Milton’s development, his culminating intervention in the ancient pastoral elegy tradition. Considered archipelagically, “Lycidas” narrates a crisis that is spiritual, political, and regional at the same time: A Cambridge-educated Protestant, King represents an interisland possibility for Irish reformation, lost. With “Lycidas,” Milton rereads Spenser’s "Colin Clouts," revising Spenser’s earlier poem. A new, better-educated Colin – Edward King – does not come home again. The loss of Edward King alters what Milton thinks could have been a more positive, reformed relationship on both sides of the Irish Seas.

This chapter explores the relationship between John Clare’s writing and the evolving discipline of ecocriticism which, in its broadest terms, treats literature as a representation of the physical world and the reader as a mediator between these complex environments. Clare’s work was central to the early ecocritical canon of the 1990s and continues, in more recent years, to shape our understanding of how and why environmental writing matters, particularly in a context of ecological despoliation, species extinction, and global warming. That Clare’s resolutely local voice and perspective should be at all relevant to an understanding of our broader world speaks to the challenge that he poses to modern readers by the example of his own relation to natural otherness. That relation, exemplified in poems such as ‘The Nightingales Nest’, is predicated on habits of attention and self-circumscription, a sequence by which the poet as ecological actor evokes the experience of coexistence.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

Despite being inundated with publications on the subject historians today feel less confident than ever that they truly understand the Reformation. The prevalence of national paradigms, such as ‘confessionalisation’ in German Reformation studies and ‘revisionism’ in English Reformation studies, encourages scholars to focus their attention on local circumstances and on specific individuals in those localities without due attention to the bigger picture. The sheer volume of case-studies being generated risks the loss of an overall perspective, and threatens to obscure the magnitude and significance of the Reformation as a European phenomenon of the first order. It is critically important to appreciate the continental scale of the Reformation because it reflected the scale and severity of the crisis of authority that beset the Catholic Church during the half-century or so following Fr Martin Luther’s announcement of the sola scriptura principle. That crisis cannot be explained by reference to local circumstances only. It went to the very heart of the institution, and it posed an existential threat to the Catholic Church. Reformation historians have yet to explain convincingly why Luther’s challenge resonated with such devastating effects across the continent. This collection of essays reflects the impact of the Reformation across Europe and offers explanations of its impact.

This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.

Part II recounts the formative period of East German economists’ intellectual coming of age during the period of the so-called Thaw. The years after the Soviet break with Stalinism created hopes for a more democratic and decentralized socialism, hopes that were crushed by Ulbricht’s so-called revisionism campaign. This chapter focuses on the short career of Arne Benary (1929–1971), an economist related to Friedrich Behrens at the Central Economic Institute of the Academy of Sciences and a first chosen victim of Ulbricht’s campaign. The field of knowledge at stake was the master discipline of the political economy of socialism, a thus far unwritten chapter in the Marxist tradition. What is a more “true” and less “revised” application of Marx? The top-down Stalinist centralism or more bottom-up approach as ventured, for example, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, or Poland? This chapter shows how the Stasi, similar to the well-known show trials under Stalin, staged a show debate that, in spite of its forced character, allowed Ulbricht to both resist the reform of bureaucratic centralism and claim his policies to be a scientific undertaking.

This chapter examines the question of prior restraints and other limitations to artistic freedom, pointing to the lack of a precise definition of ‘censorship’. Which grounds of prior restraint are legitimate or necessary under international law? is there an obligation for States to ban exhibitions such as Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery or the exhibition Ode to the Sea displaying artworks made by prisoners from Guantànamo Bay? When can States legitimately restrict artistic freedom? And how do international bodies draw the fine line between illegitimate censorship, legitimate restrictions and regulation? The chapter discusses the problem of artistic expressions inciting to hatred and other types of incitement (negationism, revisionism and Holocaust denial), in light of international standards. It further offers a more detailed approach to the methodology of human rights bodies in defining limitations to artistic freedom (and more broadly balancing conflicting interests), including the problem of artists’ ‘duties and responsibilities’. Finally, it examines the responsibility of non-State actors for human rights violations, if any, in the case of private exhibitions and events that incite to racism, hatred or misogyny, as well as similar issues arising in digital arts, on the web and social media platforms.

The chapter looks at China’s approach to regional and global institutions. It starts with a quick review of Asian regionalism first led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Japan, focusing on how Asian regionalism facilitated China’s socialization in the 1980s–1990s. The chapter then explores China’s multipronged strategy in dealing with its evolving institutional environment. First, China has pursued a latent regionalism, which is centered on East Asia, relies on the BRI, and takes advantage of ASEAN-led mechanisms to mitigate geopolitical trends harmful to its interests. Second, China has undertaken limited institutional innovation, opting instead to promote its targeted reformist agenda towards the Bretton Woods economic order. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the only institution China created and has led, demonstrates its preference of reform over innovation concerning the global economic order. Finally, to project influence, China has relied on its leadership positions in regional organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the United Nations system, including the World Health Organization. Taken together, China’s institutional tactics show that instead of offering an alternative Chinese order, China has been mainly interested in reshaping the institutional settings of its international environment.

The chapter introduces strategic opportunity as the analytical approach guiding the book. China’s strategic opportunity is defined by the national goals and ambitions as set by the Chinese leadership, the opportunities and risks presented in the international environment, and the policy instruments and resources at the nation’s disposal. The chapter first shows how the concept is anchored in the reformist Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s assessment that peace and development were the predominant trends in the world. It then explains why the concept provides an appropriate and innovative approach to the study of Chinese foreign policy. Finally, the chapter investigates how Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has launched a major-power diplomacy seeking to effectively deploy its newfound resources to reshape its international environment. It also lays out the salient causal beliefs and policy patterns behind the assertive Chinese foreign policy and concludes with a summary of the contents of the book.

The chapter summarizes the salient patterns of China’s major-power diplomacy under President Xi Jinping and highlights how it differs from the development-driven, low-profile strategy of the previous era under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. It then discusses how Chinese diplomacy struggles to balance a policy of seeking change within the global order and a revionisim risking a cold or a hot war. The next section addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic tested China’s strategic opportunity. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of the study.

In August 1993, as the shadow of the Cold War began its slow retreat, the United Nations (UN) Conference on Disarmament decided the time was ripe to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear tests once and for all. The end of superpower competition had led three of the five official nuclear powers – the United States (US), Russia, and Britain – to announce testing moratoriums, and nonnuclear states were eager for a universal ban.1 The biggest potential spoiler was China. A “vocal outsider to the global nuclear order”2 and a “latecomer to the nuclear club,”3 China had historically viewed test ban efforts as “ploys intended to monopolize nuclear weapons and solidify the larger nuclear powers’ advantages.”4

This chapter lays down the conceptual foundations of Institutional Status Theory. It situates IST in the literature on status in world politics, and on social identity in particular. It elaborates on the concept of status as an intrinsic value and as a role that entails symbolic equality with higher-status actors, as distinct from status as a set of valued attributes. It discusses the psychological and social foundations of IST, in particular its relationship to and difference from constructivist theory. Finally, the chapter theorizes the great-power club and international institutions as sites of status struggles.

The conclusion gives sweeping summaries of four different angles on the Emergency and of how they inter-relate. These are the government perspective, the insurgent perspective, the local perspective and the perspective of practitioners and scholars who have held the Malayan Emergency up as a counterinsurgency case study for global study, if not emulation. In so doing the Conclusion rejects myths about the primacy of violence and of hearts-and-minds measures alike, instead showing how strong control and big operations remained key to destroying the influence of MCP committees where they remained influential, even as persuasive measures and white areas became more important elsewhere. The Conclusion also revisists the question of violence and harm, highlighting how their intensity and prevalence changed markedly over different conflict phases. Terror and government counter-terror (‘pressure’) were high in 1948, transmuting into structural harm in 1949, and were replaced by a determination to outbalance harms with social goods as resettlement acccelerated across 1950–2. It finishes with the hope that the book’s sensitivity to variegation across place and time will inform future studies, and future debates about causation, impact and significance of the Emergency, both for Malaysia itself and for more universal study of counterinsurgency.

One problem complicating the task of humanitarian protection is the quality of data on the populations most affected. If protection agencies cannot identify those who need help, then their ambitions are unlikely to be realized. This is especially relevant when considering “invisible,” hard-to-reach, or historically marginalized groups such as stateless people for whom we have little baseline data. Undercounting is often a political matter. Who is counted also tells us about governmental and institutional priorities and exposes biases about what counts, and the ways in which resources should be allocated. This chapter presents a critical review of how statelessness has been underestimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners. It argues that the process of undercounting is indicative of a revisionist turn in humanitarian management characterized by a fixation with numbers and “results.” The ways in which the UNHCR data are presented reflects an increasingly top-down logic that ignores the lived experience of stateless people and does little to advance the cause of humanitarian protection.

The ability of Irish poetry to secure a place in the canon is intimately tied to structures of power and authority – structures with a strongly gendered character. Historically, the Irish tradition has been fractured by numerous traumas and the programmatic exclusion of poetry by women. Anthologies are key drivers in canon formation, but have been heavily slanted against equal representation of male and female poets. Often, women will achieve representation in one anthology only to disappear from view in the next; and applying a historical overview, we find that the twentieth century is often worse in this regard than previous eras. A number of case studies are considered, with close attention to questions of group dynamics, literary movements, citationality, and the role of the academy and the anthology.