In ‘Correspondents’, Hugh Cobbe reflects on the benefits for the study of composers that arise from the corpus of their letters. He describes the collection of the letters of Vaughan Williams, which he and his successor editors have built up to form a database of over 5,000 items that are publicly available online. Describing Vaughan Williams’s connections in terms of concentric circles of decreasing intimacy, he demonstrates what the correspondence reveals about the composer and his world. Relations with his two wives, Adeline and Ursula, are discussed and then relations with his close friends Ralph Wedgwood, Gustav Holst, Martin Shaw, Gerald Finzi, and Michael Kennedy. Thereafter the circles widen to include Adeline Fisher’s relations, his fellow composers, his Royal College of Music pupils, those conductors and soloists who regularly performed his works, his collaborators, and the critics who wrote about him. Cobbe also describes his concerns with non-musical issues, such as the release of interned German refugee musicians, and his enthusiasm for Federal Union as a movement for future peace. Overall, the letters provide a clear picture of Vaughan Williams’s breadth of vision and largeness of mind.

As well as his many friends in music, Vaughan Williams had some distinguished ones outside it, five notably: all agnostic liberal intellectuals with upper-middle-class backgrounds. He loved and revered Frederic Maitland, historian of medieval law, who (like himself) married into the Fisher family and who seems to have strengthened his sense of the ‘feel’ of the English past. He was on good terms with another historian from the same family, H. A. L. Fisher, who as Britain’s minister for education (1916–22) opened up possibilities for a National Opera and for the inclusion of folk music in school curricula. He collaborated with Gilbert Murray (professor of Greek at Oxford) on finding ways of presenting Ancient Greek tragic choruses on the modern stage, and relished Murray’s ideas about the workings of tradition in the arts. And he had long friendships with two Cambridge notables whom he’d first met when he and they were undergraduates at that university and who later became professors there: the philosopher G. E. Moore and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. He appreciated Moore’s musicality and admired his Principia Ethica, while Trevelyan’s literary taste and concern for English continuities paralleled and arguably influenced his own.

This chapter examines the major rebellions that occurred in Spanish America during the era of North American colonial protest and rebellion against British policies and government. It focuses on the revolt of the city of Quito in 1765, the Andean rebellions started by Tupac Amaru in 1780, and the 1781 Comunero rebellion in New Granada, set in the context of Spanish administrative and fiscal reforms under Charles III and Spanish geopolitical conflict with Britain between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of independence. The principal purpose here is to enquire into the origins of the rebellions, their organization and social composition, and the political attitudes and ideas of their participants. In addition to comparing the Spanish American rebellions in terms of their causes, political cultures and political impacts, it also reflects on their contemporaneous relationship to the American Revolution and their place in the wider challenge to European monarchies during the Age of Revolution.

The American federal union was created in 1781 by the Articles of Confederation. Designed to protect the independence and promote the interests of the member-states, it concentrated power over international matters and war in a central government. Although the Articles granted extensive powers to a congress of states, their implementation was left to the state governments. This arrangement proved dysfunctional and by early 1787, the future of the union was in doubt. The Constitution challenged neither the aims nor the purposes of the American union. Instead, it radically reformed its structure. It set up a central government with a legislative, executive and judicial branch and the right to legislate directly on the individual citizens of the American states. By allowing the federal government to operate independently of the states, the problem of the non-implementation of congressional decisions was overcome. Only with the adoption of the Constitution did the American union acquire national cohesion and a central government with the capacity to act with determination and energy against foreign powers and stateless peoples on the North American continent.

Chapter 3 examines Streit’s wartime activities on behalf of Federal Union, which included efforts to build a national movement with local chapters. The difficulties encountered offer another perspective on grassroots political mobilization, one that calls into question arguments that surge local activism at the time. The chapter also considers Streit’s involvement with the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace (CSOP), a semi-official grouping that played a key role in designing and championing the UNO as a pillar of postwar US internationalism. Streit’s unwillingness to collaborate meaningfully with the CSOP left him with inadequate means either to promote his own project or to counter the appropriation of federalism for other ends.

Chapter 4 centers on his educational activism, whose principal vehicle was Federal Union, an organization founded during the war, and which in 1946 launched a monthly magazine, Freedom & Union, to stimulate discussion of Atlantic federal union and of federalist frameworks more generally. Political and financial considerations prodded Streit to champion abstract principles of democracy, freedom, and liberty, which further Americanized his project by rooting it in dominant Cold War ideological paradigms while also eliding differences between the United States and Western European countries.

This chapter is concerned with the material constitution of the federation as a discrete form of political association. The chapter shows that the federation is a political order founded on an interstate agreement of constitutional nature between its Member States. This constitutional contract gives birth to the Union as a new institutionalised legal and political order and transforms the constitutions of its Member States in a material sense by relativising the dialectical relationship between governors and governed that lies at the heart of state sovereignty. The federation is characterised by a dual political existence, the Union and the Member States, which stand in a heterarchical relationship to one another. The federation is a dynamic order, characterised by the continual construction of political identity of both the Union and Member States.

The idea of bringing into being supranational organizations to resolve disputes between states has a distinguished lineage, going as far back as Dante Alighieri’s On World Government, Rousseau’s A Project of Perpetual Peace and Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations operating under the rule of law, and eventually evolving into “a perfect civil union of mankind.” The League of Nations was a first attempt to pool national sovereignties together to deal with the problem of war, a milestone in a long process intended to strengthen the effectiveness of mechanisms of international cooperation. The UN was initially conceived as an international entity founded on federalist principles, with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, but it emerged as a rather less ambitious entity with two fundamental flaws: the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council, both undermining the democratic legitimacy of the organization. The chapter also reviews the concerns raised by Grenville Clark and others who thought that if member countries could not agree upon well-defined powers that they would be willing to yield, no global authority adequate to maintain peace would arise in our time.