The Yorkshire novelist Storm Jameson wrote that her work tended to ‘sag beneath my great ideas’, as she fought to reconcile her own frustrations with a world of isms and inconsistencies. This chapter explores In the Second Year (1936) Storm Jameson’s dystopian vision of fascist Britain and what this might look like. Like many of her other novels is waterlogged with dialogues and monologues which seek to unpack and explore the great ideas of the age - modernity; capitalism; materialism; individualism - and the ways in which they inform and underpin the attractions of a particularly British fascism, one fashioned in a crucible of class prejudices, the public school system and growing inequality.

This essay considers how Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) assesses the function and limits of ‘ideas’ in two ways: by focusing on how ideas (plural) can be reduced, through the operations of power, to an idea (singular); and by investigating how people can be turned into abstractions through the work of ideology. Attending throughout to the form of Orwell’s most famous novel, the essay positions Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to Wyndham Lewis’s critique of Orwell in The Writer and the Absolute (1952); traces the origins of Orwell’s account of power and truth to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War; and compares Orwell’s writing with the work of H. G. Wells, a key precursor. The essay concludes with some reflections on Nineteen Eighty-Four’s ambiguous ending and on the ingenious yet problematic critical strategies through which a tincture of hope is discovered in this bleakest of bleak satires.

Russia is one of the main oil and gas producers and one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide globally. Its energy policies are still underpinned by the necessity of establishing ‘spheres of influence’ and are not on track to achieve the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. Politically, war in Ukraine is arguably a consequence of this approach and discloses for the European Union (EU) the possibility of a diversification of its energy sources to achieve security of supply, which unlocks the opportunity of accelerating the green transition envisaged in the European Green Deal. Legally, given that they are not at war with Russia, the EU and its Member States could invoke the energy supply crisis and the political misalignment between the Russian energy policy and the Green Deal, rather than war per se, as a justification to abandon consolidated long-term energy contracts and accelerate the green transition.

This chapter focuses on the Noncooperation Movement (1920–1922) and, in particular, the role played by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The NCM was the largest political movement for swaraj that India had ever seen. As the leader of this movement, Gandhi would demand noncooperators refuse mercy, and if necessary, sacrifice their lives in pursuit of political freedom. For Gandhi, it was only by reclaiming the right to die a political death that the satyagrahi could finally escape the label of the criminal and the category of rebellion. The chapter studies the place of mercy in Gandhian thought by paying close attention to his response to the Amritsar Massacre, his public speeches and writings, and his performance in his trial for sedition in 1922. As I argue, by embracing guilt and rejecting mercy, Gandhi threatened to finally explode the political conditions upon which imperial sovereignty had been organized.

This chapter introduces the reader to the topic studied in the book, factual misinformation and its appeal in war. It poses the main research question of who believes in wartime misinformation and how people know what is happening in war. It then outlines the book’s central argument about the role of proximity and exposure to the fighting in constraining public misperceptions in conflict, and the methods and types of evidence used to test it. After clarifying some key concepts used in the book, it finally closes with a sketch of the manuscript’s main implications and an outline of its structure and contents.

This chapter concludes the book and considers its major theoretical and practical implications. It begins by exploring how the book pushes us to think about fake news and factual misperceptions as an important “layer” of war – a layer that has been largely neglected despite the burgeoning attention to these issues in other domains. This final chapter then examines what the book’s findings tell us about such topics as the psychology and behavior of civilian populations, the duration of armed conflicts, the feasibility of prevailing counterinsurgency models, and the depths and limits of misperceptions more broadly in social and political life. It also engages with the practical implications of the book for policymakers, journalists, activists, and ordinary politically engaged citizens in greater depth, exploring how the problems outlined in the research might also be their own solutions. Ultimately, this chapter shows how the book has something to offer to anyone who is interested in the dynamics of truth and falsehood in violent conflicts (and beyond) – and perhaps the beginnings of a framework for those who would like to cultivate more truth.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

This chapter builds the theory about how civilians form factual beliefs in war, walking through the two major factors that power the theoretical engine behind the book’s argument. First, it explores the role of people’s psychological motivation in how they think about the world and its application to belief formation in war zones. In general, people will be motivated to interpret events in a way that fits their prior worldviews in the dispute, but not everyone will do so: for those who are closer to the action, such biases are outweighed by an “accuracy motive” and the need to get it right. Then, it discusses the role of people’s information sources in shaping their factual beliefs. The media in conflict zones is particularly prone to fueling factual biases, but not everyone is equally vulnerable: those more directly exposed to the relevant events will often reject biased narratives due to their community’s local information about what is actually taking place. Ultimately, the chapter weaves these two factors together, showing how they jointly ensure that fake news spreads widely in war, but those who are close enough to the action tend to be more resilient and know better.

The conclusions close the manuscript and make four points. First, they review the macro-level observational expectations tested in Part II, and how my findings, obtained through a triangulation of different techniques, allow for a comprehensive picture of how war affected state formation throughout the entire region. Second, they bring together all case studies in Part III, noting how the historical evidence collected fits the expectations of the theory at a micro-level—e.g., considering the behavior of individual actors and the effects of narrow events like battles within wars—and does so with out-and-out consistency—i.e., case by case, almost without exception. Third, they reflect upon the scope of the theory, discussing many other cases that could be explained by the long-term effects of war outcomes. This discussion covers many regions and time periods, showing that classical bellicist theory not only can travel, but can also solves logical problems and empirical puzzles highlighted by previous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions suggest many lines of enquiry for future research that the book leaves open.

Chapter 1 sets up the founding of the 11th New York and the heightened expectations put upon them from the start. It introduces their famed colonel, Elmer E. Ellsworth, who had dreams of reinventing the citizen soldiery with his Zouave drill. But he found that converting boisterous firemen into disciplined soldiers was not quite as easy as he had anticipated. Ellsworth struggled with challenges to his authority and harsh public scrutiny. The chapter ends just as the Fire Zouaves receive orders to embark for Alexandria, confident that success on the battlefield beckoned.

This chapter investigates how civilians sort truth from lies in the context of the Syrian civil war. In particular, it plumbs a rich batch of semi-structured interviews conducted with Syrian refugees in Turkey that was generously shared by Schon (2020). These interviews include people’s confidence in their truth discernment ability – their ability to distinguish true vs. false information – during the war, along with detailed information on what they heard and experienced while they were in Syria. The chapter analyzes these interviews with a mixed-methods approach. Quantitative analyses show that those who spent longer in Syria, witnessed a wider range of events in the war, and explicitly rely on personal experience to assess new information are much more confident in their truth discernment ability. This is supported by ample qualitative material from the interviews, which demonstrates how Syrian refugees put stock in many of these same factors and drew many of these same connections themselves when discussing informational dynamics in the war.

In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book and give an overview of the argument. After introducing the importance of studying state capacity and the main puzzle of why certain states are set in divergent state building trajectories, I discuss the state of bellicist theory and criticisms related to its alleged functionalist approach to history, and lack of fit with a world where inter-state war has become less frequent. I then turn to Latin America, a poster child of anti-bellicist scholars. There I review the aforementioned books by Centeno, Kurtz, Mahoney, Mazzuca, Saylor, and Soifer, amongst others. My book is set against this new consensus which dismisses war as an explanation for intra-regional variation in state capacity. In a final section, I propose the need to rethink the theory with a focus on the long-term consequences of war outcomes rather than pre-war conditions. The introduction closes with a discussion of my case selection strategy and chapter layout.

Was war intense and frequent enough in Latin America to cause state formation? How should we evaluate the capability of these states in the nineteenth century? This chapter presents a background of how war formed the colonial state in Latin America and features some cross-regional comparisons between Europe and Latin America which give context to the rest of the book. After showing how warfare in Europe and in the Americas led to the institutionalization of the colonial state, I focus on entire century between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI to show that Latin America faced comparatively frequent and severe warfare during this period. I then show that the territorial effects of warfare were similar in both regions and that the modes of financing war were also comparable and similarly conducive to state building. Put together, these pieces of evidence demonstrate through simple descriptive comparisons that the idea of a relatively peaceful Latin America populated by weak states, although a valid overall characterization of the region in the twentieth century, collapses when our focus is the nineteenth century.

This chapter presents latent nuclear deterrence theory. It explains how it is possible to gain international leverage from a nuclear program if countries do not have nuclear weapons.

This chapter focuses on Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762), which brings together the letters from the Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi and his correspondents that were published in the Public Ledger across 1760 and 1761. Referencing many European Enlightenment writers, the chapter discusses Goldsmith’s work as a text which critically reflects on the meaning – and the possibilities and problematics – of the slippery term ‘cosmopolitanism’, considering the way in which it presents as ‘cosmopolitan’ the workings of both global commerce and the elite republic of letters.

Scholars generally assume that Procopius, the noted sixth century classicizing historian, was a misogynist who in his notorious Secret History belittled the impact Theodora and Antonina had on the Empire’s fortunes. In that work and his Wars, Procopius highlights the plight of women in the warfare of the reign of Justinian. How, then, are we to reconcile the seeming hatred of, for example, Antonina in the Secret History with the apparent empathy of the suffering inhabitants of Italy in the Wars? In this chapter the author explores the role of women in the military of the age of Justinian at both the top (amongst the officer class – Antonina) and the bottom (amongst the civilians and the rank-and-file) ends, through the gaze of Procopius, and in the process establish the female component of what is generally assumed to have been a wholly male space. Comparative evidence is abundant and includes such materials as the Code of Justinian; other sixth century texts such as those of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Agathias, and Corippus; the papyri of Nessana (which detail the relationship between soldiers and civilians in late sixth century Israel/Palestine); and the material remains of Roman fortresses such as el-Lejjun.