Discusses Livorno’s evolving trade with the US in West Indian imports and fish and how the Napoleonic Wars and First Barbary War impacted trade. Also discusses the American consul’s role in mitigating conflict within the American communtiy and between Americans and Italians.

Clare Finburgh Delijani’s chapter accounts for a significant and growing strain of theatre that stages the central role played by migration and transnational, mobile identities not just in France but also across the world. Today around 30 per cent of France’s population comprises either migrants from its former colonies or their postmigrant descendants, demonstrating the key significance of migration to French society and culture. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘relation identity’, which expresses ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures’, Finburgh Delijani demonstrates how the exiles, immigrants and refugees featuring in the plays she examines represent the postcolonial diversity of the French nation. With close analysis of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Le Retour au desert (Return to the Desert, 1988), Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (Scorched, 2003) and Estelle Savasta’s Traversée (Going Through, 2019), Finburgh Delijani exposes how characters illustrate the uprooting of belonging, legitimacy and identity by the often violent severance of migration and exile. However, the trauma that characters suffer – which cannot be underestimated – is counterbalanced by the relational, transnational and cosmopolitan citizens they are able to become.

Why have we been so quick to dismiss late nineteenth-century Haitian novels in the field of francophone postcolonial studies? What have we failed to recognize as francophone or postcolonial in these texts? And how can we now begin to revisit them? This chapter proposes to answer these questions by drawing attention to the historical predicament that led nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers to embrace the West’s narratives of civilization and modernity when such discourses were in fact integral to North Atlantic imperialisms and white supremacy. It first provides a historical overview of the Haitian novel from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its booming production in the early 1900s. It then sheds light on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Une Chercheuse, two novels that help us understand how Haitian intellectuals sought to exist in a Eurocentric, international lettered sphere. Finally, it concludes by considering some of the ethical and intellectual challenges we must face in order to do justice to such works and their authors.

Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.

Lloyd Gerson wrote in his 1994 monograph on Plotinus: “The elements of Plotinus’ thought that can usefully be labeled ‘mystical’ are rather easily isolated from his other epistemological doctrines.” Whether that is true depends heavily on how we understand “mystical”. In any case, Gerson proposes to reconstruct a firmly third-person, objective view of Plotinus’ philosophy. This book is an attempt at something quite different, namely, to see not only Plotinus’ epistemological doctrines but also his metaphysical doctrines as impossible to isolate from the “mystical” or “contemplative”, or, as I have argued here, the first-person, subjective dimension of his philosophy. As a result of such a reconstruction, Plotinus’ philosophy as a whole is contemplative. Everything in it contemplates and everything is contemplation.

Defending the indefensible and praising the unpraiseworthy were staples of Greek declamation in the Roman imperial period. Lucian’s Phalaris I and II have generally been considered as undemanding rhetorical exercises, inverting the standard tropes of anti-tyrant invective to produce a paradoxical encomium of the proverbially wicked tyrant Phalaris of Akragas. This paper argues that Phalaris I and II are in fact considerably more sophisticated and caustic texts then they appear at first sight. Phalaris’ letter to the Delphians in Phalaris I is carefully crafted to show that Phalaris is indeed, despite his protestations, a self-deluding psychopath; he now wishes to dedicate his notorious bronze bull to the Delphic Apollo in order to whitewash his terrible reputation. The speech of the anonymous Delphian in Phalaris II makes a radically cynical case for welcoming the gift of the bull with no questions asked, in full knowledge that Phalaris may be just as wicked as he is reputed to be. The texts are an ironic commentary on the murky ethics of Delphic patronage in the second century CE, and the venality of oracular shrines more generally; Lucian may specifically have in mind the lavish Delphic patronage of the Roman emperor Domitian.

One could start the story of an insurgent movement with a vignette of the frontline or a first encounter with some enigmatic rebel office. In fact, the deleted text that was once on this page did precisely that. While such an initial vantage point helpfully offers the reader a glimpse of the convoluted ground reality of an emerging state, it also risks depicting these territories as exotic and the author as an adventurous protagonist with privileged up-close knowledge of dangerous outposts. Indiana Jones turning to the camera to look his audience in the eyes one more time, before he enters a land of mystery and peril. To start on this footing would disguise that the depiction of these supposedly quaint and anomalous places derives in part from the peculiarities of international perceptions and from the compromised knowledge curve of people like me who seek to understand insurgencies. Let me therefore not start in Sampur or Omanthai or Jaffna but at the picturesque gardens on the northern outskirts of The Hague.

These parklands are home to the Clingendael Institute. As a junior researcher of the institute – perhaps best described as an academic outboard motor to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – I had been put on a team of consultants that had been commissioned by a group of aid donors to write a ‘Strategic Conflict Analysis’ about Sri Lanka. It was 2005, and these donors had enthusiastically jumped aboard the bandwagon of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had started three years prior. However, the process appeared to be going off the rails, and donors were desperate to consider their options. Hence our assignment. Having completed several visits, interviews and consultations in previous months, I was sitting at my desk overlooking the ponds and greenery of the Clingendael estate to write up our report when the phone rang. In hindsight, my struggle with the interpretative problems around the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka that has become this book started with that phone call