In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.

The historical profession emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the nation-state. Historians of the modern period in particular focused above all on the political history of nation-states and the diplomatic history of relations between them. Global aspects of European history were covered mainly in terms of Europe’s impact on other parts of the world, as in Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution” (the worldwide repercussions of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), or the history of Europe’s colonial possessions overseas. And yet there were demonstrable global influences on many key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from the liberalism of the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s to the economic impact of the cotton-growing slave economies of the American South. The globalization processes of the late twentieth century have brought these into sharper focus and powered an approach that places Europe’s history in a broader global context of mutual interaction. Yet the nation-state is not dead, and national governments are vigorously promoting a return to national histories in the service of patriotic education. Global history is here to stay, but its place in the educational system, particularly school curricula, remains heavily contested.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.

The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

This chapter explains the legal and political features of the United Nations. It begins with a short introduction to the UN Charter, which shows the framework of international law that defines, limits and empowers the organisation. It then puts these into a more practical setting, which emphasises how the United Nations is at the same time an actor, a forum and a resource for governments.

The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.

This chapter considers how understandings of poet and nation in Australia are divided between the settler institutions of literature and poetry and Indigenous traditions. For white Australia, nation functions as a mythic and political collective, while for First Nations people, it is an alien, oppressive framework that ignores sovereignty and is of short historical duration. The chapter considers how colonial and early Federation poets conceived of Australia as a nation in relation to the global North while post-Federation poets like A. D. Hope and Ania Walwicz identify and critique a national consciousness from quite different standpoints. The chapter includes an analysis of a proposed poetic preamble to the Australian Constitution that was defeated by referendum, along with a move to become a republic. The chapter outlines the recognition of Indigenous land rights through the Mabo decision (1992) and its impact on literature. Lastly, it considers how contemporary Aboriginal writer Evelyn Araluen satirically rejects ongoing national mythologies in her recent work, Dropbear (2021).

The myth of Argentina as a uniquely white European nation dominated throughout the twentieth century. This myth gave rise to the belief that race and racism do not exist in and are irrelevant to Argentina. The literary canon not only reflected these dominant narratives but played an instrumental role in their construction and dissemination. Early canonical works lay the groundwork for Argentina’s long-running fictions of extermination, insisting on the physical disappearance of nonwhites while redefining “negro” as an implicitly dark-skinned symbol of the politically dangerous masses. Rewritings and parodies of these fictions have abounded in Argentine literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Contrary to the widespread insistence that race and racism are extraneous to Argentina, these works show that race and the trope of racialized class struggle – in which the survival of one hinges on the elimination of the other – have been a central concern in Argentine literary and national imaginaries. Meanwhile the unquestioned assumption of racelessness forged a critical silence and blindness that did not comply to the notion of whiteness. Recently, however, literary works and criticism have begun to pose a significant challenge to narratives of white Argentina.

Chapter 5 presents the paradox of national universalism as a theoretical explanation of French republicans’ historical tendency to exclude foreigners and minorities. It retraces the formation of the discourse of “nation” alongside that of “people” as well as the development of nationalism alongside the discourse of universalism. It analyzes the tension caused by the conjunction of two phenomena: the existence (or supposition of) a historical nation, and the declaration of universalism on which the revolution based itself. Finally, the chapter presents education policies and civil religion during the French revolution as two instances of the paradox of national universalism.

Edward Long’s History of Jamaica was published in 1774 and has been in print ever since. It was a text designed to legitimate slavery as central to Britain’s wealth and power and to encourage new white settlers to come to the island. A judgment by Lord Mansfield had persuaded the slave-owners that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ‘property’ in enslaved men and women. New legitimations were necessary and Long’s encyclopaedic History, encompassing population, politics, the economy, law, and the topography and natural history of the island, was structured around a defence of slavery and natural difference. Long’s History continues to be read by numerous scholars interested in racial difference and in eighteenth-century Britain and its relation to the Caribbean. But it has never been fully contextualized either in his family history or in his place in the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment man, Long was determined to represent plantation slavery as a civilizing process for barbarous Africans. Nor has the History been thought about in terms of its relevance to the present. Key concepts utilized in the analysis of his work are introduced, including racial capitalism, racialization, reproduction and disavowal.