Chapter 5 examines the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals to legitimise its identity politics. While dismantling advisory committees, quashing dissent, and attacking universities and established research institutions, the BJP has built think tanks to bring together stakeholders in government and civil society and give its political ideology a footprint in already established policy networks. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’ (see Anderson 2015), that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu-nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless. Through an ethnographic study of the BJP’s two most prominent think tanks, this chapter demonstrates how manifestations of Hindutva can be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation.

Chapter 6 has three interrelated aims. First, to identify the relationship between the modern nation-state, international humanitarian law (IHL), and notions of civility; second, through a historical exploration of the relationship between military necessity, proportionality, and discrimination in IHL, to make the argument that the claimed shift from sovereignty to humanitarianism is not as complete as often argued, and that rather, raison d’état continues to be a motivating factor informing constraint during combat; and third, through an exploration of ‘the standard of civilisation’, to identify how this relationship informs discord between the universal underpinnings of contemporary IHL, and ongoing violations of the law. The chapter concludes by proposing that the oft-maligned concept of a ‘standard of civilisation’ remains valuable in exploring continuities of double standards as they relate to protections afforded by the modern laws of war.

This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

The first part of the chapter examines how the loss of the Christian colony became a prism through which it was possible to reflect on the two globalising European projects of the nineteenth century: colonialism and Christian mission. The ‘lost colony’ in Greenland came to function as a mirror for contemporary anxieties about the danger of settling far from European metropoles. Analysis of available sources shows that this fear was fed by anecdotal evidence that the European Greenlanders had lost their Christian faith and descended into savagery. The second part of the chapter explores a series of significant themes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of the Christian mission in Greenland. As the old colonists had been Christian and new missions were now making progress, a ‘fall-and-restoration’ structure became embedded in several texts. The most notable example is the British poet James Montgomery’s Greenland (1819), a text neglected in modern criticism despite the fact that it enjoyed significant popularity in the Romantic period.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

Most contemporary students and proponents of cosmopolitanism would identify it as a philosophy of peace, based on mutual tolerance, recognition, dialogue and commitment to global justice. This chapter argues that, though true, this account of cosmopolitanism is historically incomplete and conceptually truncated. It shows how such a pacific conception of cosmopolitanism had to be positively argued for in the Enlightenment against currents of cosmopolitanism reaching back to the Stoics that presented it as conflictual and conflicted. In particular, it argues that there has been a long and complex relationship between conceptions of cosmopolitanism and ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to our own age of “Global Civil War.” It presents the darker side of cosmopolitanism as a philosophy of conflict as well as compromise, of war as well as peace and of civil war as well as of civilisation and civility.

Chapter 8 proposes a three-tier system for eliminating food insecurity, avoiding famine, and reducing conflict in the twenty-first century.

This chapter uses notions of language and civilisation to understand how disabled people were understood in the context of the British empire.The chapter begins with a discussion of the long-standing association in western European thought between language and humanity. Debates about whether animals had access to language, which gained renewed importance during the Enlightenment and again with evolutionism, identified language acquisition as the ‘true marker’ of what it meant to be human. This left those with aphasia, intellectual disabilities that affected speech or deaf muteness in a highly vulnerable position. Whilst the development of deaf education helped mitigate fears around disability, during the nineteenth century, it became deeply contested and the question as to whether deaf children should be educated using sign language or spoken English became of surprisingly wide importance. Drawing on the work of Douglas Baynton, who argues that in nineteenth-century America sign language was increasingly linked with an early stage of evolution and ‘foreignness’, I resituate these trends, found also in Britain, in the context of colonialism and imperialism. I argue that the intolerance of sign language was linked to a wider intolerance of difference, both the difference of disability and the difference of ‘race’.

Chapter 2 illuminates the transformation of the European and global international system in the first decades of the “long” 20th century (1860–1914). It analyses how the turn towards ever more uncompromising power politics, the emergence of modern states and the intensification of ever more unlimited imperialist competition between older and aspiring world powers – essentially, the European great powers, the United States and Japan – came to recast Europe and the world. It throws into relief how this competition and the rise of dominant imperialist, militarist and “civilisational Darwinist” doctrines and assumptions not only led to the creation of a new global hierarchy characterised by unprecedented inequalities between imperial world states, smaller states and those who were subjected to different forms of informal imperialist domination and formal colonisation. And it offers new perspectives on how the confluence of European balance-of-power practices and escalating global rivalries successively corroded international peace.

The importance of opera and operatic practices to nineteenth-century Latin American culture has been widely acknowledged; opera was central to the construction of ideas about liberalism, Europeanism, cosmopolitanism and the all-encompassing notion of 'civilisation'. The centrality of opera and of opera houses in the region, however, often obscures the ways in which opera, and Italian opera in particular, were being read. Taking account of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of operatic experiences in the region, the chapter examines the experience of Italian opera singers in the southern Andes (Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador) during the 1840s, a period of major expansion of opera throughout Latin America. Often these singers were the first to perform opera in the region. How did they live the experience of being Italian and singing Italian opera in South America? Based on newspapers, archival documents and private letters, the chapter demonstrates how, for many of these singers, producing opera in Latin America was neither marked by a direct projection of their previous Italian experiences, nor was it seen as an exotic transatlantic adventure. Instead, it was something in between: a constant process of negotiation between their private and public identities.

The chapter explores the role of Italian opera in the Brazilian Amazon during the Belle Époque and its effects on national and transnational identities. It focuses on the region’s most famous opera house – the Teatro Amazonas – and on the successes and misfortunes of the travelling companies that performed there between 1897 and 1907. The chapter probes the extent to which the opera house was considered a means of engaging with a ‘global fantasy of civilisation’, foregrounding the effects that local tropical diseases had on opera production and on global perceptions of the region during a period of keen interest in its commercial exploration. The shift from the Italian to the French repertoire at the start of the twentieth century sheds new light on Amazonian understandings of different notions of italianità, of Europe and of civilisation.

Teresa Carreño’s 1887 operatic season in Caracas is a notorious episode in Venezuelan musical history: an attempt to launch an Italian opera company by the country’s most celebrated pianist that ended in dismal failure. Invited by President Guzman in 1885 to give a series of recitals – and subsequently to start a permanent opera company – Carreño was by then in the glory years of her career. Studies of Carreño have long emphasised the symbolic importance of Carreño’s time in Caracas in the 1880s, highlighted by her composition of an 'Himno a Bolivar' during the visit. Less frequently discussed, however, is that the majority of the operatic troupe were in fact recruited from New York, where Carreño had settled in the previous decade, and from where she had pursued concert tours across the United States. The chapter reassesses Carreño’s failed operatic experiment both through the lens of her North American networks and against the shifting relations between New York, Venezuela and Italy at this time. It provides a framework for later activities within Latin America by the US operatic gramophone industry, and underlines the problematic status of Italian opera’s 'civilising' ambitions for local Venezuelan elites. If Venezuela could easily be subsumed into clichés of italianità abroad, then Italian opera was an uneasy and surprisingly mobile symbol of cultural progress.

J. S. Mill’s protest at ‘vulgar’ uses of the past gave way in the 1830s to an eclectic science of history which drew on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Saint-Simonians, and Auguste Comte. Book VI of A System of Logic (1843) sketched a theoretical outline of progress whose scientific conversion came about when it was connected, indirectly, to the ultimate laws of psychology. The triumph of sociology reflected Mill’s settled view that society was increasingly a historical phenomenon, shaped less and less by the psychological laws from which Thomas Hobbes, Bentham, and the ‘geometric’ reasoners had deduced their political ideas. This realisation, Barrell argues, pulled in two directions. While it provided a logic and vocabulary of historical relativism, its theoretical sketch of progress was neither relative nor concretely historical because it encompassed the ‘whole previous history of humanity’ as a progressive chain of causes and effects. This double consciousness, I have argued, can be profitably situated within German historicism, French science sociale, and English utilitarianism, all of which acknowledged the logical dissonance between historical facts and their theoretical reconstruction.

James Mill’s dogmatic rhetoric in his essay ‘On Government’ (1820) and his rejection in the History of British India (1817) of ocular and narrowly empirical methods, when seen against the febrile political backdrop of the early 1830s, was a gift to utilitarianism’s Whig, Tory, and Romantic opponents. However, his defence in A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) of Bentham’s jurisprudence and moral philosophy, when placed in the context of his other late writings, suggests a different intention. In both his historical and political writings, James Mill pursued the ‘real business of philosophy’ in which general principles illuminated social phenomena and laid bare the emptiness of Whig empiricism. Only the ‘speculative man’ could appreciate the past’s distinctness by separating general from special causes, and Mill’s indebtedness to Francis Bacon and David Hume is evident in this respect. His attractions to Benthamite utilitarianism and Scottish philosophical history were variously deepened and underpinned by his readings of Bacon and Hume, and those readings, Barrell suggests, may have been encouraged by Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

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This chapter provides a general contextual setting for the subsequent analysis of Simmel’s work. It discusses the emergence and significance of a particular perception of modernity that became very common among German intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. They believed that the central conflict of modernity lay in the tension between two polar imperatives: those of general culture and specialisation, or universality and particularity. In Germany, this particular tension acquired a high degree of significance and was often accompanied by strong feelings of urgency and even despair. The chapter offers a brief history of this issue as well as a genealogy of the related conceptual apparatus that included notions such as Bildung, Cultur, Beruf and Civilisation. The final section of the chapter introduces the central aspects of Simmel’s philosophy of culture that may elucidate this general context and are in turn elucidated by it.