This book explores what Europeans in the twentieth century understood by individual freedom and how they endeavored to achieve it, often against the odds. The Introduction lays out its conceptual bases, arguing that the quest was multi-faceted and unfolded in nonlinear ways, which jars with teleological narratives of the rise and decline of “the individual.” It disputes Annelien de Dijn’s recent account of one dominant concept of modern liberty and is attentive to mainstream as well as marginalized versions of individual freedom, questioning Michel Foucault’s idea that the former were “imposed on us” through disciplinary power. Instead, the book borrows from sociologist Georg Simmel and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin to stress the subjective, gradual, and unpredictable character of individual freedom and the fact that it was pursued against a range of obstacles and constraints. It tells a story of conflict-ridden expansion. Men and women had to claim their personal freedom in a context marked by world wars, the expanding power of the state, the constraints of work life, pre-established moral norms, the growing influence of America, and the uncertain future of colonial rule.

Since the 2010s, the writing of European history – in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe and as the histories of nations in Europe – has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations and as responses to global challenges. On the other hand, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of reterritorialization.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010–14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

Chapter 2 critically approaches Skinner’s historical oeuvre and its problematic connection with his own theoretical perspective. It begins by analyzing his major work, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, and his perspective regarding the origins of the modern concept of State. In it, we can observe the tension between his theory and the teleological perspective underlying that project. This problem indeed became more noticeable in his recent works addressed to trace the remote roots of “classical republicanism,” as associated to a “third idea of liberty”: the concept of “liberty as non-domination.” It then continues by analyzing the differences between Skinner’s and Pocock’s views of classical republicanism, and its connection with their different definitions of political languages. Lastly, we observe here how the normative temptation that fuels both Skinner’s and Pocock’s proposals of recovering classical republicanism entails an instrumental use of intellectual history aimed at making it play into the present, which inevitably leads to relapse into conceptual anachronisms.

The Epilogue takes the story into the late 2000s, as another major economic crisis hit hard. It considers the cultural memory of how the 1930s touched Britain and other parts of the world. By the early twenty-first century, memories of the inter-war past had largely evaporated from popular party politics, but they retained a force in cementing both the self-identity and the entitlements of those people born in the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter elaborates on the general approach pursued in this volume to identify institutional weaknesses that may be preventing growth in Bangladesh from being faster and more inclusive today and that may cause it to slow down in the future. It also provides a brief overview of the political history of the country, without which it is difficult to understand its development achievement, as well as the present political economy context. Finally, in the light of that historical sketch, some reflections are offered on the specificity of the institutional link between business and politics in Bangladesh, a link that very much frames its development and that are often referred to throughout this volume.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

In the last thirty years, the historiography of Spanish-American independence has emphasized the paradoxical centrality of the Spanish revolutionary process, with the key role of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the general economy of emancipation. It also emphasized the role of Saint-Domingue/Haiti as a factor of regional destabilization. As a consequence of these revisions, the French Revolution is no longer considered as the intellectual and political source of these movements. Nevertheless, they allow us to rethink the Franco-Hispanic relationship, and beyond that, the Atlantic revolutionary cycle, by reformulating two classic issues. The first is the re-evaluation of the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions in Spanish America. The second is concerned with the forms of their appropriation by the actors of independence.

The conclusion considers the wider significance of the book’s arguments. The concept of ‘modernisation’ was a potent resource for projects for social-democratic renewal over the late twentieth century. Many had the potential to become defining influences on a Labour government – even if, at turning points in the early 1980s, the late 1980s and the early 1990s, they lost out due to a combination of social and economic, intellectual, institutional, and political forces. This means that the rise of New Labour was not inevitable and that its opponents were not straightforwardly ‘traditionalist’. It also means, however, that New Labour’s leaders drew heavily from the left when forging their own agenda, including policies and institutions that endure today. This has implications for the histories of Britain after the 1970s: the rise of neoliberalism, though important, should not obscure other pivotal forces, especially deindustrialisation, constitutional agitation, and popular individualism. The conclusion ends by using this history to suggest that ‘modernisation’ is an idea that is unusually prominent in the tradition of social democracy.