As the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, Japan remained an enthusiastic participant at exhibitions overseas (Chicago 1893, Paris 1900, St Louis 1904, London 1910), showing off both its indigenous endowments (art and architecture, imperial history) and modern achievements (burgeoning industry, victorious military, and emergent empire). It was not able to prevent others supplying the more familiar Japan demanded by white audiences, who were interested in exoticism but dismissive of seeming mimicry. At home, too, the government was beginning to endorse, and cities to exploit, the use of exhibitions as much for municipal development as industrial promotion. This chapter examines in detail how Kyoto in 1895, Osaka in 1903, and Tokyo in 1907 used ‘industrial’ exhibitions to present themselves as tourist destination, industrial powerhouse, and metropolitan primate, respectively. To do it, exhibitions increasingly supplemented didactic exhibits with popular attractions, opening up a space where the press could use exhibitions as much for social commentary as economic report.

Following Expo 70, the Japanese state continued to use international exhibitions and other big events to remodel the archipelago, with Okinawa in 1975 and Tsukuba in 1985 the beneficiaries of the bureaucratic determination to develop the regions. They were vastly outnumbered, however, by a torrent of local initiatives in the 1980s, as cities and regions turned again to exhibitions, as they had in the 1930s, to resituate themselves on the national map, trying to navigate the shift of the economy away from heavy industry. This chapter explores both, thereby tracing the relationship between national plans and regional development. Big cities used expos to rebrand themselves for the information age, regional centres to advertise their distinction. Many expos continued to rely on corporate exhibits to attract the crowds; but some branched out, acknowledging environmental limits, and incorporating the local community, not just as consumers but also as participants. More important than the exhibits, however, was the demand unleashed by the expo and the impact on the local economy.

The emergence of a ruin-aesthetic comes after Petrarch, and is initially owed to architects like Brunelleschi and to painters like Raphael. Architects wanted to build in the Roman manner, all’antica, and painters introduced Roman ruins into the background of their pictures. Such was the commitment to the study and imitation of the Roman style that the need to conserve the ruins was recognised and advocated. Hitherto it had never occurred to anyone anywhere to urge that a ruined structure should be preserved for its historical value. But a further value was now attached to the ruins of Rome, namely the aesthetic: the ruins were looked upon as attractive in themselves. The ruins also became the object of study and analysis by a new breed of scholar, the antiquarian and topographer, such as Flavio Biondo, who also wanted to ensure their preservation for future ages to admire. This is a new feature of ruin-mindedness: whatever is deemed beautiful must be preserved for later generations to study and admire and imitate. Since those later generations will include foreign visitors, tourism comes to be recognised as a sound economic reason for conserving the handsome material remains of ancient Rome.

Conservation is a fundamental feature of true ruin-mindedness, but the early attempts to preserve the ruins of Rome were unsuccessful until the tourism of the eighteenth century made it clear that there was an economic benefit to the preservation and attractive presentation of the city’s ruins. Once this was appreciated, care for the preservation of the ruins from further damage and decay became an issue. Towards the end of that century, soil and rubble were removed from the bases of a number of the more significant ruins, and steps were taken to isolate them so as to protect them from harm, an innovative measure. Rome took the lead in guarding the heritage of its built environment. But since no one had ever tried to protect a building out of doors before, novel means of preservation and even of conservation and rebuilding were devised to ensure that the ruins looked their best for visitors and for posterity. Further projects of excavation were undertaken by the French and the Kingdom of Italy in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the ruins were furbished up for propaganda purposes by the Fascist regime.

True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.

This chapter brings together literary responses to the ruins of Rome. Over the centuries after Petrarch, the ruins had acquired historical, cultural and aesthetic validation, all the outcome of the development of a sentiment favourable to ruination; in short, ruin-mindedness. For an emotional validation we must turn to writers, who put into plain words how they felt about the ruins. The feelings are surprisingly various: sometimes elation, sometimes moral disgust. Whatever the reaction, it is usually founded, as was Petrarch’s, on the fact that the ruins of Rome have a historical and cultural context, thanks to the survival of Latin literature. The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the Roman literary heritage, and it is that above all which enables writers to record a varied range of nuanced responses to them that are not likely to be evoked by a ruin without a history. Reactions to the ruins are affected by shifts in sensibility, especially the influence of romanticism, which insisted upon recording impressions of the ruins in moonlight. The ruins of Rome are signs to be interpreted in endless ways. This cannot be said of any other ruins anywhere.

Despite increasing dilapidation, many of Rome’s ancient buildings survived in a form to impress visitors. During the Middle Ages a number of them – Hildebert of Lavardin, Master Gregorius, Benjamin of Tudela – left a brief record of the favourable impression the ruins made upon them. More widespread, however, were the legendary accounts, as found most extensively in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, of the history and function of a number of the ruins of the pagan past. Such fables can be seen as forerunners of later ruin-mindedness in their attempt to explain the original role in the urban fabric of what was now ruinous and puzzling.

The chief interest of the antiquarian in Rome’s ruins was topographical, identifying them if possible with structures known and described in Latin literature. Attempts to picture the layout of the ancient city generated numerous maps and disquisitions, which gradually morphed into guidebooks for tourists, many of which focussed on only the ancient remains to the exclusion of the modern city. The development of tourism is one of the capital outcomes of the fascination with the ruins of Rome. There does not seem to have been any other city or site in the world that was visited for the sake of its ruins. Topographical studies were, however, hampered by their reliance on more (or in one case, less) ancient texts in which buildings and their locations were mentioned, not always reliably. It became clear in due course that the only way forward lay in archaeological excavation.

This chapter considers the relationship between masculinity, work, and the body in Hopkins’s poetry, focussing in particular on the idealization of working-class bodies in ‘Felix Randal’, ‘Harry Ploughman’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’. It explores Hopkins’s engagement with the ‘Gospel of Work’ in the nineteenth century, situating his works alongside that of writers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. It also examines the significance of broader social developments in the period: the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’, the socialist unrest of the late 1880s, and increasing medical concerns about overwork and leisure. The final section turns to Hopkins’s journals to consider his preoccupation with forms of productive labour, especially as this relates to self-regulation and sexual continence. In closing, the chapter considers Hopkins’s fraught engagement with the poetry of Walt Whitman and its eroticized representations of the male body.

This chapter contributes a means of teasing out the uneven spatial ordering of markets. Taking inspiration from Schatzki’s (1991, 2001) practice-based spatial ontology, we introduce a four-part scheme made up of ‘anchors’; ‘places’; ‘settings’; and ‘paths’. We ground the concepts in an empirical account of the Finnish Lapland’s emergence as the official ‘home’ of Santa Claus and the related historical constitution of a Christmas tourism market. With the future of market studies research in mind, we argue that this conceptual framework provides a way of thinking about market making as an inherently spatial process, while also supporting investigations of how markets and the concerns they help produce take shape unevenly over time and across physical space.

Chapter 2 argues that syncretism, a form of eclectic union, is temporal as well as spatial. As a temporal form, syncretism consolidates historical events, daily individual experiences, and social practices onto a shared plane. This chapter analyzes syncretism in Risorgimento Florence, examining how the city adapts to serve modern Italy while maintaining its historical significance. I read Florence through the travel narratives of Susan Horner, two guidebooks (Walks in Florence, which Horner coauthored with her sister Joanna; and Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin), and a forgotten novel (Isolina, which I attribute to Susan Horner). Across these genres, syncretism emerges as a temporal form capable of defining liberty democratically so that Florence potentially serves as a model of egalitarianism internationally in response to nineteenth-century revolutions and wars.

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the hitherto slow transition of Japan’s animation industry from the Tokyo-centric traditional production methods using paper-based materials to a fully digital network that connects individuals over vast distances has accelerated. This coincides with an unprecedented uptick in the establishment of new animation production studios in the regional areas of Japan, and with incentives in the form of public subsidies for “regional revitalization” projects designed to mitigate the effects of depopulation, theoretically creating a mutually beneficial situation for all parties involved. This chapter introduces various examples of regional studios and analyzes their differences in approach, in particular with regard to the involvement with the local community. It illuminates their main function and position, be it serving as a contract-based independent entity, a subsidiary of a Tokyo-based company, or a studio developing in-house projects to subcontract work out for, thus earning license revenue.