The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

This chapter presents a brief background. It treats the Old Regime in Central Europe, the impact of the French Revolution, the postwar settlement, social and economic change, revolution in 1848, and national unification.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

The country’s “turn to production” in the late 1920s rendered “nonproductive” domestic labor irrelevant for socialism. Domestic workers were encouraged to participate in the Five-Year Plan by subscribing to state loans, agitating their friends and family in the countryside for collectivization, or by participating in state campaigns. The focus on activities outside domestic workers’ professional responsibilities signaled that intensification of domestic workers’ labor would not increase production. As the country was heading full speed toward socialism, there was renewed optimism about socialization of housework and disappearance of domestic labor, paid or unpaid. To facilitate the transition process, the labor union developed special programs that aimed to transfer domestic workers into the industries that were suffering from labor shortages. On the one hand, the new policy of mobilization of domestic workers into industry and the service sector created new opportunities for women employed in domestic service. On the other hand, it left housework without formal economic meaning for the socialist project and marginalized those women who remained in service.

Parts of Europe experienced from the seventeenth century a rapid growth in economic activity, in a combination of scientific discoveries and colonial conquest and exploitation. In a series of processes, some of them with medieval roots, populations and economic output (approximated in terms of monetary transactions) increased exponentially, first in Europe and its offshoots, then in the 20th century also elswhere. Humanity had entered the Anthropocene. Patterns of economic activity changed from agriculture to manufacturing, then to services. Trade connections multiplied in waves of globalization. Economic inequality within and between countries rose significantly during most of these centuries; it was greatly influenced by the rapid economic growth in China. The industrialization had great and harmful impacts on Nature, in the form of massive changes in landscapes and of pollution of air, water and soils. This is considered in detail in the chapters on food, water, energy and materials.

Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

This chapter analyses macroeconomic policy, with a focus on monetary policy, relating it to the performance of the economy in Turkey in the Great Depression. The Depression was transmitted to Turkey primarily through a sharp decline in agricultural commodity prices. In response, the government adopted strongly protectionist measures starting in 1929 and pursued import-substituting industrialization. In contrast, Turkey’s macroeconomic policy was cautious. Fiscal policy adhered to the principle of balanced budgets. The policies of the new central bank, established in 1930, were similarly restrained: as a result, the monetary base increased very little before 1938. While this restraint resulted in some appreciation of the currency, Turkey’s economy did better than most others around the Eastern Mediterranean. The chapter argues this performance was primarily due to strong protectionism, which paid benefits in the short run, and recovery in the agricultural sector.

The Sound and the Fury depicts how information at a certain level of complexity acquires its own quasi-agency – a hyper-mimetic ability to replicate itself through surfaces and selves. Among the many objects and surfaces that exhibit this mimetic agency, two images – the clock and the statue – lie at the heart of Faulkner’s cartography of the postbellum plantation system and allow us to understand the author’s diagnosis of the modernization of the planter system, not simply as a scaling social order, but as a coercive flow of ideology in the the era of Jim Crow ascendency. This chapter shows that Faulkner imagines planter heritage as a social force that invades the psyche, vertiginously scaling through a series of mimetic surfaces to find expression both in the financialization of the New South and in the Confederate monuments that replicate ideology through the social body. The statue of the Confederate soldier is the ultimate case in point. The mimetic semblance is not alive, yet a commonality of plantation culture is enacted between this information object and those who are forced to endure its imprint, to become mimetic surfaces robbed of depth and immanent life.

This chapter explores how voices outside the archive might shape a historian’s readings in the archive. Provoked by an experience in the grounds of the Hawai‘i State Archives, the author uses the canefield songs (holehole bushi) of Japanese labourers on Hawaiian sugar plantations in order to explore the migrants’ imaginations of their own transpacific lives. Focusing in particular on the language of ‘circulation’, and on the life history of one Yamashiro-maru migrant, the chapter reframes a historiographical debate about Japan’s industrialization in light of the canefield labourers, and a debate about Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i in light of the labourers’ remittances back to Japan. At the chapter’s heart – in the opening courtroom testimony and in the final schoolyard song – is the problem of translation and commensurability, both in the language of the actors and in the ways historians might transplant historiographical concepts from one local context to another.