What counts as a significant innovation in human history, and what might we identify beyond the topics included in this book? In our concept of progress are we too influenced by the sense of our own era as the culmination of history, and can we avoid a presentist bias?

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

As the UK, and the world, enters another decade of climate-anguished debate, the record of the Conservatives’ policy and actions between 2010 and 2024 is under scrutiny. Dieter Helm analyses the extent to which the natural environment improved, how housebuilding interacted with pressures to protect the environment, the legacy of privatised industries, comparisons to what a Labour government’s actions in office may have been and to what extent a sustainable path to net zero was achieved by the Conservative Party.

This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to an emergent ideology of classicism, which literary historical thinking both reacted to and further strengthened. The first section briefly surveys immanent literary history in poetry from Homer to Aristophanes, typologising tropes which would endure through the ages and suggesting a skeletal metahistory of early literary history. The second and third sections then move forward in time and shift from poetry to prose in order to consider in greater detail two specific work. Glaucus of Rhegium’s On the Archaic Poets and Musicians and the Mouseion of the sophist Alcidamas, early instantiations of, respectively, a macroscopic narrative of progress and a literary biography, prefigure many core characteristics of later ancient literary history. A conclusion returns to the bigger picture to consider the distinctive value of studying ancient literary history on its own terms.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

Darwin’s Origin of Species [GK26][GK27](1859), despite its almost complete silence about human evolution, was the catalyst for widespread discussion and debate during the 1860s about the history and future of humanity; about slavery and the identity of the human ‘races’; and about competition and struggle in Victorian society. Three popular novels of the early 1860s – George Meredith’s Evan Harrington [GK28](1860), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations [GK29](1860–61), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies [GK30](1862–63) – illustrate how quickly Darwin’s ideas were appropriated into fictions dealing with race and social class in the decade of the American Civil War, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the Second Reform Bill. Although generally associated with literary realism, Darwin’s work may be better aligned with the new narrative form so popular in the 1860s: sensation fiction.

A distinction between left and right policies is proposed, based on the opposition between the aim of a reduction of power inequalities in society and their acceptance as unavoidable if not useful. The objective of absolute equality is criticized. The complex nature of the notion of equality is illustrated recalling Sens notion of capabilities. Progress, interpreted as a reduction in power inequalities within society, is possible, but not a necessary historical outcome. It requires active policies, organized in a strategy of structural reform.

This chapter examines the attempts of Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith to reconcile war with their theories of progress. Both made impartiality a touchstone of enlightened judgement, and so found that the national partiality aroused by war was deeply problematic. Humes optimistic view of progress was undermined by his pessimistic account of the passions released in war, and by the evidence of the destructive waste entailed in contemporary war-making. His desire to moderate contemporary bellicosity led him, in his History of England, to emphasise medieval magnanimity in victory, in a way that was at odds with his progressive agenda. Adam Smith encountered a comparable problem. His attempts in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide improving models of public responses to war were at odds with his later conviction that the public was dangerously insulated from the destructive realities of war.

The harm principle sets a limit on the justified legal and social control of individuals. The principle also provides a widely accepted justification for such control. This chapter critically reviews John Stuart Mill’s understanding of the harm principle and the considerations he advanced in its support. It also draws on other discussions of the principle to assess its plausibility in general. Mill took the harm principle to be the sole ground for justified interference with the liberty of individuals, but less restrictive defenses of the principle are available. The content of the harm principle, on any of its formulations, is shaped by the characterization of harm that figures in it. A good characterization of harm should be both descriptively accurate and morally appealing, but these two desiderata can pull in opposing directions. This chapter argues that the characterization of harm that figures in the harm principle must advert to the grounds that justify the principle, but these grounds are multiple and can come into conflict. Mill presents both an autonomy argument and a social learning argument in support of the harm principle, but the ground of autonomy can speak in favor of interference in cases where the social learning argument speaks against it. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of harm, speech and offense.

This chapter moves from physical contests to consider those who took alternative routes toward enforcing the respect they believed was owed to them in old age. Rather than rely on physical force, some elders wielded the cultural and spiritual force associated with conjuration, hoodoo, and root-work to solicit respect, even fear, from others in the community. This was a route available to enslaved women and men, and this chapter moves beyond the gendered dimensions of physical competition and age to address wider generational power dynamics in community life. Conflict presented in the context of conjure offers another window into – and reveals the significance of – intergenerational strife among the enslaved, and shows how age operated as a contested relation of power that ran alongside, but sometimes superseded, gendered beliefs relating to power and authority. The chapter shows the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting belief systems that were understood as marked by generational differences, as well as the impact of this for notions of solidarity among the enslaved.

The transatlantic intellectual movement today called “the Enlightenment” took particular forms in British North America during the American Revolution. This essay explores four interlocking Enlightenment concepts as used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe their political revolt against British monarchical rule: nature, progress, reason, and revolution. Americans appealed to nature to delegitimize claims to authority that rested on history, custom, divine access, and lineage. Dispensing with cyclical ideas of history and decline narratives from the Bible, they invented the new idea of progress as a way to describe social and political improvements resulting from human reason. They described reason, in turn, as a distinct mode of knowledge resulting from sensory data, opposing it to knowledge resting on belief or the passions alone. Finally, they described their own break with Britain as a revolution because it seemed to show the reality of progress toward a better world of reason, natural rights, and government by the people. The essay also surveys the historiography on “the American Enlightenment,” a term invented by Americans during the Cold War era amid fears of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Eighteenth-century people themselves spoke of “enlightenment” as a never-ending process rather than a finished project.

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.