This chapter examines French travel writing from the latter end of the Middle Ages with a special focus on understudied accounts. As we will see, this period sees travel conducted by French-speaking military officers, court figures, and spies deeply embroiled in the local, regional, and international politics stretching across Francophone Europe and gazing outward over the Near and Middle East. Thus, although entitled ‘France’, this chapter necessarily encompasses far more than that geographic territory. It follows a peripatetic clerkly class ferrying counsel and culture between various Francophone royal and ducal courts. These authors’ disparate geopolitical backgrounds are subsumed under their choice to write in French, and their attachments to home are problematized by their itinerant lives and cultural aspirations. Their multifaceted accounts, often vexed and internally inconsistent, reflect the rapidly changing world through which they travelled.

This chapter examines Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism from his neglected 1930s writings through his later talks and speeches from the 1950s and 1960s, where he articulates his notion of a “tropical Marxism.” It argues that Césaire takes up and transforms the Marxist concept of alienation to theorize the paralyzing impact of colonialism through assimilation and underdevelopment. This analysis of alienation undergirds the idea of a tropical Marxism, which emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies. By tracing the theoretical underpinnings of this idea of tropical Marxism through Césaire’s intellectual and political journey first as a student in Paris and then as a representative of Martinique in the French National Assembly, we glean the myriad of ways in which Marxism spoke to the problem of colonialism and therefore constitutes a seminal part of the canon of anticolonial social theory.

Venturing beyond Britain’s established railway lines, this chapter investigates fictional entanglements with late-nineteenth-century ambitions to build a railway tunnel between England and France. It explores debates surrounding the proposed Channel Railway (1880–82), showing how fiction exacerbated fears about what (other than trains, passengers, and freight) such a line might carry. Thomas Hardy’s 1881 novel A Laodicean depictstransport and communications infrastructures enabling and impeding cross-Channel understanding. By linking A Laodicean to the Channel railway debates, this chapter reveals the political stakes of connection in a text that has attracted critical attention for its treatment of telegraphy and the postal service. Hardy’s rich railway soundscape of subterranean rumblings and distant disturbances taps into late nineteenth-century preoccupations with the reverberative qualities of industrial architecture. A by-product of the machine ensemble, reverberation could be both heard and felt. In this chapter, reverberation becomes evidence of the leakiness of a supposedly rational system, and with errant sounds working against the railway’s vector-like ideal.

This chapter offers an overview of the various spaces which have led to the racialisation of rap music in France using tools available to cultural sociology. It relies on several extensive case studies conducted in the past ten years on French rap music, its production, its consumption, and its media treatment. With the help of the “production of culture perspective”, the chapter describes how the music industry seized the opportunity to exploit a commercial niche that would later become a racialised professional segment central in its business. Focusing on the consumption of music, we then contest the representation of rap audiences as exclusively or initially male, non-White and working-class based, and demonstrate how these audiences have been socially diversified from the outset. These empirical findings are not contradictory with the capacity of rap to serve as a formative medium for racial self-understandings in contemporary France. Finally, the sociology of cultural legitimacy offers a framework to examine the political, legal, and mediatic racialisation processes which have incited moral panic relating to rap and rappers, such as lawsuits or attempts to censor their work.

Generations of historians have seen the interplay between the early modern state and its armed forces, and between warfare and state formation, as key factors in the process of modernisation. The creation of the modern state was most powerfully expressed through the supposed symbiosis between absolute regimes and standing armies. The image of geometric order and discipline generated by formations of infantry drawn up in kilometre-long battle lines; the authorities’ direct involvement in provisioning, equipping, and uniforming its soldiers; central government’s reach into every aspect of warfare and military planning. All of these have been regarded as defining traits of the interconnection between the standing army and the state. Research on the inner structures of early modern military society has, until recently, been coloured by preconceptions about functioning hierarchies and chains of command, an increasingly effective military administration, rigid discipline, and corresponding efficiency in the waging of warfare. Such a top-down view remained unchallenged as long as researchers relied almost exclusively on sources derived from governmental and/or legal provenance, leaving an impression of overwhelming state authority reaching right down to the level of the common soldier.

Chapter 10 questions whether law should widen its lens to address general appearance discrimination too. Would a protected characteristic of appearance offer viable legal rights to the many millions of us who do not have a disfigurement but are less-than-beautiful in some way? For example, is appearance objective enough to be adjudicated in law? Is a clear distinction between mutable and immutable aspects of appearance important – or even possible given increasing medico-cosmetic opportunities to change the way our bodies look? Do we have an unobjectionable nomenclature to describe appearance and attractiveness in legal terms? And could we swallow well-meaning employers’ attempts to measure the attractiveness of their staff for the purposes of diversity monitoring? The discussion draws on examples of comparative laws in France and America. Both countries have adopted wider conceptions of appearance equality, and America’s laws have seen a recent period of growth, with Binghampton, New York, the latest to vote such a law onto its statute books in 2023. However, both sets of laws remain little used so far, despite evidence showing that appearance discrimination remains prevalent. How could we ensure that a protected characteristic of appearance in the UK avoided a similar fate?

Discontent in Britain’s Thirteen Colonies had built to open violence by the mid-1770s, much of it occurring in and around Boston. (See Map 19.) A lack of representation and perceptions that British leaders pursued overbearing policies because they were indifferent or even hostile to the plight of the inhabitants pushed ever more colonists towards open rebellion. In response, the tools Britain possessed to confront its colonial troubles were limited by the nature of its government and the few instruments at its disposal. These included the army and navy, but their use at Boston only exacerbated tensions. Fighting flared on 19 April 1775 when British soldiers attempted to seize munitions at Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way, at Lexington, shots were fired and several colonists were killed. Afterwards, colonists sniped at and harried the British on their return to Boston. In the wake of Lexington and Concord, American militia gathered around Boston, surrounding its British garrison. Nearly two months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Americans seized and fortified the strategic Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston harbour. In response, the British stormed the position in what became known as the battle of Bunker Hill: the first major battle of the American Revolution. At the end of the day, the British held the field, but at the cost of nearly a quarter of their army in Boston.

This chapter examines the War Department’s role in the formation of US policy toward the European war and the growing crisis in the Pacific between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941. This chapter argues that the War Department played a pivotal role in shaping American policy and actions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, but in different ways. In the Atlantic, the War Department was a primary impetus within the Roosevelt administration for increasingly interventionist policies. It consistently pushed President Roosevelt to act and influenced the politics of his decision-making at several crucial junctures. The War Department provided the crucial nexus between the executive branch, Congress, and outside pressure groups as the US moved toward war. In the Pacific, the War Department pressed for a firm stand against Japan but helped muddle Far Eastern policy by working to undermine the State Department’s more cautious stance. This bureaucratic warfare made it difficult to foster consensus around US deterrence actions and contributed to worsening relations between Washington and Tokyo, setting the stage for the Pacific War.

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

This chapter examines how US officials responded to their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to shape Anglo-American grand strategy during 1942 by changing their approach to these debates in 1943. It argues that War Department civilian and military officials led this effort by overhauling US strategic planning processes and forcefully criticizing British strategy and policy as antithetical to American political objectives. Army planners tactically used their position within the US foreign policy process to craft a hostile narrative about British military aims to shape how their superiors approached US–UK strategy formation and to prioritize their own conceptions of America’s geopolitical ambitions. These efforts hardened US officials’ determination to advance Washington’s wartime goals above London’s and helped forge a strong level of political coordination between the War Department and the JCS for ensuring this occurred. The result was that American defense officials were able to convince President Roosevelt to back their strategic views and to shun Britain’s Mediterranean approach for defeating Germany.

The history of the relationship between Sean O’Casey and the French stage is closely linked to the history of décentralisation, the state-implemented policy of creating a network of subsidised theatres outside Paris initiated after World War II during the Fourth Republic. His plays were staged regularly in French public theatres until the early 1980s, when the generation of theatre practitioners who had implemented décentralisation began to retire. This chapter starts by giving some contextual elements about décentralisation; it then moves on to give a brief account of some particularly significant O’Casey productions, in chronological order.

Local, provincial, or ecumenical councils offered rare opportunities for bishops and other clergy members to weigh in on normative practice and establish precedents for ecclesiastical polity. While it remains debatable whether councils were effective in prescribing (or proscribing) Christian conduct and beliefs – be they among the heady echelons of clergy members or among the vast majority of laypeople – they nevertheless offer precious windows into which matters Christian leaders considered most urgent and immediate. Conciliar canons from late antiquity, and any historical period, resound with the bias and agenda of the dominant majority, and so treating them as windows through which modern readers can see what religious life was like “on the ground” for everyday Christians is problematic at best. By design, the canons convey the voice of the victors, so figuring out objections to them can be a challenge – and we can be sure that alternatives to the conciliar decisions existed. What conciliar canons do provide, then, is an indication of debates that raged among Christian groups in particular localities – debates about theology, clerical authority, communal organization and identity, ritual performance, and ascetic behavior.