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With the Revolutionary trauma and Anglican Church swept away, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists could turn their full attention to each other as they competed for converts and ascendancy in the religiously free nation. The insular Presbyterians and Baptists struggled to keep pace with the Methodists by experimenting with some of their tactics, including warm, extemporaneous preaching, lively music, and itinerancy, yet ultimately they relied on their traditional distinctions in appeals for converts. Methodists forged ahead with their universal designs and waves of quarterly and annual meetings that fostered outdoor preaching events and camp meetings, but as they encountered their competitors, they had to define their distinctive message, and, doing so, they addressed their Calvinist rivals on the enemies’ terms: the controversial spirit that the Methodists had hoped to convert.

The post-1945 European movement was partly moulded by the interests of American corporate business, which supported multi-party democracy managed in ways that maintained strong checks on its political rivals, especially Soviet-style state socialism. The EU maintained the historical European pattern of a rough balance between a loose framework of rules and cultural understandings and a diversity of politico-economic tendencies in different parts of the continent. This was possible because it was a relatively sheltered arena hemmed in both east and west by the supporting and containing walls provided by the two main Cold War players. Since 1989 the surrounding ‘outworks’ of the EU in North Africa, Central Eurasia, and the Middle East have substantially crumbled. The EU’s stability is buttressed by the integrated Eurozone which partially compensates for the decline of socio-political integration as EU membership has increased; and by the interlocking effect of cross-cutting rivalries and collaborations within the EU.

This chapter compares New Zealand and French colonial policy and practice from the late nineteenth century. It examines the movement and circulation of people and ideas, and includes direct French assessments of New Zealand’s activities in the Pacific. While the dominant trope in such relations and mutual perceptions may be that of Anglo-Franco rivalry, the premise is that an examination of the interplay of such discourses and experiences may offer fresh insight into New Zealand’s own colonial and imperial identities. The chapter also provides a context for understanding New Zealand’s present day stance towards the ‘French Pacific’ which - notwithstanding past criticism of French colonial practice, delayed decolonisation and nuclear testing - is largely a welcoming one.

This chapter explains why grand strategy is inherently competitive: because the other party has a strategy too. Competition and cooperation are inherent to international politics; rivalry, on the contrary, is the conscious choice to adopt a strategy against another power. Multipolarity is therefore the normal state of affairs in international politics. A new bipolarity or a new “cold war” is less likely than it seems. The chapter analyses how today’s great powers, the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union, are dealing with multipolarity.

This chapter explains why grand strategy requires the great powers to be proactive: nobody will defend their interests for them. Can today’s great powers establish a consensual agenda for a rules-based order? An analysis of the interbellum period shows that an international order cannot be created against one of the great powers of the day; that if violations of the rules-based order go without consequences, the order will be hollowed out; that great powers must abide by the rules that they want others to obey; and that no state seeks to be dominated by another. The chapter then analyses the grand strategies of today’s great powers and concludes that while competition is strong, permanent and systematic rivalry is not yet unavoidable.

This chapter reads Adonais and The Triumph of Life as united by their intense exploration of the purpose, possibilities, and limits of poetry, from elegiac commemoration to visionary rhyme. Though many of Shelley’s poetic works are informed by close attention to these questions, their significance becomes heightened in these late poems. The reading of Adonais sees Shelley’s and Keats’s 1820 letters influence the elegy profoundly, and I read Shelley as fashioning Adonais as a response to their mutual advice. The Triumph of Life grows out of the echo chamber of his response to the literature in which he was steeped as he composed his final poem. Yet rather than the poem being of interest for its status in relation to other works, a letter to John Gisborne of 10 April 1822 reveals the complexity of Shelley’s artistic reaction to his peers which he embeds into the poem. Both poems stand as achievements of serious ambition and poetic consequence.

This chapter lays out the context behind the shamanism that has proliferated in Mongolia in the aftermath of the collapse of socialism. It discusses existing assumptions behind shamanism, what constitutes shamanism in postsocialist Mongolia, and its multiple meanings in the context of Buryats’ relationship with the state. The supernatural and material are interconnected, but these connections are insecure and volatile, mirroring the chaotic political and economic conditions of a weak postsocialist state.The author argues that while Buryat shamans and their clients strive to engage in capitalism and gain economic resources, shamanic practices cause them to gain history instead. Thus this book adds to the study of different life-worlds beyond the universalization of capital, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words. Shamanism starkly shows the limits of capitalism; even the people who actively seek to be a part of capitalism end up creating a world alternative to it. This process also shows the dialectical, mutually-constitutive, but conflicting and colliding nature of different life-worlds, despite the fact that shamanism has often been modernity’s disowned creation. In this chapter, the author also introduces her fieldwork, which revealed shamanic competition and rivalry, clients’ suspicions, and the connections between gender, space, and power.

Chapter 3 focuses on competition. What was the nature of early competition? We will assess the concept of the challenge match and also evaluate how such events contributed to the early development of the sport. We will take examples from across the country and from different phases of the nineteenth century. We will then move on to a consideration of leagues and cups. In their time, they were revolutionary developments. Today we accept them as the norm, but then, they were new and novel. How and why did leagues and cups emerge? And what kind of reaction did they elicit?

This chapter balances the generally positive accent of chapter six by reflecting on indications that there remains evidence of lingering tendencies towards violence and insularity. The chapter considers how the enduring themes and dynamics of loyalist identity continue to attenuate processes of conflict transformation. While accepting the evidence of the previous chapter that individual former combatants are integral to maintaining and strengthening the peace, the chapter concludes that the influence of these dynamics in creating and sustaining the UDA and UVF leaves these organisations fundamentally inappropriate vehicles for advancing the tasks central to sustaining and strengthening the peace.

This chapter analyses the impact of containerisation on the port systems of the world, in particular the increase in competition and rivalry due to the presence of markets and growing necessity of profitability. The following subdivisions are explored in detail, and punctuated with partinent graphs and statistics:- Global Port Rankings; Container Ports and Terminals; Port Industrialisation; Port Authorities and Terminal Operators; and Container Networks and Regional Port Systems. It concludes by suggesting port rivalry will continue on a regional scale.