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The most important surviving encyclopaedia from the ancient world, Pliny the Elder's Natural History is unparalleled as a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in 1st-century Rome. As part of a new direction in classical scholarship, this book reads the work not just for the information it contains, but to understand how and why Pliny collects and presents information as he does. Concentrating on the geographic and ethnographic information in Pliny, the book demonstrates the work's political importance. The selection and arrangement of the encyclopaedia's material show that it is more than an instrument of reference: it is a monument to the power of Roman imperial society.

This book's analysis of the power of prestige in civic communities of the ancient world demonstrates the importance of crowds' aesthetic and emotional judgement upon leaders and their ambitious claims for immediate and lasting significance; and also finds consideration of this dynamic still to be valuable for modern citizens. An initial discussion of the fall of Ceauşescu in 1989 prompts theoretical considerations about the inseparability of authority and its manifestation; and scrutiny of Julius Caesar's gestures towards self-definition introduces the complexity of ancient political relations. The simultaneous presence of both popular affection for wondrous and kingly individuals, and also egalitarian suspicion of it, is detected in classical Athens, where an Alcibiades needed to manoeuvre craftily to achieve obvious and ritual pre-eminence in associating himself with age-old and Homeric models of distinction. Accordingly, the arrival of Hellenistic kingliness, such as that of Demetrios Poliorcetes, upon the political stage was neither wholly innovative nor unattractive. Yet such kings quite clearly articulated a new and grandiose majesty, as can be seen in parades in Egypt and Syria. With the growth of Roman imperialism, these stylings of personal power needed to be adapted to new realities and models, just as Romans of the later Republic increasingly found much to admire and emulate in others' spectacles. Thus, the book comes back to the end of the Republic and to Cicero's struggles to maintain traditional, republican dignities in civic ceremony while a new Roman kingliness, thoroughly attentive to spectacular politics, was dawning.

This book is about the political views of the ‘classic’ poor of London's East End in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The residents of this area have been historically characterized as abjectly poor, casually employed, slum dwellers with a poverty-induced apathy toward political solutions interspersed with occasional violent displays of support for populist calls for protectionism, imperialism, or anti-alien agitation. These factors, in combination, have been thought to have allowed the Conservative Party to politically dominate the East End in this period. This study demonstrates that many of these images are wrong. Economic conditions in the East End were not as uniformly bleak as often portrayed. The workings of the franchise laws also meant that those who possessed the vote in the East End were generally the most prosperous and regularly employed of their occupational group. Conservative electoral victories in the East End were not the result of poverty. Political attitudes in the East End were determined to a far greater extent by issues concerning the ‘personal’ in a number of senses. The importance given to individual character in the political judgements of the East End working class was greatly increased by a number of specific local factors. These included the prevalence of particular forms of workplace structure, and the generally somewhat shorter length of time on the electoral register of voters in the area. Also important was a continuing attachment to the Church of England amongst a number of the more prosperous working class. In the place of many ‘myths’ about the people of the East End and their politics, this study provides a model that does not seek to explain the politics of the area in full, but suggests the point strongly that we can understand politics, and the formation of political attitudes, in the East End or any other area, only through a detailed examination of very specific localized community and workplace structures. This book challenges the idea that a ‘Conservatism of the slums’ existed in London's East End in the Victorian and Edwardian period. It argues that images of abjectly poor residents who supported Conservative appeals about protectionism, imperialism, and anti-immigration are largely wrong. Instead, it was the support of better-off workers, combined with a general importance in the area of the ‘personal’ in politics emphasized by local social and workplace structures, which delivered the limited successes that the Conservatives did enjoy.

Examines the relationship between imperial cults and the Book of Revelation, focusing especially on the Roman province of Asia during the early Empire. The main argument is that Revelation and imperial cult institutions were in direct contradiction regarding cosmology and eschatology. The exaggerated cosmology of imperial cult institutions resulted in an absurd eschatology – their emphasis on Roman imperial order was so strong that they could not envision an end to Roman rule. Revelation, on the other hand, denigrated all temporal authority and focused attention on the throne of God in heaven and the eschatological inauguration of the New Jerusalem. In this way, the author of Revelation produced one of humanity's great religious critiques of hegemony, a critique that attempted to establish and maintain a just community in the face of imperial oppression.

The bubonic plague reached Hawaii for the first time in 1899, just as the archipelago was being annexed by the US. To deal with the epidemic, governmental authorities granted absolute emergency powers to the Honolulu Board of Health. Committed to the new science of bacteriology, the Board physicians eventually decided to burn buildings where victims had died, hoping thereby to destroy any remaining plague bacilli. On January 20, 1900, one of those controlled burns burgeoned into a larger inferno that obliterated the Chinatown section of the city. In a few hours, over 5,000 people lost everything they had and were marched to detention camps where they were held under armed guard. Next to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this remains the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history, and probably the worst civic disaster ever to result from an American public health initiative. In the larger context of medical history, ethnic studies, and American imperialism, this book tells the story of how that catastrophe came about and how the principal racial and ethnic groups in Honolulu — Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and whites — responded to the crisis.

In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of J.S. Mill, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas to develop a new equilibrium model for moral reasoning, in which moral reasoning is primarily bottom-up, from judgments about particular actual and hypothetical cases to norms or principles that best explain the particular judgments. Employing the equilibrium model, Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned to adopt a distinctively moral standpoint from which it is possible to make reliable, though not infallible, universal judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral standpoint has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic human rights. The book is constructed around pivotal examples. Talbott uses the example of Bartolomé de Las Casas and his opposition to the Spanish colonists’ treatment of the American natives in the 16th century to illustrate the possibility of attaining a universal moral standpoint. He uses the example of the development of women's rights as a microcosm of the development of basic human rights. He argues that assertions of basic human rights are almost always a response to oppressive norms justified by self-reinforcing paternalism. Talbott uses examples from Marxist dictatorships to show the importance of basic human rights in solving what he refers to as the reliable feedback problem and the appropriate responsiveness problem for governments. He uses Sen’s research on famines and psychological research on the ultimatum game and other related games to explain how individual fairness judgments from the moral standpoint make rights-respecting democracies self-improving self-regulating systems that become more just over time. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal human rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is not imperialistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism, first, by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots; second, by emphasizing the importance of avoiding moral paternalism. In the book, Talbott develops a new consequentialist account of the importance of the basic human rights, which he employs to augment the more familiar nonconsequentialist accounts.

Civility is desirable and possible, but can this fragile ideal be guaranteed? This book offers the most comprehensive look at the nature and advantages of civility throughout history and in our world today. The book expands our understanding of civility as related to larger social forces—including revolution, imperialism, capitalism, nationalism, and war—and the ways that such elements limit the potential for civility. Combining wide-ranging historical and comparative evidence with social and moral theory, the book examines how the nature of civility has fluctuated in the last three centuries, how it became lost, and how it was reestablished in the twentieth century following the two world wars. It also considers why civility is currently breaking down and what can be done to mitigate this threat.

This book demonstrates that British imperialism was integrally connected to British religion. Using published sources, the book identifies the construction, development, and ingredients of a public Anglican discourse of the British Empire between 1700 and c.1850. It argues that the Church of England exhibited an official and conscious Anglican concern for empire and for missions by the Church of England, from the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701. Much of that earlier 18th century understanding went on to shape later Anglican Evangelical imperial attitudes in the Church Missionary Society founded in 1799. In this Anglican engagement with the British Empire, a public theological discourse of empire was formed and promulgated. This religious public discourse of empire was developed in an imperial partnership with the state. It was formulated in the Anglican engagement with the North American colonies in the 18th century; it underwent a revival of the church-state partnership in the period between 1790 and 1830, as witnessed in Bengal; and it was fundamentally transformed in a new paradigm of imperial engagement in the 1840s, which was implemented in the colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Both the old and the new imperial Anglican paradigms developed a religious and theological imperial discourse that constructed the identities for various colonized peoples and British colonists, as well as contributing to English-British identity between 1700 and 1850. It was a Christian lens that proved remarkably consistent and enduring for both the old and the new British Empires.

The issue of state succession continues to be a vital and complex focal point for public international lawyers, yet it has remained strangely resistant to effective articulation. The formative period in this respect was that of decolonization: a period in which international lawyers were not only faced with the task of managing a process of profound political and legal change, but also the transformation of their own discipline (in which the promises of the UN Charter would be realized in an international community of sovereign peoples). Later, in the 1990s, a series of territorial adjustments placed succession once again at the centre of international legal practice, in new contexts that went beyond the traditional model of decolonization: the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and the unifications of Germany and Yemen brought to light the fundamentally unresolved character of issues within the law of succession. Why have attempts to codify the practice of succession met with so little success? Why has succession remained so problematic a feature of international law? This book argues that the answers to these questions lie in the political backdrop of decolonization and self-determination, and that the tensions and ambiguities that run throughout the law of succession can only be understood by looking at the historical relationship between discourses on state succession, decolonization, and imperialism within the framework of international law. It provides a critical assessment of the failed attempts to codify the law of state succession, and explores the implications of a new pragmatic framework for the future development of the law.