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William III persuaded the English Parliament to enter the war against Louis XIV in defence of Protestant liberties, and to expand the English army to a size five times larger than Charles II’s forces had been in 1685. The war was welcomed by those who thought that participation restored English honour after a long period of military decay. Participation in the Nine Years War also signified that English diplomatic and military priorities had shifted from preventing mainland European powers from interfering in Ireland or Scotland to obstructing the ambitions of hostile powers on the European continent and in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean. The financial and manpower demands of the Nine Years War and succeeding global wars necessitated the parliamentary union of England and Scotland, the creation of a fiscal-military state, and the impressment of men for land as well as naval forces. Popular resistance to these extreme measures led to recruiting riots and Jacobite resistance, and revived the old debates about the dangers of standing armies.

This chapter presents a discussion on popular resistance, religion and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. In the early eighteenth century, Scotland saw noteworthy advances in the publicity of its national affairs, with pamphlets and mass petitions accompanying strident debates on the Anglo-Scottish union not just in Parliament but the General Assembly and the Convention of Royal Burghs. Popular political engagement depended on data provided by pamphlets, newspapers, letters and oral exchanges between Edinburgh and provincial communities. Unionists were aware of the dangers of English power in union, but saw advantages for Scotland with appropriate safeguards. Some Scots rejected the Presbyterian-Episcopalian conflicts and saw incorporation as the only way to preserve protestantism in Europe. The unity of Presbyterians and Jacobites was queered by their loyalties to divergent forms of church government and the monarchies that supported these churches.

From July 12 to August 14, 2006, Israel waged a 33-day war against Lebanon. As aircraft bombarded towns and cities and ground troops thrust into Southern Lebanon, refugees from across Lebanon, and particularly Southern Lebanon, abandoned their homes and villages and flooded into central Beirut. The refugees' requirements were immediate and substantial — food, accommodation and medical support had to be provided and a range of social, welfare and psychological needs had to be met. However, the traditional suppliers of welfare in Beirut, the vast number of civil society organisations in the voluntary sector and the more limited state sector both removed their staff and closed down under the air assault. Into this gap stepped a new, vibrant and remarkable social welfare movement called Samidoun, which became the main provider of basic needs for a large section of the refugee population in the city during the crisis. Forged in the midst of war, Samidoun was a consciously political intervention — part of the popular resistance to Israeli aggression — that linked resistance, political struggle and social work.

This chapter discusses Scott's history that is far from the world of global communications and globalised markets, but which still focuses on issues such as commerce, commercial development and capitalism. The first section takes a look at the novel Rob Roy, which presents a recent and modern history of highland dispossession and popular resistance to foreign imperial power. It is followed by a section on A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, where the assumption that modern warfare is, or could be, governed by ‘civilised’ norms of conduct is looked at. The chapter also examines highland violence and the mercenary.

Paul Raekstad turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the molar and molecular. He argues that while these differ in nature or scale, this does not necessarily mean they differ in size or extension. Based on this argument, Raekstad examines and pinpoints a problem with vanguardist approaches to revolution which, he shows, is not a problem of organisation or unification as such, but of the kinds of organisation and unification that are required to go beyond capitalism and the State.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, marching bands could be heard in almost every community in Ireland. This particular manifestation of the international brass band movement was characterised by close political association between bands and Irish nationalism. This chapter uses the case study of Cork city to explore brass band involvement in O’Connell’s Monster Meetings, Fenian amnesty appeals, the Land War, the First World War, the War of Independence, and other mobilisations. Cork brass bands featured in political funerals, public processions, and other modes of popular resistance throughout this period. They also played a leading role in violent faction fighting between John Redmond’s Irish Party and William O’Brien’s All-for-Ireland that plagued Cork for a decade. The politicisation of musicians’ leisure time reflected the evolution of diverse popular politics in Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth century.