Oscar Wilde said, 'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.' Was he right? In Cult of Progress, David Olusoga travels the world to piece together the shared histories that link nations. We discover what happened to art in the great Age of Discovery, when civilisations encountered each other for the first time. Although undoubtedly a period of conquest and destruction, it was also one of mutual curiosity, global trade and the exchange of ideas. A few hundred years on, we see how the Industrial Revolution transformed the world, impacting every corner and every civilisation from the cotton mills of the Midlands to Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, the decimation of both Native American and Maori populations, and the advent of photography in Paris in 1839. Incredible art - both looted and created - relays the key events and their outcomes throughout the world.

Beginning with Erich Auerbach's reflections on the Goethean concept of World Literature, Ottmar Ette unfolds the theory and practice of Literatures of the World. Today, only those literary theories that are oriented upon a history of movement are still capable of doing justice to the confusing diversity of highly dynamic, worldwide transformations. This is because they examine transareal pathways in the field of literature. This volume captures literary processes of exchange and transformation between the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific as well as the interplay of different ways of narrating space and time. Thus, this volume speaks from a fractal point of view and unfolds multiple perspectives. Literatures of the World allows the reader to think in different logical frameworks at the same time, therefore shaping our future on the basis of the diversity of humankind.

The study of foreign policy is usually concerned with the interaction of states, and thus with governance structures which emerged either with the so-called 'Westphalian system' or in the course of the 18th century: diplomacy and international law. As a result, examining foreign policy in earlier periods involves conceptual and terminological difficulties, which echo current debates on 'post-national' foreign policy actors like the European Union or global cities. This volume argues that a novel understanding of what constitutes foreign policy may offer a way out of this problem. It considers foreign policy as the outcome of processes that make some boundaries different from others, and set those that separate communities in an internal space apart from those that mark foreignness. The creation of such boundaries, which can be observed at all times, designates specific actors - which can be, but do not have to be, 'states' - as capable of engaging in foreign policy. As such boundaries are likely to be contested, they are unlikely to provide either a single or a simple distinction between 'insides' and 'outsides'. In this view, multiple layers of foreign-policy actors with different characteristics appear less as a modern development and more as a perennial aspect of foreign policy. In a broad perspective stretching from early Greek polities to present-day global cities, the volume offers a theoretical and empirical presentation of this concept by political scientists, jurists, and historians.