Indian Economics’ global development plan in the long run was universal industrialisation and free trade. The widely accepted plan for development in the nineteenth century was broadly based on David Ricardo’s comparative advantage model, which prescribed industrialisation for western Europe and condemned the rest of the world to producing raw materials. This international division of labour, argued Mahadev Govind Ranade, would not, like the model theorised, bring Indians the highest level of progress. Indian Economics envisaged a positive-sum game of global development where an industrialised Asia would not outcompete the already industrialised western Europe. Industrialisation in India would bring higher standards of living and increase global aggregate demand, leading people to buy more goods from Britain and other industrialised countries. Universal industrialisation would, argued the Indian economists, be win–win for the world economy.

Nikki Hessell’s “Romantic Poetry and Constructions of Indigeneity” understands the Romantic racialization of Indigenous peoples as means of denying these groups sovereignty. The trope of the Indian in representative European texts is, by this reading, complicit with the “desire to own, define, and administer everything.” By reading Romantic poetry for its recurring tropes, however, we can also locate the Romantic tradition in the work of those generally excluded from conversations about Romanticism. Thus Hessell reads Romanticism in the works of Indigenous poets Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). This is not merely a matter of expanding the Romantic canon; rather, by centering those whose presence in Romantic literature has generally been restricted to object of interest, Hessell shows that those who have been used as tropes are wielders of Romantic tropes in their own right.

Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in the European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Overall, the transformations of rights during this period were so great that it can make earlier expressions of rights seem unrelated. But, as this volume shows, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a crucial time of transformation, repackaging rights for a modern world

Isaiah was arguably the most influential book of the Hebrew Bible upon the authors of the New Testament. It was the most frequently quoted book, apart from the lengthier book of Psalms, but as David Pao points out in “Isaiah in the New Testament,” it also supplied language and structural models for significant theological themes of early Christianity. He analyzes the role of Isaiah in New Testament themes such as eschatology, Christology, obduracy, and universalism. He also looks at the way in which whole New Testament writings were shaped by Isaianic influence, including all four Gospels, Acts, Romans, and Revelation. All this illustrates why Isaiah has been called “The Fifth Gospel.”

Latin American international lawyers are prolific historians. However, while having profusely written histories of international law, Latin Americans have shied away from historiographic controversy. Latin Americans have not disagreed much about how to conceive and write history, but they have had sound disagreements about the international law that is constructed by history, they have disagreed over different ways of using history as law. This chapter offers a history of these disagreements. Some Latin-Americans have used universal histories, echoing the familiar Eurocentric history from the Latin-American periphery to the core, in order to gain doctrinal authority to speak and change international law. With a similar goal in mind, other Latin-Americans have used particularistic histories, foregrounding the region’s doctrinal divergences and contributions to universal international law. Universalist and particularistic histories were dominant between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, between independence and the Cold War. Towards the end of the Cold War, these two types of history merged into one, presenting the region’s historical trajectory as in harmony with universal international law. This represents a break. If in the nineteenth century an international legal tradition emerged in Latin-America, during the twentieth century it radicalised, diverging from international law as conceived from the West. From the Cold War merger an endemic history emerged, which depoliticised and deradicalised the Latin American tradition. Exploring this history of history-writing in the region may help rearticulating a more ambitious Latin American international law.

Two forms of Japanese Buddhism, which Barth castigates because they lack the name of Jesus. But they rather seem to be channels of divine grace, though mistaken (from a Christian viewpoint) and perhaps incomplete.

Divine forgiveness is offered to all, but humans must co-operate with divine grace.

Barth speaks of ‘the liberation of all men’ by the union of divine and human natures in Jesus, yet he refuses to be called a ‘Universalist’. This is an aporia, an unresolved perplexity.

Faith, for Barth, is a sharing in the life of the Eternal Word. But is it for all, or only for Christian believers?

Election to membership of ‘the true church’ is unmerited, for Barth. It is hard to see how it can be just, and not arbitrary, if that is so.

Barth’s account of evil as ‘an impossible possibility’ or the threat of Nothingness, seems to lack sense. There is an argument here for some human autonomy and freedom of choice.

Barth’s account seems to imply both that, only ‘the elect’ are to have fellowship with God, and that all humanity will do so. There is no clear account of how the desperately wicked could obtain such fellowship.

The great and unresolved Barthian paradox is that Jesus shows God to be unlimited love, and yet that God abominates all human seeking after God, even the most sincere.

The CRC does not define the beginning of childhood, only its end. Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born and has a rational mind. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique as a human right since it does not require either mind or body for its realization, as it is based on age and not the body and mind. The CRC is constructed to cover every child and in some cases from conception, which means that the rights of the child cannot meet liberal rights’ ideas of freedom as a foundation since the individual freedom is conditioned on the immaterial rational mind controling the material body, which the unborn child or very young child do not possess.

By analyzing government documents from 1885 to the present, the chapter first argues that the liberal movement’s introduction of parliamentary rule in Norway in 1884 was a critical juncture in the state’s language regime. During the union with Denmark (1380-1814), Danish replaced Norwegian as Norway’s written language. In 1885, parliament adopted official equality for a new written Norwegian language (Nynorsk) along with Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål). From 1885, The Liberal Party implemented language regulations, and was also the power behind welfare regulations that are often described as universal. Consequently, the state tradition of Norway has been labelled welfare state universalism. The chapter’s second objective is to explore how Norway’s language policy is related to the social welfare model, and to discuss whether the language regime can be considered universalist. The Labour Party came into office in 1935, completing welfare and language reforms introduced by The Liberal Party. The universalist regime was not challenged by any government of the last part of the century. However, parliament will probably adopt a general language law, and this has sparked a new debate on language rights. The chapter’s third objective is to discuss whether Norway’s linguistic universalism is currently at a critical juncture.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

Chapter 3 analyses the normativity of sustainable development in international law and politics as expressed beyond the questions on its present (domestic) manifestations or the endless struggle to place the concept within general legal (normative) registers. It highlights how international law tends to subordinate non-Western experiences in its elevation of sustainable development into a global standard. What emerges from this process is that the more the world pursues sustainable development in its current form, the more we unwittingly contribute to the global dissemination of a particular strand of Eurocentrism. Sustainable development thus reveals itself as an amalgam of power and knowledge while simultaneously establishing itself as a vital component in international legal governance. What emerges in this chapter is that, although the concept of sustainable development is always at the forefront of international public discourse, little is done, in fact, to achieve its presumed objectives. Thus, while sustainable development’s quick ascent to become a universalist concept is central to this book, the concept’s character must be understood as quietly operating to mute global ecological violence that disproportionately affects marginalised peoples in the Global South.

Chapter 5 presents the paradox of national universalism as a theoretical explanation of French republicans’ historical tendency to exclude foreigners and minorities. It retraces the formation of the discourse of “nation” alongside that of “people” as well as the development of nationalism alongside the discourse of universalism. It analyzes the tension caused by the conjunction of two phenomena: the existence (or supposition of) a historical nation, and the declaration of universalism on which the revolution based itself. Finally, the chapter presents education policies and civil religion during the French revolution as two instances of the paradox of national universalism.

The introduction begins with the crisis of republicanism in France today. It asks what republicanism is for the French and why exclusion lies at the center of its crisis. It then presents the characteristics of French republicanism (in particular, its universalism and its emancipatory dimension), its place in the broader republican tradition, and in the neo-republican revival. Finally, it introduces the theoretical paradoxes that led republicans to justify exclusionary practices despite their endorsement of emancipation.