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The recent upsurge of interest in the history of the British Empire has produced a wealth of literature that often presents empire and imperialism in a hegemonic light, couched in a dichotomy that sets the ‘oppressor’ against the ‘oppressed’, the ‘coloniser’ against the ‘colonised’, and so on. Underpinning fashionable postcolonial discourse, this binary terminology can obscure important nuances of political thought in its proper historical context, such as how prominent figures who were governing the Empire yet at the same time opposed imperialism could articulate their ideas. In this article I consider the case of John Morley, a lifelong anti-imperialist who had pursued a career in journalism before entering politics in 1883 as a radical MP. His appointment as Secretary of State for India in the new Liberal government of December 1905 presents an apparent paradox, for as one of Irish Home Rule’s staunchest advocates he had built a reputation as a committed opponent of unjust British rule. Drawing on archival manuscripts and published writings, I argue that Morley’s five-year tenure at the India Office towards the end of his active life was not, as has often been seen, an aberrant postscript to an otherwise principled career in politics but was consistent with a coherent political philosophy he had developed over his lifetime.[1]   Morley was first and foremost an intellectual. He wrote extensively: in addition to his editorship of the Fortnightly Review  and the Pall Mall Gazette , he compiled biographies of philosophers and politicians in an oeuvre that encompassed Cromwell, the major figures of the French Revolution, Burke, Cobden, and finally Gladstone. In doing so, he was a rare example of someone who had expounded a developed critique of imperialism who then had the opportunity to put it into practice in holding political office. It is a truism that he compromised his position as an anti-imperialist in its strictest sense by agreeing to participate in imperial government. Yet this is not the criterion against which he should be measured. A comparison with John Stuart Mill is instructive. Like Morley, albeit to a far greater extent, Mill had set out his theory before entering politics. Renowned as an exceptionally principled politician, he was nevertheless able and willing to compromise, justifying doing so on the grounds of utility and progress.[2] So too with Morley, often labelled as a ‘disciple’ of Mill, who inherited these ideas from him and recognised similarly that short-term expediency and long-term progress were not incompatible priorities.[3]   Furthermore, it is important to draw a distinction between imperialism and empire. Opposing the former entailed a criticism of ‘mis-rule’: a phenomenon that primarily manifested itself in despotism, militarism, and unchecked bureaucracy. Opposing the latter, however, necessitated a deeply held belief in its inherent illegitimacy. Few, save a small band of radicals, were prepared to go this far in this period. I therefore suggest that Morley was not anti- empire , for he accepted its continued existence as a fact—one that   was ultimately compatible with his liberal ideals. He was, however, anti-imperialist in the sense that that connoted at the time—directly opposing the imperialist conduct of his Conservative predecessors in government.   The lack of a detailed study within the last 50 years of this important figure in Liberal politics has led to a certain amount of scholarly oversight. Passing mentions of Morley often dismiss him as an anachronistic intellectual cul-de-sac of Gladstonianism or, in one bizarre assessment, as a ‘New Liberal’.[4] I seek to remedy this by giving prominence to Morley’s biographies and historical studies, which reveal much about the workings of his mind and the themes he prioritised. When Morley concluded of Gladstone ‘always let us remember that his literary life was part of the rest of his life, as literature ought to be’, he could just as easily have been referring to himself, such was the apparent centrality of a literary-historical mindset to his way of thinking.[5] As he agonised over the decision to exchange his literary career for politics, so too, he mused, must it ‘sometimes have occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice when he locked away the fragments of his history, and plunged into the torment of party and Parliament’.[6] The transition from a man of letters to a man of action was a rare one. Morley therefore presents a unique opportunity among anti-imperialist politicians because of the volume of his literary output before his time as India Secretary, much of which was written before he was even contemplating a career in politics. It gives us crucial insight into Morley’s underlying philosophy and principles, shows his consistency of thought, and lays bare the ambiguities of liberalism’s compatibility with empire.

On 9 April 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a crowd assembled in Baghdad’s Firdos square and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein. The event was publicized widely, celebrated by many as an authentic expression of popular revolt against tyranny. Soon, however, it became embroiled in controversy as evidence emerged that the event (ultimately accomplished by American soldiers and equipment) was stage-managed by the American military. In all the ensuing debate, to my knowledge, no voices were raised to complain of the destruction of cultural heritage, nor of the erasure of history. Fig 1. Acción de Duelo (Doris Salcedo 2007, candles, approx. 267 x 350ft). Ephemeral public project, Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá 2007. Credit: Juan Fernando Castro. In 2017, following a vote of the city council, a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee was removed from Lee Park in Dallas, Texas (the park’s name was also changed). The removal was preceded—and followed—by vigorous debate, part of a broader dispute in the United States over monuments to the Confederacy, as well as those who owned or profited from slavery, or those who, following Emancipation, perpetrated or profited from racial violence. This ongoing conflict parallels similar arguments taking place currently in Britain and other European countries.   The debate over Confederate monuments pits those who frame their complaints over what they claim is the destruction of heritage and the erasure of history against those who note the historical inauthenticity of the monuments, which were for the most part created not as memorials immediately after the Civil War, but a generation or more later, following the defeat of Reconstruction. They served as ideological and emotional buttresses to the institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement, and the ruthless exploitation then being enforced against Black Americans (the Lee monument dates from 1936). In any case, opponents of the monuments note that these objects portray individuals who fought to maintain an institution that can only be considered one of history’s great crimes—they do not deserve a place of public veneration.   As the debate proceeded in Dallas, one voice spoke in defence of the Lee monument, but from a somewhat different perspective. The art critic for the Dallas Morning News , also an eminent scholar of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, argued not in support of Confederate monuments in general, but rather in defence of the Lee monument in particular and of the artist who created it. That artist, Alexander Phimister Proctor, the critic noted, was a sculptor of public monuments of some significance, and his autobiography and other works demonstrate that he was not a racist. His reputation and his intentions for the Lee monument, the critic argued, merited serious consideration.

SCENE. Manhattan. Street with jazz club and apartment building on a muggy late summer evening.   The tired leaves on the trees are damp with rain. Yellow cabs whoosh by, nearly drowned out by a thrum of cicadas. A door swings open from the jazz club, releasing a bubble of music into the street and ALAN, CLAUDE, and JOHNNY, three young men engaged in animated conversation.   ALAN : [ To CLAUDE. ] Brilliant. Thanks for bringing us. We couldn’t have heard this in London.   CLAUDE : You’re welcome. Should we walk over to my place for a drink? It’s only a block away. [ To JOHNNY. ] OK, Johnny?   JOHNNY : Sure!   They saunter down the street and enter CLAUDE’s apartment building. It is a mess, with papers, books, magazines, empty beer bottles, sheet music, and electronic gear strewn everywhere. CLAUDE sweeps the papers off two chairs and onto the floor and gestures to ALAN and JOHNNY to sit.   CLAUDE : Don’t mind the mess. I’ll get to it one of these days.   JOHNNY : So, what did you mean when you said in the jazz club that ‘It’s all the same thing’? What’s all the same thing?   CLAUDE : Well, let’s see. Did you like the jazz performance?   [ JOHNNY nods. ] OK, so what you heard was a series of notes, right?   JOHNNY : Yes.   CLAUDE : So if I had a way to write every note down, then the concert could be replayed just as you heard it?   JOHNNY : Yes, of course. That’s like cutting an LP record.

There are certain global issues that pay no attention to national borders or natural barriers: climate change; the COVID-19 pandemic; nuclear weapons proliferation; and a migration and refugee crisis. These challenges can only be met by collective action.   This demand binds every country to a multilateral system, but the current global framework is showing its age 76 years after the creation of the United Nations. To be sure, the network should keep out no one: even authoritarian nations belong at the table of universal membership bodies. Their role in potential solutions to world threats often intermingles with their tragic record as the source of many of the same challenges.   But democracies need to be at the global decision-making table in force if the world is to confront the existential threats facing humanity. These require coordinated solutions reflecting the inclusion and diversity that self-correcting representative political systems provide.   Nations unite and exert influence under regional banners like the African Union, cultural/linguistic alliances like the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, or religion-based groupings like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. So, too, should there be a coalition of countries acting as a bloc founded upon adherence to explicitly stated human rights and democratic values.   Fortunately, there is momentum behind a new multilateral structure for the world’s democracies. Whether it’s growing a D-10, or Democracy-10, from the current G-7 as suggested by Boris Johnson[1] or hosting a Summit for Democracy as pledged by President Joe Biden,[2] or people movements like ‘NOW!’ building a league of democracies,[3] these are good steps in support of a values-based energizing of the global system.   21 years ago, driven by events of the twenty-first century, a group of thinkers turned its attention to giving a new global framework to the idea of democracy, which was rapidly becoming the dominant form of governance. At the founding of the United Nations in 1945, there were only 30 countries, almost all Western, that identified as democracies. With the swell of the ‘Third Wave of Democratisation’ described by Samuel Huntington,[4] by 2000, some 120 nations were considered democracies with representative and elected governments. And in notable instances, as in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, the contribution of outside support to indigenous democratic institutions, in that case by West German foundations linked to the country’s political parties,[5] showed the importance of international democratic solidarity.   In his two terms of office (1993–2001), US President Bill Clinton made good on his 1992 campaign promise of promoting democracy around the world. In response to the increasing voices of ‘America first’ following the end of the Cold War, Clinton stated that official support for democracy was both in the national interest of the US and reflected America’s values. Since 1993, significant government funding increases for democracy-supporting NGOs joined structural changes in US foreign policy. At the State Department, the little-known Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was rebranded as Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour. The US Agency for International Development’s stable of experts in global health delivery and clean irrigation systems developed new skillsets in elections and civil society support. And America’s diplomatic missions were required to include information on democracy in their country reports back to Washington.

In the digital age, the sharing of images is prevalent across a variety of online platforms. Instagram, one of the largest of these, can provide an up-and-coming artist with an audience of over one billion users. Some already predict the platform’s decline. Kenny Schachter recently commented that, given Instagram’s ever-changing format, ‘it is only a matter of time before the powers that be get too greedy and the ease and accessibility of the app decline’.[1] Yet platforms like Instagram provide a space to interact with a vast amount of material. They form what Hayleigh Bosher and Sevil Yeşiloğlu call a ‘cultural “remix” environment’, a space for creatives to be influenced and inspired by other works.[2] This can create tension between an artist’s legal moral rights and the creativity of users on the platform.   In the United Kingdom, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CPDA) ss 77-89 protect moral rights. Notably, they give the author the right to be named and the right to object to derogatory treatment of their work.[3] Both of these moral rights could be undermined in the creative environment of Instagram if an ‘alterer’ were to digitally change their image. An altered image could be deemed original if it expressed a new aesthetic idea. Since current copyright law only protects works that result from individual ‘skill and labour’, the new image is unlikely to be afforded copyright protection. But as copyright law begins to recognise changing artistic practices, could the actions of an ‘alterer’ be legitimised? And would this lead to a weakening of the moral rights of the original artist?   The high originality threshold for ‘skill and labour’ in the law of England and Wales has thus far proved a stable groundwork for establishing authorship. Yet this approach must keep up with the shift in the technology used by artists, and with how apps like Instagram offer an artistic outlet for millions of people worldwide. One way forward could be an objective test using a ‘public’. This notional public would have an interested, informed view that could objectively recognise artworks. This view could be used in an assessment of infringement of moral rights. After all, the ‘real’ public has a vested interest in moral rights, as all artistic work created becomes part of our cultural history, no matter its aesthetic quality. By considering the public view in cases of moral rights, copyright law would recognise the stake society has in knowing who is contributing to its heritage, and in preserving that information. Any lowering of the originality standard in copyright law must balance the new artistic capabilities of the digital world and the importance moral rights have for both the artist and society. In evolving from existing standards for skill and labour, the test of a ‘public’ view could preserve the rights an artist wishes to claim over a digital image.   Can filters make an original image?   In the UK, the test for originality remains largely the standards of skill and labour. An author must show that they have expressed their ideas by the application of techniques that create a fixed work. Bingham LJ in Designer Guild Ltd v Russell Williams Ltd  defined this principle:   [A]nyone who by his or her own skill and labour creates an original work of whatever character shall, for a limited period, enjoy an exclusive right to copy that work. No one else may for a season reap what the copyright owner has sown.[4]

Introduction   Frans Hals was a mildly successful seventeenth-century Dutch old master who specialised in portraits. Few of his works have persisted in popular cultural consciousness in the intervening 400 years. One exception is the Laughing Cavalier,  painted in 1624, which remains on display in the Wallace Collection in London. The Laughing Cavalier  was once described by the Harvard art historian   Seymour Slive as ‘one of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits’.[1] But interest in Hals’ work since has been limited mostly to fine art specialists and investors.[2] This year saw the fruits of that interest in a claim against the auction house Sotheby’s. The subject matter was Hals’ Portrait of a Gentleman, half-length, wearing Black , believed to have been   painted around 1650 .  It is a rather boring work. The subject matter is a grim, wealthy Dutch aristocrat, whose only redeeming aesthetic quality seems to be the fine robe he can afford. Beyond that there is little to spark one’s interest. But luckily the artwork has generated an interesting case, engaging, in an art law context, principles of agency, partnership, witnesses of fact, and contractual construction of state of scholarship clauses. The case also provides a key moment to re-evaluate whether there are any unique or common principles which animate this area of the law. I argue that there are such principles in the final section. First, however, it is necessary to begin with the historical context of Mark Weiss  and auction house claims more broadly.   Historic auction house claims   The vast majority of claims before English courts against auction houses have taken place in the last 30 years.[3] This has corresponded with the growing commercialisation of the fine art market internationally. In the 1990s there was a movement from the culture of gentlemanly handshakes to one of increasing legal formalisation. Martin Wilson, previously Co-Head of Legal and Compliance at Christie’s, noted that in 1998 Christie’s had only three people working in its legal department. ‘By the time I left Christie’s in 2017’, he recently wrote, ‘the legal department numbered 40 employees’.[4]   Since the mid-1990s, claims against auction houses have involved mixed allegations of breach of contract and tort.[5] A useful mixed example is the 1995 case of De Balkany v Christie Manson and Woods .[6] This case was about a work by Egon Schiele, an Austrian   Expressionist protégé of Gustav Klimt, purchased in 1987 for the reserve sale price of £500,000 plus the hammer price and buyer’s premium. By 1991 the buyer believed that it was a forgery, and contacted Christie’s requesting a refund. Christie’s’ terms and conditions generally excluded liability. There was only a limited right to obtain a refund if the item was a forgery, defined with the classic term of being a piece created with an ‘intention to deceive as to authorship, origin, date, age, period, culture, or source’. But that right was further limited by the requirement that, if the sale had been in line with general scholarship at the time of sale, no refund would be possible. Christie’s argued that there had not been an intention to deceive, nor was it contrary to the state of scholarship when sold.   The judge disagreed. He found that 94% of the painting had been overlaid by someone other than Schiele, with ‘E’ and ‘S’ initials being added ex post as part of that conservation. He rejected Christie’s’ argument that no amount of overpainting could turn it into a forgery, and held that whoever had overpainted clearly intended to deceive, otherwise they would not have added the monogram. The judge also held that irrespective of the state of scholarship, the detrimental overpainting and intended forgery of Schiele’s signature would have been clear to Christie’s on inspection, hence the ‘state of scholarship’ clause could not prevent liability from attaching. Beyond just these contractual provisions, in tort, the judge went on to apply Hedley Byrne v Heller [7] to find that there had been an assumption of responsibility from the catalogue preparations by Christie’s. In effect, Christie’s comprehensively lost in both contract and tort.

A central image in the consideration of law is the totemic figure of justice—Justitia—the blindfolded Roman goddess of justice. Often appearing in statue form in many courthouses and carrying a sword and scales, she heralds the idea of law as impartial and unseeing, of law as a system that, theoretically at least, is open to all—democracy as a form of blindness. The irony of this sightlessness will not be lost on artists, who tend (with good reason) to think of law as oafishly clunking behind them, laughably out of touch with contemporary artistic form, ideas, and methods, and unconversant with the light-fingered nimbleness of creative work. Law generally confines creative freedoms, increasingly in the interests of the gods of corporatised intellectual property. Artists often see law as dry and administrative, as an expensive threat, or something to be resisted (with the usual artistic-anarchic leanings), rather than, dare I say it, a source of curiosity, or a medium for them to work with, like paint.   Justice’s blindness is said to represent objectivity—since postmodernism, another enemy of artists. Justice must be seen to be done, thereby allowing public access to many trials, and the principle of ‘open justice’, but law privileges language and the written word over images and aesthetics. In this era of McLuhanesque visuality-over-orality, in which Instagrammability has tended to trump criticality, this seems especially absurd. Legal theorist Peter Goodrich asserts that Justitia’s blindfold ‘marks an exclusion, an indication that mortals should keep out’[1]—a class issue with which most of us can sympathise. Nevertheless, from the perspective of visual artists, or perhaps only us perverse ones, all this might represent temptation, in terms of a rich subject. Law may have been termed an ‘empire’[2] (and that idea in itself should act as artistic provocation) but its gaps, elisions, and silences—and there are many—are lacunae, or a form of social-sculptural negative space. Law has an unconscious—we just need to analyse it.   Law’s inherent relationship to performance could be seen as further enticement. The courtroom can of course be seen as a ‘theatre’ of judgment, centring on the performance of authority and the fragile recall and transferral of mental images by witnesses and defendants as well as jury, judge, and litigants. Law’s many performative statements, in which speech becomes act—‘I sentence you’, etc—have been termed ‘superperformatives: performatives backed by force’,[3] evoking law’s complex relation to the body and the physical. Law’s inherent violence, its state- or sovereign-backed ability to remove a person from life, society, family, home, and possessions, is Foucault’s ‘technology of power over the body’.[4] But we should not forget that the law also includes a liberatory potential, a choreographic circumscription of individual agency, rights, promises, and liberties. Fig 1. Carey Young, Palais de Justice (still), 2017. Single-channel HD video (from 4K); 16:9, colour, quadraphonic sound; 17 mins 58 secs. © Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

The origins and definition of the word ‘Americanitis’ are opaque at best. It is generally believed to have appeared in medical journals of the late nineteenth century, describing a particular nervous ailment found in the inhabitants of the United States of America. Thought to cause disease, heart attack, nervous exhaustion, and even insanity, Americanitis was seen as a serious threat to the American public. In fact, in 1925, Time  Magazine reported that Americanitis was responsible for claiming up to 240,000—white—lives a year.[1] Nevertheless, with the passing of the Great Depression, its position as a legitimate disease faded in the public eye. Now virtually forgotten, I wish to resurrect it, and propose that it be used to describe a disease that truly does claim lives: white supremacy.   Currently, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘Americanitis’ as ‘excessive nervous tension’ and an ‘enthusiastic or aggressive advocacy of Americanism’.[2] In my reinterpretation, I would like to expand upon this definition to describe Americanitis as a structural disorder which plagues American society at large, as opposed to a disease that merely infects individuals. I will argue it is an entanglement of power, fear, and amnesia that writhes under the surface of the American landscape. The foundation upon which white supremacy stands is a polarised sense of white identity as virtuous yet vulnerable to the supremacy of Black identity, which is regarded as impure and violent. It reinforces hierarchies by instilling a fear—indeed, an ‘excessive nervous tension’—of Black assault on white structures, people, and spaces. It fabricates a link between the upward mobility achieved by Black Americans with the violent invasion of white spaces. What belies its tactical purpose is that it has been repeatedly harnessed by white supremacist hate groups— ‘aggressive advocates of Americanism’—to endorse racial violence as a defence strategy. Paired with mass media and its falsified depictions of Black violence, they seek to use this to justify attacks against Black communities and their spaces.   Mutative expansions of Americanitis have cycled since Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, cinema, television, and the Internet have emerged as effective platforms to spread a fear of encroaching Blackness through representations of architectural destruction. Cinema’s maturation in the early 1910s transformed the Neoclassical architecture of Southern plantations into a symbol of white supremacy and confederate nostalgia. Half a century later, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the television was used to associate the Civil Rights Movement to the dread of imminent nuclear annihilation of racially segregated neighbourhoods by Soviet forces. Half a century after that, during the Obama era and the Trump era, the Internet and its social media platforms have allowed an association to be constructed between increased diversity, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter, with social discord and detriment to America’s structures. In this essay, I will explore each of these expansions, and the resulting white supremacist violence, in an effort to show how the through-line of Americanitis has been an essential tool for spreading and maintaining white supremacy. I will conclude with the recent white supremacist attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, to illustrate how this ‘disease’ very much affects the nation to the present day. Fig 1. Lincoln Memorial (Nicolas Canal Tinius 2021, from photograph by Martha Raddatz 2020).

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever?[1]   *   The rich symbolic inner workings of Hobbes’ Leviathan  have been much commented on in the centuries since its publication, with most attention being given to its incomparable frontispiece. But fewer interpreters (especially today) comment in detail on the reference to the Book of Job in Hobbes’ title, a reference that Hobbes mentions explicitly in the text.[2] I want to offer an interpretation of the image of Leviathan that connects it directly with some of Hobbes’ central concerns (his ideas about human nature, sovereignty, and covenant), and that helps us understand the place of symbolism, metaphor, and literature in Hobbes’ famously mechanistic politics.   A brief synopsis of the book of Job. Job, a ‘blameless and upright’ man who ‘feared God and turned away from evil’,[3] has been tested by the Lord. Everything he owned has been taken from him, his family have been killed, and his body is covered in painful sores, to the point that he curses the day of his birth: ‘Let those curse it who curse the Sea, / those who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan’.[4] The bulk of the text consists of verse dialogue between Job and three of his friends about the problem of theodicy: how can Job, a blameless man, be made to suffer by God? His friends argue that he cannot have been truly blameless, that he must have acted so as to justify his punishment. Job continues to insist on his innocence.   Hobbes’ reference is to the climax of the text, where the Lord answers Job ‘out of the whirlwind’: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?’[5] The Lord’s (somewhat ironic) response is not to prove that Job was deserving of suffering, but merely to humble  him, rhetorically—even sarcastically—asking:   Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

A witness walking to these shores in our time would not spy a single war-worn and sea-tossed Ithacan sailor returning to his homeland but rather thousands of woeful, current- day avatars of Odysseus, refugees who in the words of Homer find themselves ‘τῆλε φίλων καὶ πατρίδος αἴης’, ‘far from friends and home’.   The linkage of space, politics, and the humanities in the theme of this conference is something more than a matter of mere historical timeliness—and certainly not opportunism—but instead an expression of the deepest roots shared by Greek and American notions of language, literature, history, philosophy, and the arts, that for better or worse we have come to call by the increasingly awkward term ‘the humanities’.   ‘The humanities’ has become an awkward term not only because of a broadening definition of human beings’ reciprocal relationship with both the animal world and the inorganic quantum universe, but also on account of the convergence of techne and episteme in the networked world, factors that increasingly challenge the centrality of the human. But our humanity is also challenged on its face as the internal politics of nation upon nation across the globe turn misanthropic and the immigrant experience of an increasingly exiled global population of refugees becomes brutalized, hopeless, and dehumanized. We are all of us ‘estranged from that which is most familiar’, as the twentieth-century American poet Charles Olson frequently paraphrased and evoked Heraclitus.   If we gathered here have been both careful and caring during these days, perhaps we can leave here having renewed our familiarity in the root sense of not just our shared humanity but also what we mean by both politics and space. I hope by these remarks to make some suggestions toward that renewal.   ‘Politics’, of course, is a fine and ancient Greek word, at first meaning the affairs of the city, the polis, but where the meaning of polis in time came to be understood not just as the concentrated and fortified high place—the citadel—but the surround which the city state encompassed and whose extent the polis gave a view to. ‘Polis is eyes’, Olson—himself a one-time politician—declared in his four-volume epic The Maximus Poems , whose prototypic hero is modeled upon not Odysseus but the second-century Greek rhetorician and philosopher, Maximus of Tyre (M I 26).[1]   By ‘Polis is eyes’ Olson meant a quality of attention—a caring attention to the what, the whom, and the when of the world—possessed by those women and men who had eyes to see their relation to both others and otherness. For Olson politics was a poetics, what he called ‘the attention, and the care’ with which ‘each of us/chooses our own/ kin and/ concentration’. He attributed this quality of attention not just to poets—but perhaps unsurprisingly to a Greek audience—to fishermen, those whose eyes we might say could discern the kinship between the ship of the returning hero on the horizon and a raft teeming with Eritrean refugees nearing Kos.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the first civilisation to be governed in a manner comparable to our own was Ancient Greece—the world’s first democracy.[1] Such discourse has contributed to popular belief that earlier civilisations, of which Egypt is probably the best-known example, might be interesting in myriad ways but surely have little to offer scholars of modern government. Egypt, according to established narrative, was an absolute monarchy, where Pharaoh did as he pleased and all else fell into place around this.[2] Yet was this really so? In this article, it will be demonstrated that the reality was not so simple, with the Ancient Egyptian framework for government and justice being based on far more than the will of one man. This argument for Ancient Egypt having what may be termed an early constitution—however embryonic it may have been—rests on four key premises: evidence for the distinction between the notion of ‘State’ and ‘Government’; the rule of law; the right of appeal; and the separation of executive and judicial power. Each of these shall now be briefly discussed in turn, with the article then concluding with a discussion of the implications of such observations for studies in constitutional history going forward.   The distinction between state (Pharaoh) and government (Vizier)   Almost everybody knows that Ancient Egypt was reigned over by Pharaohs, but to what extent was it actually governed by them? In theological terms, the monarchy was indeed absolute—Pharaoh was a living incarnation of the god of kingship, Horus, seen by his subjects as the ‘good god’ ( ntr nfr ) occupying the middle ground between this world and the next and  ex officio  serving as the high priest of every cult in the land.[3] He was the supreme guarantor of right order ( M3c.t ), tasked with defending Egypt from all enemies foreign and domestic. And yet, the practical task of overseeing the daily running of the country in fact fell to a different individual: the Vizier.[4] This high official was appointed by Pharaoh as a de facto head of government, not unlike the appointment of a Prime Minister by a modern-day head of state. According to the Installation of the Vizier , a text of the fifteenth century BCE setting out royal expectations at the time of a new vizieral appointment, a Vizier could expect to be told the following by his sovereign:   Look to the office of the Vizier, be vigilant concerning all that is done in it, for it is the mainstay of the entire land. Now as for the Vizierate, it certainly is not pleasant; indeed it is as bitter as gall. See, he is copper enclosing the gold of his master’s house.[5]   Thus, this text paints a picture where Pharaoh appreciates the unpleasantness of the job of governing the country, and offloads it onto his Vizier—the metaphorical ‘copper’ which serves to protect the ‘gold’ which is Pharaoh himself. In so doing, Pharaoh presumably freed up time which could be spent on his other prerogatives, such as foreign conquest, building work, and religious observances. However, this did not mean that the work of Pharaoh and Vizier became disjointed, with the latter being duty-bound to regularly report to the former. Clear evidence for this can be found in another text of the same period, the Duties of the Vizier , which states that a Vizier was obliged to act as follows:

1. The fish are alright   Historically and presently, the United Kingdom has identified and presented itself as a maritime nation.[1] Fisheries, historically a significant source of employment, cultural identity, and economic output, are a vital component of the UK’s seafaring character. Amidst the decline of other British coastal industries, fishing, also in a state of ‘managed decline’,[2] is perhaps the UK’s final remaining material link to this maritime heritage.   Our article posits that the interplay of fishing, national politics, and British international affairs over several centuries engendered a fishing iconography rooted in place, power, and identity. Fishers, fishing communities, and the political class gained differing utilities from this iconography. Even as the industry’s size and productivity has declined (to 0.02% of the economy)[3] and knowledge of fishing’s adverse environmental impacts has become widespread, fishing iconography remains germane to major events in contemporary British politics.[4] We use EU membership generally, and Brexit specifically, to highlight how conceptions of national identity influenced by the fisheries-politics-law nexus can ‘bite back’ to shape the activities of a political class instrumental in affording fisheries this power in the first place.[5]   Brexit is an example and an outcome of these interlocking forces. Since the UK joined the European Union in 1973, fishing policy challenged key British constitutional principles, and precipitated UK-European conflicts. This fomented pro-Leave rhetoric and ultimately directed the course of Brexit (2016-20) and the Transition Period (January-December 2020). Yet Brexit may also prove to be a critical juncture in fisheries policy, as it offers the UK an opportunity to break from perversely subsidised and unsustainable path dependencies that defined EU-era UK fishing policies.[6]   We proceed as follows. §2 articulates a historical and material foundation for British fishing iconography, arguing that it arose from the fishing communities’ socio-economic and political activities to become part of British national identity writ large. We characterise this as a romanticised national iconography of fishing as a noble, distinctively British profession. In §3, we consider the implications of this by examining how fishing iconography was effectively deployed by sections of the British political elite to capture national attention during the referendum campaign, before assessing how fishing directed political events during Brexit. Having evaluated the past and present of British fishing, §4 turns to the future. Building on previous work by marine scientists, we highlight pathways to recast extractivist fishing iconography as an iconography of flourishing marine ecosystems conserved in service of public welfare interests.[7]