Bilateral will dominate Gulf UK and EU trade advances

Significance The post-Brexit United Kingdom is eager to conclude economic agreements across the world under its promise to deliver a ‘Global Britain’. The EU wants to increase its visible commercial clout in the Gulf and strengthen its image as a significant geopolitical actor. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are ready to seize the opportunity to boost technology transfers. Impacts The Gulf countries’ increasingly serious shift towards green energy could be a major driver for increased European engagement. The GCC countries will seek further investment in their respective education sectors. Differences in perspective on human rights issues will lead to tension within the EU itself, as well as with the GCC.

Red Sea Entanglement: Initial Latin European Intellectual Development Regarding Nubia and Ethiopia during the Twelfth Century

What happens to the ability to retrace networks when individual agents cannot be named and current archaeology is limited? In these circumstances, such networks cannot be traced, but, as this case study will show, they can be reconstructed and their effects can still be witnessed. This article will highlight how Latin European intellectual development regarding the Christian African kingdoms of Nubia and Ethiopia is due to multiple and far-reaching networks between Latin Europeans, Africans, and other Eastern groups, especially in the wider Red Sea region, despite scant direct evidence for the existence of such extensive intellectual networks. Instead, the absence of direct evidence for Latin European engagement with the Red Sea needs to be situated within the wider development of Latin European understandings of Nubia and Ethiopia throughout the twelfth century as a result of interaction with varied peoples, not least with Africans themselves. The developing Latin European understanding of Nubia is a result of multiple and varied exchanges.

The Europeanization of metropolitan regions from below: Comparing the European engagement of two archetypical metropolises

Since the early 2000s, the Europeanization of metropolitan regions from below takes place in a political process with variable geometry and differential intensity. While ‘the metropolitan’ as a political label and research topic has witnessed an impressive upswing in Europe, a concrete understanding of the Europeanization of metropolitan regions is still missing. This article highlights and explains the Europeanization of metropolitan regions in Europe as particular subnational authorities of which only a small group of forerunners recently develop the capacity to act at a European scale. The Europeanization of metropolitan regions is conceptualized as a political process from below, going beyond the initial definition of Europeanization as domestic impact. Thereby, the article lays particular focus on ‘where’ and ‘when’ the European dimension of metropolitan regions is produced. Moreover, the analysis puts the emerging European engagement of metropolitan regions into a larger perspective by discussing it in the context of the increasing international agency of cities. The article questions, first, how a European dimension has developed in metropolitan policies and, second, what modes of engagement contribute to the metropolitan regions’ increasing Europeanization. Empirically, the metropolitan regions of Lyon and Stuttgart present examples of Europeanized metropolises with an exceptional engagement. Comparing modes of engagement in these two metropolitan regions allows understanding the particular characteristics contributing to the formation of an archetype of Europeanized metropolis.

Introduction

The Introduction maps out the ambitions and challenges for the collection of essays as a whole in foregrounding the many and varied significances of the ancient near east in early modern European classicism, across a range of disciplines. It describes the context of renewed European engagement—commercial, diplomatic, cultural—and exchange with the eastern Mediterranean, and the continued appeal of a host of classical works and authors describing that world in ancient times. It studies European familiarity with the material traces of that history—archaeological as well as textual—as well as the complex, often mediated routes of reception that texts of and about the ancient near east took. It highlights four key concepts or approaches to early modern studies that would benefit from closer attention to early modern familiarity with the ancient near east, and concludes by summarizing the key contributions of each essay in the collection.

Networks

This chapter turns to the role of private actors in facilitating the various forms of European engagement with the British Empire. Long-distance and transnational networks undoubtedly played a key role, sometimes underpinning types of continental European involvement of which ministers and officials in London, and state servants in imperial sites, disapproved, and wished to discourage or even stop. But private actors did not always work to undermine the efforts of British governments to preserve an exclusionary empire. Their independent activities could dovetail neatly with official policy. Landowners and employers in the colonies wanted to promote settlement to secure more tenants and more labour. British governments wanted to see the North American colonies settled so that their economic potential could be realized and their security improved. On some occasions, private actors even worked directly with state officials to facilitate foreign participation in the empire through contractual arrangements to secure settlers or soldiers.