For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

Satia makes clear that historical imagination played a significant role in the unfolding of empire. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. At key moments in Satia’s telling, we find Britons warding off guilty conscience by recourse to particular notions of history, especially those that spotlighted great men helpless before the will of Providence. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

Time’s Monster demonstrates the dramatic consequences of writing history today as much as in the past. Against the backdrop of enduring global inequalities, debates about reparations, and the crisis in the humanities, Satia’s is an urgent moral voice.

It would not be wrong to suggest that we have been undergoing a “global turn” in Ottoman studies for some time. Historians increasingly tend to situate the Ottoman experience in a world historical context in a comparative and connected fashion. Rather than an isolated imperial trajectory of Ottoman his-tory, which could only be explained through internal realities and meanings, some Ottomanists increasingly tend to link the Ottoman experience with cer-tain large-scale (e.g., global, Afro-Eurasian, European, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean) movements, transformations, and events. The “early modern” seems to be the key notion facilitating the Ottoman “global turn.” It helps scholars of the Ottoman world to “synchronize” Ottoman realities with structural changes in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, from the fifteenth to the nine-teenth centuries, during which we see increasing (and asymmetrical) interac-tions at a global scale. However, both the “global” and “early modern” turns come with certain limits and costs, which we should take into consideration and problematize.

Does additional shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,400 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. We find that additional shareholder liability reduced bank failure by 30%. Results are robust to a diff-in-diff analysis incorporating National banks (which faced the same regulations in every state), and are not driven by other differences in state regulation, FED membership, or differential selection into state and nationally regulated banks. Our results suggest that exposing shareholders to more downside risk reduces bank risk taking.