Waging Future Wars

This is to announce a new essay, focusing on The Reign of George VI, a XVIII-century speculative fiction.

This research aims at fostering a better understanding of how future wars were imagined in European literature, against the backdrop, on the one hand, of the cultural history of time and, on the other, within the context of the crisis of the European temporal mind during the eighteenth century.[1] It does this by analysing a fascinating early futuristic fiction, The Reign of George VI. 1900–1925: A Forecast Written in the Year 1763, which displayed a very specific interest in (future) military history and polemological strategy. [2]The Reign of George VI is here interpreted within a long history of imagined warfare and placed within a cultural context shaped by eighteenth-century European armed conflicts. Published anonymously in London in 1763 (or possibly at the beginning of 1764), this proto-novel offers a fascinating spatio-temporal representation of a future war at the crossroads of British national and imperial construction, European tensions, and power relations increasingly global in their scope.[3] These elements make it a significant chapter in the development of a secularised futuristic imagination, and an eloquent testament to the Seven Years War as a catalyst of cultural change.

Iannuzzi, Giulia. “Waging Future Wars: The Reign of George VI, Imagined Conflicts and the Birth of a Global Consciousness in the European Mind”. In Waging War and Making Peace: European Ways of Inciting and Containing Armed Conflict, 1710–1960, edited by Matthew D’Auria, Rolf Petri and Jan Vermeiren, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025, pp. 47-70. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110764758-003

Contact me at giannuzzi <at> units.it if you wish to receive a full text for research reasons.

About the book: The history of Europe is marked not only by violence and division but also by efforts to reduce the destructiveness of war. In this volume, the authors explore the meaning of ‘Europe’ within war and peace discourses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. They examine imagined wars, the post-1815 security order, the portrayal of Russian and Muslim ‘Others,’ double standards in international law, pacifist rhetoric, and the role of ‘Europe’ in war propaganda and resistance movements. The authors demonstrate how both war and peace practices have shaped the concept of ‘Europe’ over time. Edited by Matthew D’Auria (University of East Anglia); Rolf Petri (University of Venice); Jan Vermeiren (University of East Anglia).

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Notes

[1] Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715 (1935) (New York: NYRB, 2013); on historical time in the eighteenth century, good entry points are: Edoardo Tortarolo, “L’eutanasia della cronologia biblica”, in La centralità del dubbio: Un progetto di Antonio Rotondò, Tomo I.III, Scritture, ragione e storia, eds. Camilla Hermanin and Luisa Simonutti (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 339–359; Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 280–343.

[2] The Reign of George VI. 1900–1925: A Forecast Written in the Year 1763 (London: Printed for W. Nicoll at the Paper-Mill, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1763).

[3] Neither in the text nor in any other peritextual place – i.e. title page, frontispiece, prefatory and introductory writings – does the word “novel” appear in The Reign of George VI. On the use of “novel” in the English publishing market in the 1760s: Leah Orr, “Genre Labels on the Title Pages of English Fiction, 1660-1800”, Philological Quarterly, 90, no. 1 (2011): 67–95.

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