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We celebrate cruise ships as gateways to new cultures. However, over the past half a century, the mass-market cruise industry has increasingly relied on global supply chains, exploited maritime labor, and corporate control over the consumer experience to turn cultural contact into profit.

Shayan S. Lallani uncovers the historical scaffolding behind the cruise industry’s strategic co-opting of global cultures. Tracing the evolution of the modern mega-ship from its roots in postwar ocean liners to the floating cities of the twenty-first century, Lallani demonstrates how cruise lines paired commodified cultural referents with immersive spatial design and international labor to maximize guest spending. This corporate grip extended to Caribbean destinations, where companies steadily gained control of port enclaves and vetted shore excursions to manage contact with local communities while retaining the profits.

A sobering look at a vacation mainstay, <i>Engineered Paradise</i> explores where leisure becomes entangled with culture, capitalism, and power.

Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.