bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chahk, the Capricious Rain God
Authors: Lucero Lisa J.
Published: December 2024

This chapter revolves around Chahk, the Rain God, who was vital for the rainfall-dependent Maya, and his capricious nature—too much, not enough, or the right amount of rain. Annual rainfall varies locally, and much of it percolates through the porous limestone bedrock. Rains transform everything. The rainy season is a time of renewal: rains nourish flora and fauna and everything else. It is also the agricultural-intensive period, so there’s always the risk of flooding, erosion, and crop damage. During the five-month dry season, Maya flocked to cities and urban reservoirs. They prevented water from becoming stagnant and disease-ridden for over 1,000 years by constructing self-cleaning reservoirs that are the same as the constructed wetlands used globally today that rely on aquatic plants to maintain water quality. The Maya sustainably adapted to the wet and dry seasons for millennia.
The Maya Inclusive Worldview
Authors: Lucero Lisa J.
Published: December 2024

This chapter introduces the Maya nonanthropocentric inclusive worldview where everything is animated and connected. The Maya work with nature, not against it, because they are part of the tropical world where things, humans, animals, land, water, and other entities coexist on the same plane and each plays a role in world maintenance. There are no Cartesian dichotomies—no sacred/secular, natural/supernatural, or animated/inanimate. Their cyclical view of life focuses on renewal via ceremonies and collaboration in the home, forests, and Underworld portals (caves and water bodies), which often were places of pilgrimage where they engaged with ancestors, gods, and fellow entities. Ancestors, gods, and forest spirits ensure that people follow the right path. Infractions can result in death or worse—including being killed as a witch and left in portals where their souls would never be reborn.
House and Cosmos
Authors: Lucero Lisa J.
Published: December 2024

When Maya first moved into an area, they and their descendants invested in place materially and spiritually via their homes to emphasize their connection to the land, nonhuman entities, and the cosmos, as highlighted in this chapter. This relationship was sustained via renewal ceremonies, as illustrated at the small Maya city of Saturday Creek, Belize (c. 600 bce to 1500s ce). The house is part of the landscape, enmeshed with other entities through continuous transformation and renewal, essential since family is the unit of action and the home is the building block of society. Commoner and royal families recorded their history through burials and ritual deposits. The family home connects the three realms: the space underneath the roof is the Upperworld, the walls are the mountains, the floor is the Earth’s surface, and under the floors is the Underworld.
Yax Cities
Authors: Lucero Lisa J.
Published: December 2024

This chapter is about yax, or blue-green Maya cities, that is, green (sustainable) and blue (reservoirs) ones, some occupied for over 2,000 years. During the dry season, Maya relied on urban reservoirs and also built and maintained monumental buildings, met in the markets, attended ball games, and participated in public ceremonies. Cities encompassed temples, palaces, ball courts, elite and commoner residences, large plazas, reservoirs, agricultural fields, orchards, and gardens. Cities cannot survive without farmers and the local resource network that brings in forest and farm products, not to mention labor. Urban-rural networks lasted for over a thousand years. And even though cities have remained empty since c. 900 ce, they still withstand hurricanes and tropical storms, which speaks to their resilience. They thus provide a roadmap for sustainable urban planning—if they are not lost to destruction, urban sprawl, agriculture, and looting.
The Survival of Our Planet
Authors: Lucero Lisa J.
Published: December 2024

This chapter presents concrete solutions crucial for the survival of Earth based on Maya wisdom, and not just for the tropics, but globally. Action and change start in the home and continue in communities, cities, governments, and transnational corporations. Solutions include adopting more diverse practices and an inclusive worldview, appreciating Indigenous knowledge, and considering nonhumans in future strategies. It is also important to devise green technologies that don’t rely on finite resources (e.g., lithium) and that serve multiple purposes. Green cities, urban-rural networks, and using organic waste to fertilize fields and gardens are also vital. People need what the Earth provides, but the Earth does not need people. Thus, it is essential to take care of fellow entities and not deplete them or cause their extinction, and to collaborate more sustainably and properly with forests, water, land, soils, and air to ensure the survival of our planet.
Economic and Welfare Impacts of Farm Size and Tenure
Authors: Berry Albert
Published: December 2024

A farm’s impact on people involves not only the output it produces, but also its direct effects on the welfare or satisfaction of those involved and on the environment. Small farms tend to produce more per unit of land than do larger ones, but less per worker; when the scarce factor of production is land—the norm in developing countries—this makes land productivity a better measure of the contribution to total agricultural output than labor productivity, and this underpins the basic argument that smaller farms are typically more efficient than larger ones. Along with size, land tenure can affect results significantly, especially when it involves a lack of security. A major challenge to small farms meeting their potential is a lack of public sector support in areas like infrastructure and research and development on new varieties of crops and new technologies; this often stems from an elite control of the state, a related preference to support larger farms, and a belief that small farmers cannot be efficient producers. Land concentration promotes income inequality which is famously persistent over time. Evidence is less clear on the impact of land concentration on agricultural and overall growth; it varies with each case but, on average, may well be negative. Overall, land concentration typically has seriously negative consequences on overall human welfare.
Institutions With New Rules, But No Norms
Authors: Power Greg
Published: December 2024

Chapter 1 looks at the diverging experiences of Libya, Egypt, and Iraq in trying to get new political institutions to work when there was no recent democratic experience, high levels of division between different political forces and little agreement about what the new institutions should do. In Libya the process was characterized by an extreme form of zero-sum politics which ultimately led to state collapse. In Egypt, following the Arab spring, those running the institutions behaved as though the democracy was already stable, but ultimately failed to address any of the deep-seated problems and allowed the space for a military coup to seize power. In Iraq, the context is shaped by the muhassassa system which divides power between Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish blocs, and means that no side entirely wins, and no side entirely loses. As one politician put it, “the problem here is that no one is in opposition”, everyone shares the spoils.
Party Lines
Authors: Power Greg
Published: December 2024

All political systems are ultimately based on trading votes in return for the promise of tangible improvements in the quality of people’s lives, and clientelism is an attractive and obvious political strategy in countries where the state is weak, the public is in dire need of help and political parties can fill those gaps. The promise of short-term relief in the shape of money or food, is a powerful incentive in many countries. This logic shapes electoral politics in many parts of the world—and is an integral part of the selection, election and re-election process. In many places it has become entwined in the systems of governance. But, as the history of the US and Europe shows, machine politics tends to become too costly and ineffective in the long-run, especially when more efficient alternatives emerge. MPs in many parts of the world are searching for alternatives, and the challenge lies in creating new credible currencies, where voters can believe that if they forgo immediate rewards, they are likely to benefit from wider economic development. Examples from South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, and Indonesia highlight the innate contradictions in clientelism, and how some politicians are seeking to do things differently.
Reform at Hogwarts-On-Thames
Authors: Power Greg
Published: December 2024

The Westminster parliament is an atypical legislature. Although it has provided a template for many other parliaments, it is hampered by its tradition and history, which has meant that reform has tended to occur at a glacial pace. It does though offer some insights for other institutions on the difficulty and the possibility of reform. Reform in parliamentary institutions is difficult for three reasons: there is never one person in charge of a parliament, every MP has strong opinions on reform, and every MP has an influence on the process, because they will have to vote on the content of proposed changes. It is easier to frustrate parliamentary reform than it is to implement it. And the concept of “loss aversion” from behavioral science offers insights as to why MPs are so resistant to change: all reform alters the balance of power, and because it is fraught with short-term risk, it is easier to stick with the status quo. Where successful reform has overcome these factors, it has aligned the personal interests of MPs with a bigger parliamentary principle, such as strengthening oversight and accountability, and also played to the personal, professional and political concerns of Members of Parliament.
What’s In it for Me?
Authors: Power Greg
Published: December 2024

In the space of ten years the Kenyan parliament went from being one of the weakest on the African content to one of the strongest. This change was down to a number of reforming MPs who understood that politicians would be attracted to reform for different reasons—some as principled reformers, others as opportunists who saw how reforms benefited them personally. As such, they carefully orchestrated a series of reforms which played to both sets of incentives. The key insight is that all MPs have the potential to be reformer and opportunist, and will frequently be both, often at the same time. Reforms need to appeal to both sides of the political mind—the altruistic and the egotistic. Reforms also need to maximize the number of potential beneficiaries, so that all MPs believe that they will gain in some way from the change. In other words, reciprocal exchange needs to be an integral part of the negotiations with different groups of politicians. Self-interest, on its own, is not enough to sustain reform. Rather it needs to tap into different sets of motivations using change that offers immediate reward to more strategic and longer-term institutional benefits.
Radical Incrementalism
Authors: Power Greg
Published: December 2024

International development assistance suffers from three significant flaws: over-ambition, premature load-bearing, and misjudging political resistance. All three are a product of the tendency to focus on projects that are large in scale and attempt to do many things at once. Political change tends not to occur in this way, but rather as the accumulation of multiple small changes. The very nature of reform—as highlighted in previous chapters—means that it needs to be understood as a process of bricolage, rather than the product of a neat, linear and rational process. As such, it is better to approach it as a process of radical incrementalism, of thinking big, but acting small. There are three elements to this. First, start with what matters today—find ways of solving immediate problems in ways that make them easier to solve tomorrow. Second, build institutional mētis—foster the skills that mean politicians learn to value their institutions. Third, create pockets of good practice and a ripple effect—achieve change in small spaces and then replicate it.
The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression
Authors: Parker Robert Dale
Published: December 2024

The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression studies a forgotten side of modernism: the literature of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, especially fiction and poetry about people starving on the street or half-starving on welfare, people who often don’t know where they’ll find something to eat that night or whether they’ll find someplace to sleep. They spend the night on park benches or in filthy flophouses, or they trade sex for food and shelter, or they starve. Time itself changes. For the starving poor standing for hours and hours in a breadline, the speed of modern culture slows down. This book expands on previous studies of the 1930s by recovering the fiction and poetry of dozens of forgotten writers and reading them together with political cartoons and with underknown writing by such acclaimed or understudied writers as Langston Hughes, Tom Kromer, Dorothy West, and Martha Gellhorn. From an age so immersed in despair and suffering that many writers came to doubt the very idea of literary aesthetics, this book rescues a vast archive of literary analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory. It shapes a collective portrait and interpretation of a nearly lost literary history that represents a nation, its crisis, and its literature of crisis from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
How to Make a Queer
Authors: Parker Robert Dale
Published: December 2024

Stories of begging for money or food, a core scene in the poetics of the stiff, sometimes take on erotic connotations. Building on Chapter 2’s account of Waiting for Nothing, this chapter looks at that novel and other stories and novels in the literature of extreme poverty from the Great Depression and identifies a recurring pattern of prosperous queer men trading food and shelter in exchange for sex with unemployed, ostensibly straight men starving on the street. In a Depression that challenges conventional models of masculinity by throwing so many men out of work, the collective portrait across a multitude of stories and novels queers the masses of down-and-out unemployed men whose unloosed gender stirred up a national anxiety of precarious masculinity.
Life on Relief in the Short Fiction of Dorothy West and Martha Gellhorn
Authors: Parker Robert Dale
Published: December 2024

Martha Gellhorn and Dorothy West both worked as relief investigators (welfare investigators) during the Depression and translated what they saw into short fiction about people barely getting by on inadequate relief. Where Kromer and Hughes and so many other writers of extreme poverty in the Great Depression portray isolated, usually male stiffs adrift on the street, Gellhorn and West center on women and children in broken families struggling on relief so meager that it threatens to turn their family, or at least its men, onto the street like stiffs, and for Gellhorn, on families that break because the husband and father deserts his family to become a stiff. (Warning: this chapter discusses Gellhorn’s portrayal of child sexual abuse.)
Nomination
Authors: Shukman Ann
Published: December 2024

Runciman receives an invitation from Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax to go as a mediator to Czechoslovakia. He refuses. Runciman’s previous career had been in British politics and as a successful businessman. British Government policy towards Germany inclined towards making good the “raw deal” of the Versailles Treaty, and overlooked Hitler’s long term aims. In early 1938 after the Austrian Anschluss, the crisis in Sudetenland grows more acute. The Sudeten German Party puts forward its Carlsbad Program of demands to the Czechoslovak Government. The chapter explores Horace Wilson’s assessment of Runciman’s character. Runciman goes onto accept Halifax’s invitation.
Days Four to Six and the First Weekend
Authors: Shukman Ann
Published: December 2024

The chapter begins with the first weekend away with the family of Zdenek (Ra) Kinský at Žd’ár nad Sázavou, now a World Heritage Site, a masterpiece of Czech Baroque architecture designed by Santini. The chapter considers the character and opinions of Ra Kinský and his wife and family. He was an owner of a famous stud of horses and the host of the Pardubice steeplechase. Hilda complains of spartan living conditions. The chapter explores the language, musical gifts and political views of Ra’s wife, Lori Clam-Gallas (formerly Schwarzenberg), and Hilda’s description of hunting methods. The Runcimans visit another Santini masterpiece, Karlova Korona at Chlumec nad Cidlinu, where they stay the night. The chapter analyzes the relationship of the aristocracy with the Czechoslovak Government. Franzi Schwarzenberg expounds to Hilda the history of the ancient kingdom of Bohemia.
Days Twenty-One to Twenty-Three
Authors: Shukman Ann
Published: December 2024

The Negotiating Committee makes no progress. Without informing Runciman, Beneš starts exploring possibilities for constitutional change. Henlein tells Ashton-Gwatkin who reports to Runciman. Beneš starts face-to-face talks with the SdP (Kundt and Sebekowski in particular). Ashton-Gwatkin flies to London with optimistic news that Henlein will negotiate with Hitler as he reported to the Foreign Office on 25 August. The assembled ministers, including Horace Wilson but not Chamberlain, pick up Runciman’s suggestion of sending a personal emissary to Hitler: Runciman should go himself. But he adamantly refuses this new role.
Days Twenty-Four to Twenty-Seven And The Fourth Weekend
Authors: Shukman Ann
Published: December 2024

A clear pattern emerges of a violent reaction on the part of the extremists in the SdP whenever an agreement seemed to be possible between the Czechoslovak Government and the more moderate members of the SdP. The “Manifesto” by Frank and Kollner was a call to arms. The surreptitious buildup of irregular forces, and arms smuggling by the SdP, was intensifying. The chapter describes the nervousness at the historic palace of Teplice (Teplitz) where the Runcimans, with their daughter Margaret, spent the weekend with the Clary Aldingens. Hilda meets and becomes friends with Elizabeth Baillet de la Tour who was closely associated with Hitler through the Olympic Games organization. She convinces Hilda that Hitler does not desire war. Alfons Clary-Aldingen speaks of a knife-edge situation. The Runciman party go over to Rothenhaus to meet Henlein.
A Theory of Competitive Intervention in Civil War
Authors: Anderson Noel
Published: December 2024

This chapter develops a generalizable theory of competitive intervention that explains protracted fighting, temporal variation in average conflict duration, and changing trends in the global prevalence of civil war. Integrating the nested interactions of domestic combatants, third-party interveners, and the international distribution of power, the theory details the distortionary effects competitive intervention entails for domestic bargaining processes, explains the escalation dilemma that competitively intervening states confront, and links variation in the prevalence of competitive intervention to international systemic change. The chapter concludes by deriving hypotheses from the theory, identifying the observable implications of the argument, and describing the research design employed in subsequent chapters.
External Meddling in Internal War
Authors: Anderson Noel
Published: December 2024

This chapter presents an empirical overview of global trends in external intervention in internal wars spanning more than six decades. It introduces a novel dataset that provides an exhaustive record of military aid transfers to civil war combatants for all years from 1946 to 2009, describes how patterns of intervention have changed over time, and establishes the nature of temporal variation in the prevalence of competitive intervention. Several striking findings emerge. First, external intervention has been a ubiquitous feature of the ostensibly “internal” civil war process since the end of the Second World War. Second, the end of bipolarity and the transition to a unipolar international structure had virtually no effect on the percentage of conflicts attracting external support. Third, while rates of intervention remained consistent across the bipolar and unipolar periods, the configuration of military aid flows changed dramatically: the rate at which civil wars attracted competitive interventions was halved in the unipolar period, while the rate of one-sided intervention increased by over one-and-a-half times. Fourth, the popular notion that great power “proxy wars” pervaded the Cold War period is correct, but incomplete; competitive interventions by less powerful states were in fact more common. Finally, the phenomenon of competitive intervention did not disappear with the end of the Cold War—a finding that underscores this book’s importance for the study of contemporary conflicts.
The Angolan MPLA–UNITA Civil War, 1975–1991
Authors: Anderson Noel
Published: December 2024

This chapter examines the dynamics of competitive intervention in one of the deadliest conflicts of the past century: the Angolan civil war (1975–1991). Drawing on declassified intelligence and military reports, memoirs of military veterans, and original interviews with former military commanders, diplomats, and political elites, it demonstrates that while battlefield victory was undoubtedly the primary objective for Angola’s domestic combatants, fears of uncontrolled escalation led third-party interveners to pursue more limited objectives. The chapter documents how the need to avoid direct confrontations prompted South Africa and the United States, on one side, and Cuba and the Soviet Union, on the other, to condition the scope of their support for rebel and government forces, respectively. While this restraint was successful in helping the interveners manage escalatory risks with one another, it simultaneously prevented them from conferring decisive military advantages on their domestic clients. The net result was a stalemated civil war that persisted for decades, inflicting hundreds of thousands of deaths, displacing millions, and decimating Angola’s economic, political, and social institutions.
Quatremère de Quincy
Authors: Gilks David
Published: December 2024

Antoine-Chrysosthôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) was the most distinguished writer on art and architecture at the end of the Enlightenment. However, this study argues that he was also a zealous functionary and skilled publicist whose writings on the arts often intertwined with his politics. The book first demonstrates how Quatremère’s early reflections on art informed his abhorrence of destructive experimentation and his conviction that society, as much as art, needed faith, authority, and hierarchy. The next chapters then trace how Quatremère set aside his scholarly inquiries in 1789 and became a royalist politician who feared that the Revolution would destroy the cosmopolitan republic of letters that flourished when European states supported the papacy. Yet Quatremère’s disingenuous use of his opponents’ arguments means that his interventions must be understood in their political contexts and with reference to his biography, sources, and milieux. The concluding sketch of the second half of his life underlines his commitment to Crown and altar and his fight against godless materialism and the spirit of calculation. The resulting book is an exhaustively researched study of the most remarkable period in Quatremère’s biography that brings to light previously unknown writings and transforms our understanding of his famous reflections on the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the Panthéon, art plunder, and museums. The book also offers an unfamiliar history of the French Revolution that integrates the study of political power with the history of ideas and art history.
The Making of a Missionary of Antiquity, 1755–85
Authors: Gilks David
Published: December 2024

This chapter explains how Quatremère became a self-professed ‘missionary of antiquity’. If his family’s wealth afforded him a classical education and enabled him to indulge his artistic and intellectual interests in Paris, his experience of Italy led him to become a tireless proselytizer of the antique. He read Winckelmann, admired Piranesi, discerned in Canova’s work the ‘resurrection’ of ancient style, and came to believe that ancient temples in southern Italy embodied the untarnished essence of architecture. However, his zeal for antiquity reinforced his Christian faith rather than leading him towards classical republicanism: after travelling in Italy, he argued that Christianity inspired the greatest modern artists, and he praised popes and bishops as enlightened collectors, saviours of antiquities, and custodians of ancient buildings. Rejecting the pessimistic view that papal Rome was in decline, his extended stay in this epicentre of art and learning convinced him that it was a metaphorical museum for understanding the entire past and present world. His Italian voyages also led him to believe that one needed to experience, rather than simply read about, ancient and Christian sites because much of their beauty resulted from their surroundings.
The Friend of the Arts, 1785–9
Authors: Gilks David
Published: December 2024

This chapter reinterprets Quatremère’s first writings to demonstrate how, by the eve of the Revolution, he established a reputation as a friend of the arts capable of influencing public opinion towards urban improvements and cultural matters in Paris. With these writings, he articulated ideas about art, architecture, and cultural heritage that he later expanded and adapted for polemical ends. Despite his apparent detachment from current affairs, the chapter shows that, even before 1789, his favoured form of government was an enlightened absolutism that nurtured genius, patronized art, rediscovered and preserved antiquities, and created spectacular public monuments whilst regulating private construction. The chapter also shows how his pre-revolutionary writings about the arts expressed his predilection for hierarchy, spirituality, gradual development, and deference towards the past and his abhorrence of ‘vicious licence’, the mania for innovation, and conflating the ‘arts of genius’ with ‘fashion’.
Art in a Regenerated Nation, 1789–91
Authors: Gilks David
Published: December 2024

This chapter explains how Quatremère became a significant public figure during the early Revolution. It argues that throughout this period he publicly paid lip service to the Revolution by adopting the language of reform despite privately considering joining the emigration in Rome and fearing that recent events harmed the art market and interest in the arts. The first half of the chapter describes his initiation to Paris municipal politics. The second half reinterprets his written contributions to mediate conflict over the future of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and the Academy of Architecture. The chapter concludes by explaining how a combination of accident, ambition, and slander lay behind his ill-deserved reputation as a reform-minded enemy of the academies and supporter of opening the Salon to all artists.
The Nation’s Temple, 1791
Authors: Gilks David
Published: December 2024

This chapter reinterprets Quatremère’s vision in spring 1791 to transform Soufflot’s church of Sainte-Geneviève into the temple of the nation. Quatremère’s vision guided the only large-scale architectural project during the Revolution, but his ideas are overshadowed by the Panthéon’s later republican and anti-clerical associations. The chapter therefore revisits the project’s origins, showing how Quatremère defended the Constituent Assembly’s demand to repurpose the church. It explains his vision for modest architectural changes, a wooded Elysium around the temple, and decorative sculptures that shunned direct allusions to recent events and instead taught citizens to obey the law and celebrate the gradual progress of knowledge and the arts. Although the Directory of the Department of Paris endorsed Quatremère’s plan to save Soufflot’s masterpiece by making measured changes, the chapter concludes by showing how political developments in summer 1791 radicalized expectations for the nation’s temple.
Meiji Military Reforms
Authors: Tonooka Chika
Published: December 2024

This chapter examines the history of Meiji military reforms and their centrality to Japan’s sovereign survival. It accounts for the Meiji government’s willingness and capacity to undertake extensive military reforms, and elucidates the contours of Japan’s military transformation, its choices and consequences. The chapter proceeds in four sections. Rejecting the idea of the Meiji reforms as a radical rupture, the first section highlights the important foundations laid by Tokugawa military reforms during the final decades of shogunal rule, as well as their limits. The second section considers the reform efforts of the early Meiji government, exploring the challenges and opportunities entailed in building a standardized national army. The third section focuses more closely on Meiji Japan’s Westernizing reforms, evaluating the strategic choices and constraints involved in Japan’s emulation of international best practice. The chapter concludes by exploring the importance of these reforms for Japan’s military ascendancy in terms of its performance in the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and Russo-Japanese (1904–1905) Wars.
Extraterritoriality in Imperial Ethiopia
Authors: Feyissa Hailegabriel G.
Published: December 2024

This chapter attempts to provide an understanding of how the unequal treaties imperial Ethiopia signed with European powers during the first half of the twentieth century secured European extraterritorial privileges as well as influenced major legal reform in Ethiopia. It also highlights the precariousness and roughness of imperial Ethiopia’s semi-colonial trek compared to other prominent semi-colonial polities discussed in this book. It challenges our knowledge about extraterritorial regimes and their impact on legal change in Ethiopia, and argues extraterritoriality was a major marker of the unequal relationship between Western powers and imperial Ethiopia and was more successful after the liberation of Ethiopia from Italian rule.
Siam’s Diplomacy and Imperial Europe
Authors: Trakulhun Sven
Published: December 2024

The chapter examines diplomatic contacts between Europe and the kingdom of Siam in the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the reign of King Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868). During his tenure, the Siamese government slowly abandoned long-held reservations toward Western nations and took important steps toward establishing economic and political relations with Britain, France, and the United States. Western powers expanded their influence in Southeast Asia and began to set the rules for political intercourse and international commerce. King Mongkut responded to this challenge by dispatching, in 1857 and 1861, the first Siamese embassies to Europe since the seventeenth century as a means to secure Siam’s political independence. Diplomatic missions were crucial instruments for regulating Europe-Asia relations. Embassies and royal audiences provided opportunities for kings, courtiers, and companies to negotiate political hierarchies, economic interests, and cultural conflicts in public, representing competing political claims expressed in symbolic gestures and languages. The chapter describes the complex diplomatic interactions between Europe and Siam in the nineteenth century and seeks to capture some of their key features.
Imperialism and Japan’s Monarchy
Authors: Fujitani Takashi
Published: December 2024

This chapter traces the history of Japan’s monarchy within the modern global system made up of nation-states, colonies, indigenous peoples, and above all empires from the late nineteenth century to 1941. In their desire to forge a powerful nation-state and empire under the figure of an emperor, there were few ready-made models for Japan. The Meiji state’s leaders looked to archaic precedents, but they also began to mix and match different elements from the political rituals, aesthetics, symbols, and laws they observed in the Euro-American world while also striving to figure their nation, monarch, and empire as distinct. Such borrowing has lent itself to the view that Japan was a follower or late-comer to modern political conventions and forms; but if late, it was only slightly tardy to the task of adopting the nation-state form and becoming a modern empire. Thus, it is most appropriate to consider the Japanese efforts in nation and empire building as having been “right on time,” if the goal was to survive and prosper as an accomplice with the Euro-American powers. Hence, Japan’s emergence as a national and imperial power headed by an emperor that eventually challenged the Euro-American powers is far less attributable to continuities with the past or with other non-Western pathologies than to its pyrrhic success at conforming to and even participating in the making of the age of empires.
European Imperialism and the Qajar Court
Authors: Eskandari-Qajar Manoutchehr M.
Published: December 2024

While Persia was still geared to the geo-political realities of the eighteenth century and capable of holding its own in that context, the new century brought with it challenges and realizations that required adjustments for which there was no domestic precedent. Persia and Qajar rulers thus had to adopt new ways and adapt to the new realities in order to ensure the survival of Persia as an independent nation. While not without setbacks, Persia managed to navigate the turbulent waters of the “long century” and emerge intact, though not without experiencing fundamental political and cultural changes at home.
Primary and Secondary Imperialisms in Madagascar
Authors: Campbell Gwyn
Published: December 2024

This chapter investigates the French takeover of Madagascar in 1895 within the context of competing French and British imperial policies toward Madagascar, and the reaction of the Merina polity of Central Madagascar to both. It surveys the interest of the French and English East India Companies in founding colonies in Madagascar, and the more acute focus of the white settlers of Réunion and Mauritius on Madagascar, from the late eighteenth century, as a source of cheap labor and provisions. From the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, this aroused intense Franco-British rivalry within the region for influence in Madagascar. It further stimulated attempts by the Merina state to defy European imperial ambitions by subjecting the entire island to its rule and initiating a modernization program. Such initiatives involved intensive use of forced labor that met with increasing resistance by the Malagasy subject to them. This in turn critically undermined the Merina regime’s ability to stave off foreign imperial ambitions, thus facilitating the French imperial takeover in the late nineteenth century.
Introduction
Authors: McCormick Miriam Schleifer
Published: December 2024

This chapter lays the foundation for a novel perspective on belief, positing it as an emotion rather than a purely cognitive state. It challenges the traditional dichotomy between cognitive and affective states and questions the “standard” view of belief, which emphasizes a special connection to evidence and action, suggesting that many states commonly understood as beliefs do not conform to this narrow definition. Such “problematic states” include cases of delusion, religious faith, and beliefs related to trust. This chapter proposes that understanding belief as an emotion offers a more inclusive framework for understanding a range of doxastic phenomena. This view aims to address the complexities of belief and its connection to our rational and emotional lives. The chapter ends by considering why it matters what we call belief, arguing that how we categorize belief has deep implications for how we see ourselves and each other.
Defending Doxasticism about Delusions
Authors: McCormick Miriam Schleifer
Published: December 2024

This chapter defends doxasticism about delusions, the view that delusions are genuine beliefs, contrary to some theorists who categorize them as different kinds of mental states. While other theorists have defended doxasticism about delusions, this chapter argues that the view of belief as an emotion offers a better defense. The chapter proposes that we think of delusions as recalcitrant emotions but they can be distinguished from other kinds of resilient or recalcitrant beliefs. The way to distinguish delusions from the other “problematic states” that pose a challenge to the standard view is by recognizing that some feelings are better grounded than others. The chapter ends by addressing two concerns about the view that delusions are a specific type of recalcitrant emotion. First, there seem to be some important disanalogies between the recalcitrant beliefs in the case of delusions and other recalcitrant emotions. Second, the chapter considers why the view that beliefs are emotions is different from (and better than) the one that explains delusions by beliefs being accompanied by emotions that make them resistant to evidence.
Defending Doxasticism about Religious Conviction and Political Ideology
Authors: McCormick Miriam Schleifer
Published: December 2024

This chapter argues for doxasticism concerning religious convictions and political ideologies, positing that these, too, can be understood as genuine beliefs. The chapter addresses the motivation for non-doxasticism about these states which stems from the view that they are fundamentally different from other types of beliefs due to their normative and motivational dimensions; these attitudes seem to interact with evidence and action differently from “ordinary” or “factual” beliefs. The chapter argues that treating these convictions as beliefs allows for them to be rationally assessed, and for normative distinctions to be made among them. Recognizing that these beliefs are not as sensitive to evidence, or not as connected to behavior as the standard view of belief predicts they should be, provides a reason to rethink the standard view of belief rather than endorsing non-doxasticism. This chapter reinforces the idea that thinking of beliefs as emotions allows for a more accurate and nuanced understanding of their role and function.
Investing in Health and Wellbeing
Authors: Dye Christopher
Published: December 2024

The proverbial benefits of prevention over cure are self-evident—and yet we are reluctant to invest in protecting or improving health. Resolution of this age-old dilemma begins with a timeless truth: the benefits of good health come at a cost; prevention is not better than cure at any price. Investment in health protection is more appealing when a high-risk, high-value hazard can be averted certainly, rapidly, and at a relatively low cost. Application of this idea helps to explain why prevention is neglected by health services, why the world was not ready for the COVID-19 pandemic, why the world’s most deadly infections are neglected, why cigarette smoking is still commonplace, why the idea of a ‘sin tax’ is misconceived, why billions still do not have access to safe sanitation, and why the response to climate change has been so slow. Although more money and effort are invested in health promotion and disease prevention today than is commonly thought, the enormous avoidable burden of ill-health is a reason to seek ways of investing still more. The search should begin, not with the usual expert prescriptions of how health choices ought to be made, but with investigations of how choices are made in practice. That depends on understanding, not only costs, hazards, and risks, but also the values, motives, and powers of all those who collectively make decisions about health.
History
Authors: Dye Christopher
Published: December 2024

The main ideas about protecting and promoting health run throughout the whole of human history even if, in every age and in every place, they find new interpretations. Spanning more than 5000 years, this chapter introduces all the main themes: illnesses arising from poor sanitation have preventable causes (Neolithic filtration and boiling of water); healthy living is about enhancing wellbeing as much as preventing illness (Ancient Chinese, Greek, and Hindu societies); the choice of prevention over cure depends on the balance of perceived costs and benefits, which in turn depend on hazard, risk, timing, and uncertainty, with multiple historical applications (shipping insurance from 4000 BC, Franklin on fire insurance, Chadwick on sanitation); prevention is for communal as well as personal health (Roman aqueducts and communal toilets); prevention is at a premium in the absence of a cure (fourteenth-century plague); prevention and cure are often complementary (parallel discoveries of antibiotics and vaccines); and the immediate, preventable causes of illness (diet, tobacco) depend on deeper causes, in societies, economies and environments (from Hippocrates to the Sustainable Development Goals). These ideas guide the development of a logical framework for making health choices, the subject of Chapter 2.
Epidemics
Authors: Dye Christopher
Published: December 2024

If the threat of disaster—an earthquake, a pandemic, or a nuclear accident—is unlikely or uncertain in time, place, and scale then prevention and preparedness may not be better than treatment and cure. Tactics that favour the prevention of an unlikely disaster are routinely used by the insurance industry: spotlight preventable hazards, pool the risks, and share the costs. A hazard—such as COVID-19, Ebola, or Zika virus—is perceived to be more dangerous, and more likely to stimulate action, when classified as a public health emergency or a threat to national security, and when the severity of a hazard changes suddenly and unpredictably in space or time. The methods for pooling risks and sharing costs include: early detection and response systems for multiple pathogens, including an unknown, unpredictable Disease X; mechanisms for sharing genomic and other surveillance data; platform technologies for the development of new diagnostics and vaccines; and collaborations through the international conventions and regulations. Although primary prevention is preferable, secondary prevention is often a better interim investment: preventing the emergence of Disease X is not generally feasible; stopping its spread by surveillance, diagnosis, isolation, quarantine, and vaccination is practical and essential.
Introduction
Authors: Kortendiek Nele
Published: December 2024

How do IOs govern new, contested, and crisis-ridden issues? The introductory chapter presents the core argument that they do so through practice—without first going through formal policy channels or renegotiating their authority. Much scholarship has been devoted to the question of how IOs become autonomous agents and exercise authority to shape governance outcomes. Far less attention has been given to the way IOs use their field access to govern global issues on the ground, circumventing official decision-making arenas. The chapter sketches the loop model that theorizes this specific governance mode, illustrating it with key findings from the case study on mixed migration governance at the European external border. The chapter then discusses how this theoretical argument contributes to and differs from IR research on IOs, global governance, street-level policy-making, and practice. Finally, it explains the logic behind the case selection and presents my strategies for data collection and analysis.
Governing on the Ground
Authors: Kortendiek Nele
Published: December 2024

Chapter 2 proposes taking transnational professionals as the starting point for thinking about international organizations (IOs) and global governance. This shift in perspective makes it possible to examine several (types of) organizations, thereby ensuring that important actors are not excluded from the analysis. It then develops the five-step loop model of global governance on the ground. Drawing on organization studies and practice theory, the model theorizes how, during moments of uncertainty and urgency, transnational professionals stationed in the field improvise across organizational boundaries to respond to global problems. The key claim here is that inter- and intra-organizational networks govern emerging or unsettled transnational challenges right where they occur—during several rounds of governing on the ground and without first renegotiating their authority. Although they require mandates and funds to act, institutional factors do not determine how professional actors in IOs use the discretion they have by being located at the organization’s periphery.
Situated Learning
Authors: Kortendiek Nele
Published: December 2024

Chapter 4 studies the response to the crisis at Europe’s external border in Greece. Ethnographic fieldwork on the Aegean island of Chios is used to analyze how border and coastguards, camp managers, humanitarian professionals, doctors, social workers, psychologists, lifesavers, lawyers, and asylum caseworkers—affiliated with different public and private organizations—made sense of mixed migration as an emerging, underregulated, and crisis-ridden issue in international politics. The chapter shows that they relied on their personal networks and professional knowledge to test ways of handling the large numbers of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. It demonstrates that through situated learning in the field, they established several practices for governing migration and asylum. In so doing, they brought some degree of order to the unauthorized movements, restricted or opened up new possibilities for action for people on the move, and defined mixed migration as a policy concern. They governed mixed migration at the border.
Conclusion
Authors: Kortendiek Nele
Published: December 2024

What are the theoretical, practical, and normative implication of the study presented in this book? Chapter 6 links the loop model outlined in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2 to current international relations (IR) debates on territory, practice, and authority. It argues that we need to look beyond formal mandates and policy-making arenas to capture informal, dynamic governance in concrete places of decision-making. IOs not only govern at headquarters. Chapter 6 also discusses the promise and pitfalls of global governance on the ground. It highlights failure, arbitrariness, and the misuse of power as the main concerns regarding effectiveness and accountability. It discusses potential institutional solutions to these concerns, namely high-quality professional training, better job incentives, and latitude for fieldworkers—along with ombudsmen, individual complaint mechanisms, and similar instruments of direct accountability for the governed.
The conceptual foundations of debt capital markets
Authors: Bavoso Vincenzo
Published: December 2024

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to understand the dynamics and trends in debt capital markets that were explored in the previous chapter. The aim of this discussion is to unravel the conceptual link between the bundle of neoclassical theories that became dominant in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the extent to which they informed the growth of debt capital markets, and ultimately their regulatory framework. The thrust of this analysis is on the concept of market efficiency (and attendant corollaries, such as market discipline), and on the assumptions of perfect markets that permeated the functioning of debt capital markets. This chapter discusses specific theories (primarily, the efficient market hypothesis, the capital asset pricing model, the option pricing formula), highlighting how the underlying assumptions influenced policy-making and regulation in debt capital markets.