bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Falling into Epic
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: February 2024

Paradise Lost repeatedly alludes in the narrative of the Fall to Odysseus’ visit to Scheria and the choice of Odysseus. Linking Satan and Adam to two traditions of reading Odysseus, the poem explores the full range of literary and critical traditions it inherits and creates a further voice: a reading against the grain from within the poem, which presents Adam’s decision to fall with Eve as heroic. Drawing on a theoretical apparatus of allusion and intertextuality developed by classicists, the chapter shows that Satan’s successful temptation of Eve offers a reading in malo of Odysseus’ visit to Scheria and creates the ‘choice of Odysseus’ that Adam confronts when he must choose either to fall with Eve or to remain in Eden. That choice in turn creates parallels between Adam’s fall and Odysseus’ decision to return home, introducing an Odyssean further voice into the narrative of the Fall. Casting the Fall in Odyssean terms simultaneously explores the benefits of falling and enables a reading of the reconciliation that follows as the first example of human heroism. Without overturning the powerful sense that the Fall is a tragedy for humankind, the Odyssean further voice quietly suggests ways of reading fallen human experience as heroic and ways of navigating human experience through the Odyssean goods of marriage and the acceptance of cataclysmic ruptures in life and in relationships. In its emphasis on marriage and survivorship as epic matter, Paradise Lost adapts core Odyssean values for its vision of heroic human existence.
Biophysical models of synaptic interactions
Authors: Destexhe Alain , Sejnowski Terrence J.
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses the biophysical models of synaptic interactions. It overviews a variety of models of synaptic transmission for use in detailed compartmental models of single neurons and simulations of large-scale networks of neurons. The simple models of neurotransmitter release combined with Markov models of postsynaptic receptors capture the most salient features of synaptic transmission at a variety of synapses. On the other hand, sophisticated models include extracellular diffusion of neurotransmitters to evaluate the precision required to capture the dynamics of inhibitory transmission in the thalamus and cerebral cortex. Both types of models essentially provide the foundation for subsequent large-scale network simulations.
Spindle oscillations in the thalamocortical system
Authors: Destexhe Alain , Sejnowski Terrence J.
Published: February 2024

This chapter elaborates on the mechanisms that organize spindle oscillations in the thalamocortical system. It covers the interplay between large-scale thalamocortical network models and the spatiotemporal patterns of coherent activity observed in recordings of thalamocortical oscillations. According to experimental data, corticothalamic feedback holds significance in organizing the large-scale synchrony of oscillations. Additionally, computational models of thalamocortical networks proposed a possible mechanism for large-scale thalamocortical synchrony while highlighting the importance of refractoriness in thalamic neurons. The chapter also presents further findings on thalamocortical networks, such as the human cortex's two spindle systems and the participation of cortical interneurons during cortical oscillations.
Discharging Procurement of the Digital Regulation Role
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

Procurement is not well-placed to act as a two-sided gatekeeper. It is unable to effectively ‘regulate by contract’ the behaviour of the public entities seeking to adopt digital technologies and tech providers offering to deliver them. Additionally, given in-built flexibility in the procurement tools, procurement is unable to develop prescriptive mandatory requirements for the screening of technology vendors and technological solutions in pursuit of the digital regulation goals. This shows that an alternative regulatory strategy is required to govern the digital transformation of the public sector. This chapter makes a proposal for such alternative approach. It first focuses on the design and role of an external regulator of the process of public sector digitalization, the ‘AI in the Public Sector Authority’ (AIPSA). It then concentrates on minimum mandatory requirements, both in relation to the digital technologies to be adopted by the public sector and the applicable governance framework. The chapter stresses the key attributes and characteristics these two regulatory interventions should have to make a positive contribution to governing the transition towards new modes of public digital governance.
Conclusions and Implications
Authors: Hickey Sam , Sen Kunal
Published: February 2024

This chapter summarizes the book’s key findings and discusses the theoretical and strategic implications that arise from these. It confirms that politics plays a critical role in shaping developmental processes and outcomes, argues that a ‘power domains’ analysis can offer greater traction on contemporary development puzzles than a narrowly institutionalist perspective, and delivers new, systematic insights into how this happens. We find that the capacity and commitment to promote development are shaped primarily by the nature of a country’s political settlement (its configuration of political and social power), and how this plays out in specific policy domains. We identify two successful developmental pathways: one involves a dominant ruling coalition with a strong developmental vision, which can be particularly effective where the configuration of social power presents an existential threat to the ruling coalition. The second occurs when the problematic tendencies emanating from competitive political settlements, including the generally short-term vision of ruling elites and the politicization of the public bureaucracy, are offset by the presence of strong and coherent coalitions within particular policy domains. The three main strategic implications that flow from our analysis suggest the importance of context (how a political settlement shapes potential development pathways and why interventions need to be attuned to this), capacity (whether the state can regulate capital and protect its citizens and the importance of supporting this), and coalitions (how progressive actors can advance the rights and interests of marginal groups and devise institutional fixes in difficult governance contexts, and why supporting reform coalitions matters).
The Abuse of Sexual Images between Liberal Criminal Law and the Protection of Sexual Autonomy
Authors: Schmidt Anja
Published: February 2024

This chapter deals with some aspects of the debate on legal regulation of the abuse of a person’s sexual images in the context of the shift from a liberal criminal law to an effective protection of sexual autonomy by criminal law. The chapter explains that this paradigm shift to a liberal sexual criminal law did not result in an effective protection of sexual autonomy, but only in a shifting away from moralizing criminal law. Nevertheless, one of the tasks of criminal law is to protect sexual autonomy against assault—on a physical and a non-physical level of sexuality. Image-based sexual abuse infringes not only the right to one’s own image, but also the right to sexual autonomy in its non-physical dimension. It is a duty of the law to effectively protect against any form of unauthorized production and use of images that show another person naked or in a sexual context.
Refining the Contours of Intimate Image Abuse Offences
Authors: Crofts Thomas
Published: February 2024

Research continues to bring to public consciousness the range of ways in which intimate images may culpably be used to cause significant harm to individual and collective interests. This is causing jurisdictions to compare notes and assess whether there is coherency and adequacy in the coverage of existing offences and whether reforms are necessary. The challenge is to develop offences that are wide enough to capture behaviours that are sufficiently culpable to be deserving of criminalization without bringing less harmful or less culpable behaviours within the reach of the criminal law. This requires a careful balancing of the physical, mental, and defence elements of intimate image abuse offences. With this in mind this chapter takes a comparative approach to evaluating how offences can optimally be designed to address intimate image abuse. Overall, it is argued that a ladder approach, with scaffolded offences, can best reflect harms and degrees of culpability so that the specific wrongdoing in intimate image abuse is accurately captured, packaged, and labelled.
Criminalization of Intimate Image Abuse in Latin America
Authors: Flórez María Camila Correa
Published: February 2024

This chapter aims to expose and analyse the patterns of criminalization of intimate image abuse in some countries of Latin America. It also aims to conceptualize intimate image abuse as a manifestation of violence against women from a theoretical approach. The legal framework in Latin America is then set out, describing not only how some Latin American countries have (or have not) responded from a legal perspective to intimate image abuse, but also the regional instruments, such as the Belém Do Pará Convention and the Follow-up Mechanism recommendation on cyberviolence against women in Latin America. The foregoing leads to the conclusion that prevention, punishment, and eradication of violence against women, including intimate image abuse, is an international obligation of the Latin American states that are party to this Convention. The chapter concludes by analysing the patterns of criminalizing intimate image abuse in Latin American legal frameworks. Three patterns were identified: (a) countries where there is no autonomous criminalization of intimate image abuse; (b) countries where intimate image abuse can be considered an offence against privacy; and (c) countries that prohibit intimate image abuse as an offence of sexual and/or gender content.
First Conversation
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

Dostoevsky appears in the narrator’s Glasgow apartment and they discuss the conclusion of the short story A Gentle Spirit, which is about the suicide of a young woman who has been subjected to mental abuse by her controlling husband and ends with a vision of a loveless, mechanistic universe. This has reminded the narrator of the existential despair he experienced as a young man and of his own midlife crisis. The conversation addresses the question of lying and truth in literature and life, offering a defence of literary imagination as revealing the truth of the human condition.
Postscript
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

The postscript describes the narrator’s difficulties in writing up the conversations and how, just as he is finishing this task, he hears the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and learns that this has been blessed by the Orthodox Church leadership. He is troubled by how Dostoevsky might have thought of this and whether he would have seen it as a holy war of Russia against the West, as some passages in his works suggest. However, he realizes that there are very different ways of applying Dostoevsky’s novels and analyses to the present situation and considers a variety of ways in which Dostoevsky might have responded.
Commentary on the Second Conversation
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

The commentary focuses on Dostoevsky’s relation to the Bible and his portrayal of Christ. Emphasis is placed on the challenge of introducing the biblical word into modern realist fiction and the question of authority associated with the biblical text. In some cases (Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov) it is shown how a biblical text that is read aloud provides a key to the religious meaning of the novel in question. The conversation also raises the question as to whether Dostoevsky’s treatment of suffering is, as some critics allege, pathological, arguing against this view that Dostoevsky sees suffering as potentially helping to break down egoism and broaden compassion. The question of Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Christ centres on whether his conception of Christ is too weak in comparison with orthodox Christian teaching and whether Prince Myshkin can be regarded as a Christ figure. A range of theological views is considered.
Commentary on the Fourth Conversation
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

The commentary considers Dostoevsky’s view of Mary, Mother of God, and returns to the question of Dostoevsky’s ‘weak Christ’, discussing his short story ‘The Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree’. Dostoevsky is shown to have appreciated both Western traditions of representing Mary (the Madonna) in a realist style, as well as the Russian icon tradition. His admiration for Raphael is discussed. His view of the weak Christ is contextualized in relation to nineteenth-century theories of self-deification, often associated with Left Hegelianism. This is also seen as being in continuity with the spreading influence of kenoticism, i.e. the view that Christ emptied himself of his divine attributes in the Incarnation. Following the interpretation of T. A. Kasatkina, the story of ‘The Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas tree’ is seen to illustrate the radicality of Dostoevsky’s transformation of Christology, albeit in keeping with biblical sources.
Commentary on the Seventh Conversation
Authors: Pattison George
Published: February 2024

The commentary explores both literary and theological dimensions of memory in Dostoevsky’s fiction and its implication for views of the afterlife. Nineteenth-century innovations in thinking about the afterlife are considered, placing Dostoevsky’s views in the context of the ideas of his time. It is argued that Dostoevsky’s novels create memories for their readers that bring into focus hope for a life beyond the material world, linking this to the theology of light. With reference to the motto of The Brothers Karamazov (John 12.24), it is argued that Dostoevsky sees literature as being able to raise life to a kind of immortality, thus enabling them to push back against the encroachments of nihilism. Dostoevsky’s view is contrasted with that Hegel and of Proust, who uses the same biblical text to explain his literary work.
Absolute Rights in Assets
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant
Published: February 2024

This chapter elaborates the concept of absolute rights to assets. Through a comparison of the conventional lists of ‘fundamental principles of property law’ in national legal systems, it argues for an approach based on the concept of rights effective against third parties and ‘property law’s’ regulation of third-party interests through the grant of ‘absolute’ rights. The meaning of ‘absoluteness’ also differs between legal systems, especially between civilian and common law systems; however, enforceability against third parties provides a point of reference against which to determine the province of ‘property law’. Property law exists wherever erga omnes rights to assets exist. This leads into a discussion on the numerus clausus principle, its dissemination throughout the legal systems of Europe, and the role it plays in the concept of European property law.
A Tri-Partite Conceptual Framework: Objects of Legal Transaction, Goods, and Things
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant
Published: February 2024

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the objects of property rights. In contrast to national taxonomies, this chapter presents a tri-partite distinction: anything of which a rule-set is willing and able to notice for private law purposes is an ‘object’. Anything, which can be sold or gifted is an object of legal transaction and therefore a ‘good’. Finally, ‘things’ are such objects of legal transaction in which erga omnes rights can be created—namely, property rights. Things, in turn, can be classified as real things, normative things with a physical substrate, and purely normative things. The chapter reviews national approaches to the objects of property law, including the contextual approach taken in the common law systems, and critically reviews the tendency to treat the distinction between ‘moveable’ and ‘immoveable’ things as a summa divisio.
Normative Things with a Physical Substrate: Land Units
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant
Published: February 2024

This chapter describes the category of normative things with a physical substrate—essentially, land units. Many legal systems posit ‘land’ or ‘immoveables’ as the core category of real things. However, on closer examination, the relevant object is a normative one, albeit with a physical substrate. This reveals a concept that has as much (or more) affinity with the common law concept of an ‘estate’ in land as with the German law concept of a ‘land unit’ [Grundstück] on whose terminology it draws. Because of the importance of land to property law, and because of the unique nature of land units, there are a number of intricate rules around the formation and alteration of land units, as well as concerning land units connected with land covered with water.
Things and Rights
Authors: von Bar Christian , Allen Jason Grant
Published: February 2024

This chapter concludes the investigation of the ‘foundations of property law’ by elaborating on the recursive relationship between ‘rights’ and ‘things’ (Sachen and Sachenrechte), and explaining the social and economic importance of the legal system’s function of granting persons property rights in things. This relationship is fundamental, and allows us to conclude with a definitional proposition. In the sense we mean it in property law, a thing is everything, but only such a thing which can be the point of reference of some person’s property right. In other words, things are conceptually necessary to imagine rights, and rights are conceptually necessary to describe things.
The Brunian Tradition
Authors: Mori Giuliano
Published: February 2024

Chapter 1 focuses on the humanist historiographical current that identified historical truth with verisimilitude, defined as the quality of what is appropriate to and expected of the subjects of one’s narrative in accordance with their condition, social status, and overarching character. The chapter argues that authors such as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Pier Candido Decembrio used the notion of historical verisimilitude to tailor the classical topoi of history’s impartiality and utility to the needs of different geographical and political environments. Through verisimilitude, humanists could project an overall meaning of the events, whose exposition was considered the task of truthful historians and the standard of history’s utility and impartiality. Verisimilitude also functioned as a criterion to select relevant historical materials—a classical historiographical requirement that could easily be turned into an excuse to pass over unflattering facts. To demonstrate how Brunian historians navigated this gray area, the chapter investigates the boundaries they erected to distinguish between works whose verisimilar character was perceived as a conveyor of historical truth and works that, instead, used verisimilitude as a pretext for carrying out impartial—and hence untruthful—analyses.
Christian Pornography
Authors: Schryer Stephen
Published: February 2024

Chapter 4 focuses on a forgotten writer of the conservative movement. D. Keith Mano was the author of nine novels published between 1968 and 1998, including his masterpiece, Take Five (1982), an ambitious postmodern fiction influenced by Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. Today, his books are ignored by critics and general readers. The reasons for this neglect are reflected in the two magazines for which he wrote. He was one of National Review’s most prolific contributors in the 1970s and 1980s, writing a column titled “The Gimlet Eye” in which he satirized liberals. He was also a contributing editor for Playboy; he considered himself a Christian pornographer who led readers to grace through explicit representations of sex. His work, in other words, was too conservative for the left-liberal critics who promoted postmodern literature in the 1970s and 1980s, too transgressive and formally experimental for Christian conservative readers. These two sides of his work reflect the central contradiction of post–World War II conservatism: its attempt to simultaneously promote Christian tradition and the capitalist free market. At the same time, Mano’s novels allegorize his sense of the increasing obsolescence of highbrow literature within the conservative movement.
Collective Political Decision-Making in Aristophanes
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra
Published: February 2024

Chapter 3 analyses off-stage group decision-making as portrayed in Aristophanes’ comedies, discussing the assembly scenes in Knights and Assembly-Women. It reveals Aristophanes’ pervasive interest in depicting and exploring group decision-making processes: he frequently echoes stereotypes surrounding group decisions in prose texts. However, Aristophanes also develops a unique range of vocabulary which he applies specifically to group activity. Several off-stage assemblies are followed by the appearance of individual characters who represent the off-stage groups (Dêmos in Knights, Blepyrus in Assembly-Women), allowing us to understand how Aristophanes constructs the differences between group and individual decision-making. This chapter finishes by demonstrating how these conclusions can shed light on other Aristophanes plays, by applying them to the Chorus of Birds.
‘Political’ Armies in Tragedy
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra
Published: February 2024

Euripides’ surviving plays often depict an off-stage Achaean army. Such armies exemplify several different types of group identity: they are, in effect, the population of the army camp (or indeed the ruins of Troy); they often participate in assemblies; they contain an inherent potential for collective violence. Euripides’ ‘Trojan’ plays (and, to a lesser extent, Sophocles’ Ajax) encourage us to view the Achaean army in terms of a democratic polis. However, the army is also cast as a menacing off-stage collective which particularly threatens female characters, starkly emphasizing their all-male gender. As such, the army allows darker elements of democratic power to be explored. Furthermore, the army’s political portrayal affects the depiction of Homeric characters (such as Agamemnon, Menelaus, Hecuba, and Clytemnestra), aligning them with stereotyped fifth-century political figures. The army’s shifting identity in Iphigenia at Aulis is a particular focus of this chapter.
‘Operation Netflix’
Authors: James Kathryn
Published: February 2024

The value of global e-commerce business-to-consumer sales in 2022 is estimated at USD 5.4 trillion and predicted to reach USD 6.4 trillion, or one-fifth of sales worldwide, by 2024. Australia is therefore one of many jurisdictions scrambling to find a means to update its value-added tax (VAT), known domestically as the goods and services tax (GST), to effectively tax cross-border transactions within the digital economy, which, due to their intangibility, mobility, and high volume, do not respect the traditional rules and administrative techniques of VAT collection. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has spearheaded the global policy response, and Australia has been a pioneer in adopting reforms aligned with the OECD approach, including reforms to tax imports of digital products and services to Australian consumers, known colloquially as the ‘Netflix tax’. The Australian ‘Netflix tax’ reforms offer an ideal case study of the challenges to the VAT posed by digital disruption, the main policy responses available, and the limitations and risks inherent in these responses.
Lessons from EU VAT Harmonization
Authors: Englisch Joachim
Published: February 2024

This chapter analyses the common system of European Union value-added tax (EU VAT) as to the lessons that it holds for the harmonization of VAT/goods and services tax (GST) systems around the globe. The focus of the analysis is on the institutions, procedures, and arrangements that facilitate or complicate the creation as well as subsequent improvement and modernization of the harmonized VAT system. The chapter first explains the institutional framework for the development and implementation of VAT policy in the harmonized system of EU VAT. It then describes its historical trajectory to a dense layer of supranational legislation on VAT and provides four case studies of recent reform attempts. On this basis, several key factors that have contributed to the positive and negative outcomes of harmonization efforts, as well as the processes and institutions that are conducive to a uniform application of the harmonized rules, are discussed in more depth.
Brexit and VAT
Authors: Cordara Roderick
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the Brexit settlement of 2021 between the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) on value-added tax (VAT) in the United Kingdom after Brexit. It discusses how, in substance and reality, the tax rules have either changed or remained the same, despite legislative relabelling for political reasons. It also examines legislative drafting techniques in the context of a political wish to give the impression of a new start by the UK government, combined with unchanged fiscal policies and money-raising priorities. The chapter reviews the role of European legislation (regulations and directives) in the post-Brexit UK administration of VAT and specifically discusses the accommodation of the general principles of EU VAT law within the post-Brexit UK judicial system without the imperative of building a single EU market since the United Kingdom is already a single market. The chapter makes references to potential further legislation which, if passed, could destabilize the Brexit settlement of 2021 for VAT purposes.
Contractual Interpretation: Meaning, Intention, and Disembodied Spirits
Authors: Kramer Adam
Published: February 2024

This chapter focuses on the meaning, intention, and indeed disembodied spirits of contractual interpretation. Beyond the basic objective principle and the (entirely correct) contextual approach to interpretation, there is the need to recognize that speakers intend without foreseeing or contemplating something, and their entry into a contract is an intended delegation, appointment, and out-sourcing. Accordingly, the meaning of contract legitimately includes things parties did not consider or foresee. The core of Lord Leggatt’s analysis of rational choice theory is correct.
Contractual Interpretation: Antinomies and Boundaries
Authors: Sales Philip
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses contractual interpretation in terms of antinomies and boundaries. It highlights that entering into a contract results in legal consequences wherein parties create a shared legal world of legal rights and obligations arising out of compromises between conflicting values. The principle of objective interpretation mitigates the conflict between free consent and rule of law values through the reasonable interpretation of contracts. While consent is the foundational justification for treating a party as bound by it, taking other values into account requires a departure from the principle of pure consent. The chapter then elaborates on the boundaries of contractual interpretation and the management of uncertainties created by the need to accommodate different values in one doctrinal space.
“To Will a Future”
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: February 2024

Chapter 4 focuses on the poet Archibald MacLeish’s verse drama Panic (1935), which depicts an America ravaged by the bank runs and closures that proliferated in the wake of the Great Crash, and ponders the routes via which the nation might emerge from its disastrous slump. Having established MacLeish’s complex position within the cultural politics of the Depression era, the chapter initially explores how the play presents a stylistic critique of what MacLeish saw as Marxist thought’s economic fatalism: the obscurantism and mystification that he associated with Marxism are manifest in the language of dire portents and monstrous terrors assigned to the play’s communist revolutionary characters. While casting Marxist prognostication not as scientific but as paradigmatically speculative, however, the play suggests that radical left projections of capitalism’s imminent and terminal collapse are in effect speculative wagers against the American economy, premised on their capacity to sow the demoralization and resignation that will turn their own future visions into realities. Communists’ predictions thus, for MacLeish, have the potential to harness the power of the “self-fulfilling prophecy” or what economic sociologists have recently theorized in terms of “fictional expectations” or, more commonly, the “performativity” effect. The chapter takes Panic as an opportunity to place a proliferating social-scientific literature on economic performativity in contact with work on the interconnections between performative utterance and theatrical performance by literary critics and performance studies scholars, arguing that the play’s prophetic rhetoric and expressionist staging offer a spectacular dramatic anatomization of performativity in action.
Corporate Governance, ESG, and ‘New Capitalism’
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Corporate governance is a critical—and increasingly crowded—arena for corporate transformation, and for determining the future of Japanese capitalism. Japan’s Stewardship and Corporate Governance Codes have been progressively strengthened. The giant Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) helped to spread ESG in Japan. Shareholders and managers are exhorted to work together for medium to long-term ‘corporate value’, as well as sustainability, but do their interests really align that well? Reflections are offered from the turmoil engulfing Toshiba, setting the scene for a consideration of Keidanren’s ‘sustainable capitalism’ and Kishida’s ‘new (form of) capitalism’. Investor relations have become the core institutional nexus of Japanese capitalism, but this is not necessarily compatible with new capitalism’s emphasis on growth with distribution, investment in human capital, and rebuilding the middle class.
Historical Drama
Authors: Wynn Thomas
Published: February 2024

Closet drama offers new possibilities for writing and reading history. Charles-Jean-François Hénault’s François II, roi de France (1747) was thought by contemporaries to be the first example of historical drama in French. Set during the Wars of Religion, the play spurns normal dramatic conventions: there are twenty-three characters; unities of time and place are abandoned; there are substantial historical and bibliographical notes. Hénault took inspiration from Shakespeare’s Henry VI and deployed dramatic form to make his readers visualize the sixteenth-century figures in a kind of resurrection. He presents his characters in such a way as to valorize the reader’s disincarnate gaze, which permits a more complete vision of history in all its terrible truth. To read François II is not just to take an active role in the historiographical process; it is to practise an ideology of tolerance that is absent from the events portrayed in the work.
Athenian Power in the Fifth Century BC
Authors: Lazar Leah
Published: February 2024

This monograph offers a new analysis of fifth-century bc Athenian imperial power, a central topic in ancient Greek history. Challenging orthodox approaches, which have been mostly empirical, monolithic, and centred on Athens, the monograph argues that Athenian power was flexible and a matter of negotiation between the Athenians and their allies. The first three chapters focus on political, fiscal, and religious negotiations between the Athenians and their allies in Athenian contexts. The subsequent three chapters then offer studies of the empire in three different regions—the North Aegean, Rhodes, and the straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea—showing how the empire was formed of overlapping but differentiated regional manifestations. The monograph differs from previous studies in three key respects. Throughout, the monograph provides sophisticated economic analysis. It offers new perspectives on well-known Athenian epigraphic and literary sources, while also utilizing different categories of non-Athenian evidence, including varied forms of material culture. Finally, it makes use of critical historical comparison: with other imperial powers, with later Athenian power, and most of all with the operation of fifth-century Athenian power in different regions.
Negotiation, Flexibility, and Corruption in the Athenian Tribute System
Authors: Lazar Leah
Published: February 2024

Chapter 2 focuses on Athenian imperial revenue production, arguing that the fiscal system, namely the collection of monetary tribute, was inherently flexible and composed of bilateral interactions. The chapter is largely based on close analysis of the inscribed tribute quota lists, in particular unusual patterns of assessment in the 430s and 420s bc. However, this flexibility, and the individual agents which supported it, were increasingly restricted when the financial pressures of the Peloponnesian War began to bite. Indeed, both epigraphic evidence and comic plays from the 420s bc show a significant Athenian preoccupation with imperial revenue and the corrupt behaviour of individuals. Finally, the chapter turns to the abolition of the tribute system in 413 bc, in favour of a much less flexible universal harbour tax. Overall, the chapter tracks a similar development in the Athenian restriction of community-level negotiation and individual agency as in Chapter 1.
Athens, Daskyleion, and Kyzikos
Authors: Lazar Leah
Published: February 2024

The final chapter analyses Athenian fiscal and commercial strategies at the straits between the Aegean and the Black Sea, the Bosporos and Asiatic Propontis, from two perspectives: first through consideration of one allied community, Kyzikos, its unique electrum coinage, and the peripheral position it occupied between Athenian and Achaemenid influences; and second through discussion of Athenian taxation at the straits, the one known location where the Athenians themselves imposed a tax on mobility beyond Attica. The chapter argues that the Athenians were pragmatic in their intervention or lack thereof in their exploitation in the straits. The uniquely fragmented and competitive geography allowed the Athenians to skim surplus from numerous allied communities better integrated into Black Sea networks—a dynamic attested in the material record through the circulation of the Kyzikene electrum staters—and into inland areas not dominated by Greek poleis. Simultaneously, the Athenians asserted their own fiscal claims directly. Their interests overlapped and sometimes aligned with those of allied communities, and also of the Achaemenid satrap. The Athenian approach to coinage and its use, like its approach to fiscal exploitation, was highly pragmatic.
Introduction
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

This chapter introduces the journals and sets out my argument for thinking formally, rather than only historically, about these texts. Treating journals as form raises the question of how to read them, given that in the collections of writing they present, Présence Africaine and Mensagem enclose internal tensions. I argue that these moments of dissidence and dissonance comprise the texture of both journals. As such, reading for cracks and fragments, as well as consensus, becomes an important part of parsing the journals’ form. It is also important to consider how they exceed and escape the marshalling intentions of their editors. From the perspective of the present, reading for cracks and fragments is also one way to retrieve the dissensus and contingency in the evolution of once-polysemic ideas that have today become concretized, such as negritude.
Multilingual modernism
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

In this chapter, the history discussed in Chapter 2 is brought into conversation with a growing body of scholarship in English-language postcolonial studies about African modernism. It shows firstly how the French and Portuguese language material complicates the distinction between ‘modernist’ and ‘engaged’ writing that has been established in English-language work. Part of the contention in this chapter (and in the book as a whole) is that, as journal culture, in which writers from different language traditions were published alongside one another, makes clear, it is not possible entirely to separate out the different linguistic threads of African literary histories. In this context, the chapter considers what kind of comparative strategies are required to take seriously the shared questions about aesthetics, politics, and freedom that underpinned writing in different language contexts. The chapter goes on to discuss the Nigerian English-language journal, Black Orpheus.
Introduction
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

This introductory chapter summarizes the book’s three core arguments. First, British politicians and officials have thought in grand strategic terms throughout the era of American hegemony—even if they do not realize or admit to this. Grand strategy is the highest level of national security decision-making and is an unavoidable part of governing. Second, the role of allies in influencing British grand strategic decision-making has been overstated. The UK has retained a remarkable degree of agency considering its relative decline over the last century. Third, domestic political actors, notably parliamentary parties, have played a greater role in grand strategic decision-making than has hitherto been acknowledged. The chapter also discusses research design—that is, the approach for selecting the three case studies and the primary sources. Finally, it outlines the book’s two contributions: to debates and ideas on grand strategy as well as historical research on the UK in the world.
‘The most momentous shift in our foreign policy for a century and a half’
Authors: James William D.
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the decision-making underpinning the UK’s drawdown from its large military bases in the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War. Existing explanations for retrenchment from ‘East of Suez’ range from the UK’s weak economic position to the domestic political incentives of withdrawal for the ruling Labour Party. This chapter offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining major garrisons such as Aden and Singapore dissolved during the 1960s, as officials realized that these military bases were consuming more security than they could generate. They had become political and military liabilities, rather than hubs for power projection. From mid-1965 onwards, the British government embarked on a phased withdrawal, while attempting to mollify allies, who wanted the UK to remain, and ‘East of Suez’ sceptics in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This careful management of expectations unravelled in the wake of the November 1967 currency crisis.
The Law Emerges from Violence
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tells the familiar story of the struggle in the American West between naked physical violence and the rule of law. It appears that law wins when the thuggish Valance is bested in a shootout by the bookish Rance Stoddard, who then goes on to be the Governor and Senator of a state he helps civilize. But a flashback scene (within a flashback scene) reveals that the fight was not fair and was orchestrated from the shadows by a hidden gunman. The triumph of law and order has been effected by the very force law is designed to blunt. Civilization rests on a bedrock not of principle but of cold-blooded murder. High Noon presents a vision of the law housed not in an institution but in the breast of a single, heroically unheroic man who stands his ground independently of any official obligation to do so. At the moment of crisis, he is deserted by everyone—including, for a time, his new wife—and must rely only on his determination to be the man that he is, with or without a badge.
Natural Law versus Positive Law
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Judgment at Nuremberg is structured by the age-old opposition between natural law—the law of an abiding morality—and positive law—the laws on the books in a particular precinct. The visual imagery (of concentration-camp films) and the emotionally charged occasion (the trial of Nazi jurists) tip the audience sympathy in favor of the United-States-led prosecution helmed by that most American of actors, Spencer Tracy. But the movie keeps giving renewed life to the position of the defense and its argument that the accused were faithful to the laws of their country. The legal drama is mirrored by the personal drama between the Tracy character and a German aristocrat played by the great German-born actress Marlene Dietrich, whose personal story repeatedly bleeds into the story of her character.
Sex, Class, and Class Action
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

North Country is based on an actual case that marked the first time a class action suit for sexual harassment was brought (and won). The central figure is Josey Aimes, a beautiful woman (Charlize Theron) who has always been at the mercy of the misogynist culture pervading her small Minnesota town and the mine that, quite literally, hangs over it. Raped as a teenager, abused by her husband, vilified by her neighbors, scorned by her son, Josey finds the strength to expect more than the sorry and limiting conditions everyone in the town accepts and affirms. She does not set out to make legal history; she just wants to live a life whose shape is dictated by her choices and not by the role—a beauty vulnerable to the whims of men—imposed on her. She just wants to be free to teach her son how to drive.
Speech, Radical Innocence, and the Law
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Billy Budd presents a near-allegorical conflict between a figure of pure innocence—Billy Budd, the “handsome sailor”—and a figure of radical misanthropy—Master at Arms John Claggart. Claggart’s darkness of spirit and action is rooted in a belief that, at bottom, all men are driven by the same base motives—cruelty, desire of mastery, lust for power—that move him; therefore the very appearance in the world of an apparently guileless young man, enemy to no one and beloved by everyone, is an affront to his convictions and must be removed by proof that Billy is as self-serving and venal as anyone else. Hoping to provoke Billy into some act that will reveal a dark side, Claggart falsely accuses him of inciting mutiny. Unable to declare his innocence because a stutter renders him verbally inarticulate at moments of stress, Billy speaks with his fist and fells Claggart with a blow to the temple. In the court martial that quickly follows, the fact of Billy’s innocence—no one doubts it—is overwhelmed by the legal and formalist distinctions Claggart so loved.
Free Speech for Good or Ill
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

The People vs Larry Flint celebrates the First Amendment by putting at its center a self-described “scumbag”—moonshiner, pornographer, exploiter of women, voyeur—and insisting that we, the viewers, be on his side because in the movie’s morality he stands for freedom of speech. The director secures the desired effect of inducing sympathy for Larry Flint by portraying his opponents as bigoted and hypocritical; and, lest any viewer miss the point, the warriors against pornography are played, not by professional actors, but by public figures known to be free-speech stalwarts in real life. Absence of Malice has a plot generated by New York Times v. Sullivan, a case in which the Supreme Court rewrote the law of libel by declaring that a public official can be libeled only if the alleged libeler knew that the information being retailed was false and thus acted with reckless disregard for the truth; if this very high standard is not met, anything printed is absent of malice. In the movie, this account of libel allows a cunning FBI agent to put into the public record a story suggesting, falsely, that one Michael Gallagher is suspected of involvement in the disappearance and likely murder of a union activist. Because the story was written by a reporter with no direct knowledge of the facts, the newspaper can publish it without fear that its subject will sue. The effects of the story’s appearance are far reaching. An early primer in the production of fake news.
The Development of Welfare
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

Development is a multidimensional concept. As well as economic growth, it includes more people living in cities big enough to support hospitals and colleges; welfare services administered without corruption; and political institutions that hold government accountable. Since these characteristics are correlated, they are combined in an Index of Development. Countries highest in development are spread across continents and cultures from Europe and North America to the Asia Pacific region. The mean of the Index of Development differs between continents, being highest on average in Latin America and lowest in Africa. It also differs within continents. China and India have similar Index scores for different reasons: China has a bigger economy, while there is more freedom in India. The chapter concludes by explaining the statistical methods used to account for big variations between countries on every continent in the health, education, and employment of their population.
Health
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

Female life expectancy varies by 19 years between continents while being consistently higher than male life expectancy on every continent. Eliminating infant mortality has almost reached its limit in highly developed countries, and every continent is approaching this goal at its own speed. Smoking tends to be highest among men in China and Asian developing countries. Non-smoking by women is very high on developing continents, while highly developed countries have the biggest percentage of women who smoke. Fatal road accidents are lowest in countries where motorists and pedestrians have the longest experience of dealing with a large number of motor vehicles, while being highest where there are fewer vehicles and less experience in avoiding road accidents. A country’s level of development and communist legacy are significant influences on measures of health.
Nation Keeper
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

The chapter unfolds the story of Dr. Muhammad Riaz, son of a nation builder and grandson of a nation protector, this chapter narrates story of a nation keeper. Coming from the family of a war veteran from the Second World War, headmaster of the school, and session judge, he’s always seen neat uniforms around him. Read about how after losing everything in partition, he found it all, all heights and glory; worked in various high positions, and also had a chance to meet Col. Gadaffi in person. This is the story of a Nation Keeper who after achieving all the accolades still long for his childhood days with his friends.
Sighted Soldier
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

The chapter reveals the story of Shyam Lal Kanojia who hails from a family of military officials who were then based in Lahore. However, the family managed to migrate to India without much difficulty. The storyteller, still smitten by the charm of Lahore and the ambiance around the pre-partition time, he would often say, “he, who has not seen Lahore, has not been born!” Read about his love for Lahore and how he looks back at the days spent in his native city, his admiration for his Urdu teacher, the cordial relations with neighbors, and post-partition hardships before they finally settled in Meerut and called it home. The story, Sighted Soldier, is a love letter to Lahore.