bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Imagining the Pacific and the Russian Far East
Authors: Ziegler Charles E.
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores central and regional constructions of Eurasia and the Russian Far East in Russian national identity as a frontier territory that forms a nexus with the Chinese, Japanese, and American Others along the Pacific littoral. Russia’s Far East and Siberia have been an integral part of Russian identity. These remote regions give Moscow claim to great power status on the Eurasian continent, but Russia’s Far East and East Asia are geographically and conceptually distant from the European center of Russia. Russia’s east is imagined as a frontier territory, with great wealth and potential, yet sparsely populated and vulnerable. As relations with Europe deteriorated in the 2010s and 2020s, new versions of Eurasianism emerged to assert a unique role for Russia as an exceptional country, as a bridge between Europe and Asia. The Putin administration has promoted the idea of Russia as central to Greater Eurasia, not only in geopolitical and geoeconomic terms, but also through a civilizational prism that reflects attitudes developed over decades.
Text in Context
Authors: Stoltz Dustin S. , Taylor Marshall A.
Published: February 2024

Language is generous. It is a window into the mind, an echo of shared meaning, and a tool people use to remake the social world. Language, typically, enters social scientific examination in the form of text-either transcribed by the examiners or written by the examinees. Text allows us to map meanings across time, space, and people. In this chapter, we explore what language and text is and is not, bounding our object of inquiry.
Speaking with Homer
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: February 2024

Chapter 1 explores early humanist efforts to establish Homer as the head of a Renaissance epic tradition. Readings of Francesco Petrarch’s Africa and Trionfi and Angelo Poliziano’s Silvae reveal that from its earliest days, Renaissance epic establishes speech with Homer as the ultimate proof of a poet’s place in the epic tradition. Throughout Petrarch’s epic output, metaphors of deafness and muteness to Homer and his heroes contrast with the language of hearing and speech that describes Petrarch’s relationships with Latin poets and reveal the limitations of the humanist poetics of imitation that Petrarch himself did so much to develop. Petrarch’s strategies to overcome Homeric silence resonate through two centuries of Italian and neo-Latin poetry. They lay out the challenge of poetic reckonings with Homer and the Homeric tradition taken up by later poets—most spectacularly Angelo Poliziano. In his presentation of Odysseus as a hero of experience and his choice of an Odyssean ending, Poliziano anticipates developments in the later epic tradition. As Petrarch’s humanism gives way to Poliziano’s, Homer begins to emerge from Virgil’s shadow as a predecessor who cannot be subsumed in ‘the classical epic tradition’ but must be heard and reckoned with independently. These poems distinguish Homer from Virgil, looking to him for alternatives to Virgil’s authority, exemplarity, and ethics. They turn the humanist problem of recovering original sources into a poetic problem of performing authority. For Renaissance epic poets, the immense challenge of creating an authorizing conversation with Homer becomes itself a heroic enterprise.
Ariosto’s Fractured Odysseys
Authors: Van der Laan Sarah
Published: February 2024

This chapter reads the Orlando furioso against humanist teaching methods and reading practices to show that the Furioso’s ideals of achievable, sustainable heroism and humanism emerge from a dynamic interplay of Odyssean failure and successful revision. Ariosto’s characters attempt to emulate Odysseus’ heroic feats and traits by following the practices of Renaissance exemplarity. Reconstructing those practices from humanist reference works and the printed and manuscript marginalia of early editions, the chapter shows that the Furioso condemns them as essentially prismatic and thus ill-equipped to teach the interplay of qualities that constitutes Odyssean heroism. Where humanist surrogates for reading poetry fail, Ariosto argues, epic poetry and intertextual poetics succeed. By selecting various facets of Odysseus’ character and reassembling them into a finally successful Odyssean narrative, Ariosto constructs a partial, careful defence of human capability. He uses the classical hero of reason and prudence to ask what possibilities there may be for valour in a modern world, what kind of virtue the Odyssey can teach. Allowing this Odyssean model of epic closure to succeed where the Furioso’s Virgilian ending fails, Ariosto sets Odyssean prudence above Virgilian furor. By focusing these Odyssean imitations on marriage and the interaction of reason with desire, and by elevating the partial and prudent emulation of Odysseus above the full and furious imitation of Aeneas, Ariosto redefines heroic ethics and epic closure on Odyssean models of prudence, homecoming, and social reintegration.
Regulating Public and Private Interactions Through Procurement
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

This chapter concentrates on procurement as a regulatory actor. It explores the role of procurement in mediating interactions between the public and private actors involved in the adoption of digital technologies by the public sector. The chapter starts by using agency theory to map the logic of the interactions between the public sector entities seeking to adopt the technology, the (private) economic operators seeking to provide it, and the procurement function as gatekeeper. In addition to the well-known ‘weak public buyer’ problem, this mapping evidences the difficulties of the ‘two-sided’ gatekeeping that procurement is expected to carry out to discipline not only the behaviour of the tech provider, but also that of the adopting public entity. This shows the heightened potential for tensions and governance challenges in the process of procuring un(der)regulated technologies, where procurement’s agency and gatekeeping roles are overlaid. The chapter concludes with a first sketch of a proposal to discharge procurement of this newest regulatory gatekeeping role through mandatory requirements and external oversight, which will be developed in more detail in Chapter 5.
The Technological Promise of Digital Governance
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

Focusing on procurement digitalization as a site of unregulated public sector technological experimentation, this chapter takes a governance perspective to reflect on the process of horizon scanning and experimentation with digital technologies for the management of public procurement. It stresses how digitalization aspirations can drive policy agendas and make them vulnerable to hype, despite technological immaturity and in the face of evidence of the difficulty of rolling out public sector transformation programmes—for example, regarding the ongoing wave of transition to e-procurement. The chapter stresses how delivering on procurement’s goals of integrity, efficiency, and transparency requires facing challenges derived from the information intensity and complexity of procurement governance. Digital technologies promise to bring solutions to such informational burden and thus augment decision-makers’ ability to deal with that complexity and with related uncertainty. The allure of the potential benefits of deploying digital technologies generates ‘policy irresistibility’ that can capture decision-making by policymakers overly exposed to the promise of ‘tech fixes’ to persistent governance challenges. The chapter sets out how this can in turn result in excessive experimentation with digital technologies for procurement governance in the name of transformation.
Governing the Assessment and Taking of Risks in Digital Procurement Governance
Authors: Sanchez-Graells Albert
Published: February 2024

Managing the risks generated by public procurement digitalization requires deploying several risk assessment tools, or at least a tool capable of capturing risks of a very different nature and stemming from different sources. This chapter stresses how, concentrating on data- and technology-related issues only, this already requires assessment of a wide array of issues, such as data hazards, algorithmic harms, technological dependency, and cybersecurity threats. Taking the perspective of the emerging model of risk-based regulation, this chapter furthers the analysis of the specific (sub)model that is emerging in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Given that this model applies to the acquisition of digital technologies for all types of public sector activity—that is, it is not specific to procurement digitalization—the chapter evidences the shortcomings in the general regulatory approach to public sector digitalization that justify the creation of mechanisms of external oversight and mandatory requirements proposed in this book.
Disrupting Central Banking or Shadow Central Banking
Authors: Dell'Erba Marco
Published: February 2024

Private entities have recently attempted to invade the realm of central banking. This chapter identifies such activity as ‘shadow central banking’, and draws analogies to the previous emergence of ‘shadow banking’ more generally. The similarities between shadow banking and shadow central banking are clear when analysing the circumstances of their emergence, their pathologies, and the regulatory response. This chapter focuses on the evolving roles of central banks and private initiatives, as their activities have led to the rethinking of central banking activities and the form of money in modern capitalism. In doing this, it proposes that this disruption of traditional central banking activity stems from a new interpretation of the concept of money, one that defies the classic dichotomy of ‘central bank money’ versus ‘commercial bank money’. This chapter then analyses the main characteristics of shadow central banking and identifies specific commonalities not only with the shadow banking system, but also with historical systems that pre-existed the modern central banking framework. Finally, it considers the systemic risks, systemic conflicts of interest and opaque corporate governance mechanisms associated with shadow central banking and posits some policy considerations to address such risks.
Introduction
Authors: Reynolds Anna
Published: February 2024

The introduction begins with an unusual work by Thomas Urquhart in which he claims to have had his manuscripts plundered and used as waste paper by Parliamentarian soldiers during the English Civil War, before going on to himself compose a text on scraps of waste paper in a London printing house. Urquhart’s claims regarding the histories and fates of his writing materials are representative of the material and imaginative presence of waste paper in early modern England more broadly—the subject of Waste Paper in Early Modern England. The introduction goes on to overview existing scholarship on subjects related to waste paper; to outline the place of papermaking in the early modern imagination and its connection to that of waste paper; and to explain Waste Paper in Early Modern England’s indebtedness and contribution to scholarship on the phenomenology of reading, material culture, and the theorization of waste, commodities, things, and stuff.
Hard and Soft NPM in City Management
Authors: Lapsley Irvine
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines NPM in practice. It examines NPM as a colonising device which mobilises management practices as the dominant strain of thinking in public service organisations, in this case in the study setting of cities. The prevailing concept of NPM in the literature is conventionally depicted as a preoccupation with calculative practice and there are many city studies which take this perspective (for example, Lapsley, Miller, and Panozzo, 2010; Kornberger and Carter, 2010; and Ahrens and Ferry, 2015; McCrone, 2022). However, this study not only examines aspects of hard NPM (as expressed by specific calculative practices) but it also extends the discussion of NPM to examine soft NPM—the mimicry of private sector business practices but which goes beyond calculative practices to include softer forms of business techniques, such as branding from marketing (Bertilsson, Renstam, and Sullivan, 2022). Branding has been described as a business practice which is penetrating many aspects of everyday living (Kornberger, 2010). Also, much of the NPM literature emphasises the importance of accounting and calculative practice in everyday living, but this study reports on calculative practice as complex, with instrumental, ambivalent, and symbolic aspects.
Co-production—An Ethnographic Analysis of Local Services with Renewed ‘Traditional’ Methods
Authors: Kudo Hiroko
Published: February 2024

In recent years, the sustainability of public services has been discussed and studied by researchers as well as practitioners. This chapter, thus, explores public service tradition and examples of Japan (Avenell, 2010; Haddad, 2012) and analyses them in terms of sustainability through commons. One of the recent developments in public services is to co-produce with citizens (Kikuchi, 2010; Kawato et al., 2011), which was a historically and widely employed method (Haddad, 2012). The tradition of co-production in basic community services has been replaced by public services delivered by local governments (Jain, 2011, Matsuura, 2006) after the Second World War, alongside with the effort to ‘modernise’ and ‘westernise’ the country. Since then, local public services have increased significantly in terms of varieties as well as in expenditure. Serious natural disasters and crises have been managed with significant citizen participation, which has proved the possibility of sustainability in delivering public services. Citizens’ self-help has been reintroduced even for building and maintenance of the roads (see Yanai City, 1994; Mino City, 2017), typically provided by the public sector in the modern society, but traditionally by the local community (Sasaki and Sasaki 2006). Services provided through self-help and mutual aid are much more sustainable compared to those provided by the public sector. Thus, the introduction of co-production with the citizen is indeed a process of rediscovering the traditional way of providing services with civil society’s self-help and/or through traditional ‘commons’.
Reflecting on Management Change in the UK Public Sector
Authors: Hyndman Noel , Liguori Mariannunziata
Published: February 2024

Over almost three decades, central governments in many countries have engaged in reforms aimed at improving public-sector practices, with a main area of change involving accounting processes. Such changes (particularly with respect to financial accounting, budgeting and performance management) are often introduced with claims that they will support government, at any level, in becoming ‘modern’ and ‘business-like’. A major argument for their introduction is that these ‘new’ accounting tools will provide better information for decision making and control, and this is often linked to the assumed achievement of a more-effective, more-efficient, and more-accountable public sector. Focusing on the main accounting changes that have occurred in the UK public sector over the last 30 years, this chapter examines their effects and consequences. Using ideas rooted in the New Public Management literature, ideas emanating from institutional theory, and contemporary research, the chapter considers the impact of these accounting changes, and the reasons they are still popular after years of implementation and empirical evidence suggesting they do not always work as intended. While some evidence of radical change is found (where accounting systems and staff thinking have changed because of the new tools’ introduction), frequently, accounting modifications have resulted in a changed architecture of accounting, but limited use, and understanding, of this new, ‘better’, ‘modern’ information. This has led to some dysfunctional (often unintended) consequences. The time has perhaps arrived to ask: was it all worth it?
When Managers Take Over
Authors: Bolleyer Nicole
Published: February 2024

This chapter theorizes and examines to what extent central traits of the ‘professionalized voluntary organization’ allow for managers to take control over internal decision-making (i.e. to start operating as a group of decision-makers in its own right), thereby displacing organizational members and leaders alike. Vice versa, it examines whether ‘voluntary association features’ help contain such tendencies by incentivizing the maintenance of organizational accountability structures over the growing need for expertise and efficiency in decision-making. As with member control, the quantitative analysis suggests that the two templates shape CSOs in opposite ways: professionalization and bureaucratization as central features of the ‘professionalized voluntary organization’ increase the propensity for staff control over decisions. In contrast, organizations with multi-tier structures that rely heavily on volunteer staff (central association features) help contain it. Consequently, the findings suggest that CSO accountability to organizational actors can remain intact if CSOs’ voluntary capacity remains strong, despite the growing pressure towards more efficient and expertise-based decision-making.
Disaggregating the Transmission Belt and the Study of CSOs’ Democratic Contributions
Authors: Bolleyer Nicole
Published: February 2024

This chapter synthesizes the quantitative and qualitative findings to underline the usefulness of the two organizational templates ‘voluntary association’ and ‘professionalized voluntary association’ to specify and analyse organizational trade-offs that increasingly confront CSOs in individualizing societies that, in turn, shape CSOs’ democratic contributions. Embodying distinct behaviour logics, the characteristics central to each governance template—overall—generate contrasting repercussions on each of the dimensions used to assess these contributions (member activism, staff control, goal reorientation, and political engagement). At the same time, features central to each template have positive repercussions for some of the four dimensions and negative repercussions for the others. This highlights that neither CSOs resembling ‘voluntary associations’ nor those resembling ‘professionalized voluntary organizations’ are unambiguously superior in terms of their likely democratic contributions. This significantly qualifies the widespread scepticism towards the increasing professionalization, bureaucratization, and state funding of organized civil society in contemporary democracies.
Humanist Criticism
Authors: Mori Giuliano
Published: February 2024

Chapter 4 investigates the emergence of embryonic forms of critical historical scholarship in the fifteenth century, arguing that the legal knowledge shared by Quattrocento humanists channeled a critical attitude toward sources and a method of comparative assessment grounded in verisimilitude. Such a critical approach is displayed in the historical works by humanists who tended to equate historical truth and verisimilitude, such as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Bartolomeo Facio, and Bernardo Giustinian. The integration of judicial methodologies into historical works was more problematic for Quattrocento antiquarians, who rejected the notion of verisimilitude. Yet, while radical antiquarians such as Pomponio Leto remained deaf to the issue of historical criticism, moderate antiquarians expended great efforts to verify traditional historical narratives. Lorenzo Valla realized that a critical method of assessment inspired by judicial inquisition was indispensable to the analysis of doubtful traditions such as those discussed in the Oration on the Donation of Constantine and the Epistle on the two Tarquins. However, Valla repeatedly states, because they revolve around verisimilar conjectures rather than factual necessity, works such as the Oration and the Epistle cannot be considered histories. They belong, instead, to the genre of judicial oratory—a genre that Valla forcefully distinguished from history proper.
Annius of Viterbo
Authors: Mori Giuliano
Published: February 2024

At the end of the fifteenth century, the authors who were most liable to develop critical methods of assessment grounded in verisimilitude were not eminently interested in facts, whereas those who were most invested in the quest for factual truth either lacked the theoretical means to develop a critical approach to history or considered historical criticism as being distinct from history proper. This disconnect entailed serious consequences that Chapter 5 analyzes through the example of the reception of the infamous historical forgeries by Annius of Viterbo. Under the guise of an antiquarian, Annius exploited the critical weaknesses of Quattrocento historiography in order to pass as true a bogus universal historical account that had the mere appearance of factuality, despite being utterly fictitious and thoroughly non-verisimilar. The chapter focuses on Annius’ deceitful strategies, which were closely related to the characteristic features of Quattrocento antiquarianism, involving the use of pseudo-archeological materials and the definition of historical truth as the objective report of facts in the style of ancient annalists. Annius’ deceitful enterprise was made possible by the antiquarian rejection of historiographical verisimilitude. Once Annius had managed to establish himself as the mere collector of authentic fragments of ancient annals, the lack of verisimilitude that characterized those fragments ceased to be a problem.
Conclusion
Authors: Mori Giuliano
Published: February 2024

The forged historical fragments by Annius of Viterbo were ultimately exposed when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars combined the interest in factual truth that characterized Quattrocento antiquarians with the attention for verisimilitude displayed by authors such as Leonardo Bruni and Bartolomeo Facio. Using Annius’ fall from favor as an example, the Conclusion shows that the emergence of historical criticism was contingent on the ability to draw fine distinctions and comparisons that in turn required scholars to operate upon a graded scale of verisimilitude or probability. This claim is substantiated by considering some of the best-known sixteenth-century examples of historical criticism, including the works of François Baudouin, Jean Bodin, and, in particular, Melchor Cano.
Introduction
Authors: Schryer Stephen
Published: February 2024

The introduction explores movement conservatives’ concept of the liberal establishment. William F. Buckley, Jr. fleshed out the idea of conservative expertise in God and Man at Yale (1951). In this book, Buckley twines together an elitist and populist critique of the academy, positioning the conservative intellectual as an independent scholar immune to liberal groupthink and as a pious traditionalist attuned to the mores of her community. When Buckley and other conservatives founded National Review, they militated this critique against the American intellectual class and the network of institutions they allegedly controlled; conservatives also used their populist elitism to attack the Civil Rights movement, which they perceived as a threat to white majority rule. This critique of the liberal establishment drew literary intellectuals such as Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Joan Didion to National Review’s “Books, Arts, Manners” section, which they hoped to transform into a venue for kinds of literary work out of tune with the academy and publishing industry. Over the course of the 1960s, however, these critics found Buckley’s magazine increasingly inhospitable. Drawing on distant reading techniques favored by magazine scholars, the introduction shows how Kenner, Didion, and other writers were gradually displaced by critics more narrowly wedded to populist conservative ideology.
Conservatism’s Popular Fictions
Authors: Schryer Stephen
Published: February 2024

Chapter 5 explores fiction written by movement conservatism’s two most influential figureheads: Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind (1952), was the preeminent Burkean traditionalist of the post–World War II era. Historians often juxtapose him and Buckley, seeing Kirk as embodying a more humane version of conservatism, attuned to literature and the fine arts, and eschewing the free-market economics championed by National Review. Kirk and Buckley’s fiction, however, complicates this picture. Both wrote didactic popular literature for a conservative audience; Kirk wrote Christian horror stories, while Buckley is famous for his bestselling Blackford Oakes spy novels. These fictions are linked by their middlebrow aesthetic and by their attempts to imagine academic counter-circuits that might bypass the liberal-dominated university. This chapter focuses on a late-career novel by each writer: Kirk’s Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) and Buckley’s Last Call for Blackford Oakes (2005). Kirk’s novel features a Satanic book club whose diabolical misinterpretations of T. S. Eliot mirror the reading practices of post-1960s literary criticism. Buckley’s novel presents the CIA as an alternative to the English Department: a place where advanced forms of literary expertise might thrive, pursued by tradition-minded defenders of the West.
Female Groups
Authors: Hardwick Alexandra
Published: February 2024

Chapter 6 discusses female groups, who tend to be cast as marginal by default. This chapter focuses on Bacchae, Hecuba, Thesmophoriazusae, and Lysistrata. Female groups’ nature and identity is made deliberately uncertain by evoking and then defying stereotypes of female transgression. To varying extents, we are encouraged to view the women as bacchant revellers, groups of violent man-slaying foreign women, military gatherings, or even democratic assemblies, yet the validity of all these categories is consistently undercut. Not only are off-stage groups of women granted a threatening level of power, but their power is made undefinable and incomprehensible to male characters.
Facility, Circumvention, Economic Duress, and the Corporate Veil
Authors: MacQueen Hector L
Published: February 2024

The aim of this chapter is to consider the possible implications for the application of Times Travel Ltd v Pakistan International Airline Corp of a more or less contemporaneous Scottish first instance decision, Lindsay’s Executor v Outlook Finance Ltd. The chapter starts with Ewan McKendrick's arguments regarding Scots law and English law in relation to economic duress. The circumstances in Lindsay’s Executor v Outlook Finance Ltd highlight an unusual application of facility and circumvention in a commercial rather than a purely inter-personal setting, possible because the alleged debtor was a human being acting on his own behalf albeit in support of other family businesses in financial difficulty. The Times Travel case, on the other hand, involved relations between commercial companies, in which facility and circumvention could not have applied. The case also exemplifies the very exposed position of small businesses dealing and contracting with much larger ones. The chapter suggests that in appropriate cases of this kind the corporate veil might be lifted to allow the courts to consider the relations between the human individuals concerned in the transaction as a factor in determining the enforceability of otherwise inter-corporate obligations. Ewan McKendrick’s argument that doctrines of duress, undue influence and (in Scotland) facility and circumvention might be unified under the heads of pre-contractual procedural unfairness or unconscionability is also considered. It is suggested that the substantive unfairness of the contract’s effects should, as in facility and circumvention, also be a factor taken into account.
Shades of Frustration
Authors: Day William
Published: February 2024

This chapter considers the law of frustration. It argues against the ‘one size fits all’ multi-factorial test in the modern authorities which assumes that the law of frustration comprises a single doctrine. Rather, supervening events can operate to excuse performance for a variety of reasons, including through engaging express terms (such as force majeure clauses), terms implied in law (for impossibility of performance), terms implied in fact (for impossibility of the contractual purpose) and different forms of public policy (for illegality under English law, and supervening foreign law illegality where applicable). Splitting out these different doctrines would bring some much needed certainty to this corner of contract law.
The ‘Tripartite Guide’ to Uniform Instruments in the Area of International Commercial Contracts: Background, Content, and Legal Effect
Authors: Vogenauer Stefan
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the significance of the Legal Guide to Uniform Instruments in the Area of International Commercial Contracts, with a Focus on Sales, which is also known as the Tripartite Guide. It highlights that the text is an important and welcome addition to the legal literature on international commercial contract law since it provides an updated overview of the law on international commercial contracting. While the Tripartite Guide primarily focuses on sales, many of the issues covered are equally relevant to other types of contract. The chapter also provides an overview of the contents and legal effects of the Tripartite Guide. It argues that the document has persuasive authority. The Tripartite Guide will have a lasting impact in several regards. Most importantly, it highlights that, beyond the scattered and fragmentary regulatory framework, the field of transnational commercial transactions is governed by a relatively coherent body of law.
“A Touch of Disaster”
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: February 2024

Chapter 2 begins by testing the claims of prophetic insight with respect to the Great Crash that have been made for three novels of 1925. Most famously attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, such prescient powers have also been assigned to two directly comparable, as well as contemporaneous, novels: John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and Nathan Asch’s The Office. The chapter argues that claims of this kind are not without some underlying substance, to the extent that the novels in question simultaneously draw attention to the prospect of future crisis in the financial markets and acknowledge their own liability to be read in the aftermath of such an event. The chapter considers how Fitzgerald evokes a surprisingly broad array of aspects of American financial history past and present; how Dos Passos draws on a rhetoric of biblical prophecy and urban ruin; and how Asch channels an avant-garde aesthetic of speed and futurity—all to signal the US stock market’s persistent and ongoing propensity for violent boom and bust. The chapter subsequently explores the central role that the Great Crash played in Fitzgerald’s imagination in the 1930s, considering a range of nonfictional writings, as well as plans and drafts for unrealized projects, and focusing particularly closely on the intertwining of familial and financial anxieties in the classic post-crash story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). The chapter concludes by reflecting on the Wall Street Crash’s suggestively indirect depiction in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936).
The Green Economy
Authors: Whittaker D. Hugh
Published: February 2024

Chapter 3 turns to green transformation (GX). Japan gained a laggard reputation in the turn to renewable energy, as its reliance on coal increased with the post-Fukushima closure of its nuclear reactors. A considerable step-up is needed if Japan is to achieve a 36+ per cent GHG reduction by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. When it comes to recycling and the circular economy, however, Japan’s record is more impressive. In disaster preparedness and resilience, moreover, a series of natural disasters has pushed Japan to adopt advanced measures and technologies. The chapter further considers market mechanisms for GHG reduction, as well as the ‘Green Growth Strategy’, a set of industrial policies to meet Japan’s climate obligations and rejuvenate the economy, as well as the 2023 GX Realization Basic Plan, which sets out more comprehensively Japan’s path to a green economy in the coming decade.
Libertines
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

This chapter tells two overlapping stories of the young George IV’s identification with Shakespearean princes: Florizel from The Winter’s Tale and Prince Hal from the Henry IV plays. George’s Shakespearean performances in theatre auditoria and print media allowed him and his supporters to negotiate his intimacies with commoners—an early love affair with the actor Mary Robinson and his youthful friendship with the Whig politician Charles James Fox—but to maintain the integrity of royal identity. The chapter explores the different forms of roleplaying which contributed to George’s public profile, and demonstrates the risk of ‘slippage’ within Shakespearean roleplaying. The chapter concludes with a longer historical view, demonstrating the enduring appeal of Prince Hal to later Princes of Wales, and suggesting that this connection can illuminate the shifting anxieties around the public profile of an heir to the throne with regard to sexual behaviour, sociability, political partisanship, and political intervention.
Royal Bodies
Authors: Barnden Sally
Published: February 2024

Beginning with the story of George III’s request, while suffering from his recurrent mental illness, to read King Lear, this chapter provides a detailed account of George’s identification with Lear and its long cultural aftermath. I consider the significance of the differing print and performance versions of the play in the eighteenth century for the king’s engagement with the Lear story, looking closely at the representations of dynastic succession in the variant texts with which George was acquainted. The chapter proposes that while Lear became associated with dynastic anxiety and the fear of reproductive failure for George III and his descendants, it also supported a narrative about the mutually reinforcing nature of the royal body and the realm which ultimately served the monarchy’s sense of its own centrality to history, national identity, and cultural life.
From the Thermaic Gulf to Thasos
Authors: Lazar Leah
Published: February 2024

The first of three regional studies, Chapter 4 focuses on the resource-rich North Aegean, exploring how the Athenians adapted their strategies of negotiation and exploitation to its particular demands. Strategically located allied communities, multi-polis entities with collective bargaining power, and Thraco-Macedonian groups including the Argead and Odrysian kingdoms, with kings and powerful elites, necessitated different parameters of negotiation and the navigation of overlapping spheres of authority. Private relationships with elite individuals were even more important in this region, at and beyond the formal limits of Athenian power. The second half of the chapter turns to the east of the region and the island of Thasos. It argues that the highly successful Thasian model of exploitation, facilitated partly through mainland settlements, forced the Athenians to adopt a number of different strategies to compete. Athenian intervention then forced the Thasians to adapt in turn. Not only was Athenian strategy adjusted in the face of Thasian competition and influence, but this process was mutual and multi-directional.
Redrawing the colonial map
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

Drawing more broadly on thinking about space, place, and scale in both journals, this chapter considers how we can bring the multiscalar sensibilities discussed in Chapter 6 to bear on anticolonial comparison. It begins by discussing four significant geographies drawn from the pages of Présence Africaine and Mensagem: shifting and repopulated space in the work of Aimé Césaire; the ‘world’ in René Depestre and Francisco José Tenreiro; mobile geographies of labour in José Craveirinha and Ousmane Sembène; and imagined places of escape in Luandino Vieira and Alda Espírito Santo. Underpinning this discussion is the question of how these geographies can inform comparative postcolonial work.
Epilogue
Authors: Reza Alexandra
Published: February 2024

This concluding section connects the arguments made to contemporary debates in comparative and postcolonial studies. The book argues that comparison was central to the anticolonial charge of these journals, and this tradition of relational praxis gives us new ways to think about connection and comparison and about methods in postcolonial critique. In particular, by illuminating the connected and comparative nature not only of antcolonialism but also of European empire itself, these journal histories illustrate the valency of multilingual cultural and political analysis to grasp that history of co-colonialism and its afterlives.
Liberal Heroism and Reasonable Doubt
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

12 Angry Men is usually read as a celebration of law’s impartiality in the face of emotional and rhetorical appeals: the disinterested presentation of evidence, if pursued, will dispel clouds of prejudice and, in the end, deliver the truth. This chapter argues the reverse: the movie is rhetorical through and through; it manipulates its viewers to the point where they congratulate themselves for having reached conclusions imposed on them by filmic strategies of which they are sublimely unaware.
The Law’s Dogma and Religious Dogma
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: February 2024

Inherit the Wind dramatizes the forensic and cultural battle between a William Jennings Bryan figure played by Spencer Tracy and a Clarence Darrow type played by Fredric March. The issue is whether the state can ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The law plainly says “yes,” but the two antagonists are less interested in the law than the clash between biblical literalism and rational science. The movie is massively on the side of science and liberal open-mindedness, but even as the religious viewpoint is dismissed and ridiculed its force registers in ways the filmmakers resolutely ignore. A dishonest movie.
Negotiating Crisis
Authors: Agnihotri Indu
Published: February 2024

The story of the Great Depression is generally told from the top to focus on the roadblocks faced by an ascendant, industrial capitalism in the period between the two World Wars. This chapter turns the lens on the impact of economic turbulence on the everyday experiences of women and peasant families in rural Punjab. The crisis precipitated by the Depression demanded that women in rural Punjab take on additional work burdens in the fields and in homes, with increased pressure to spin and grind and a dietary squeeze. Faced with a contraction of resources, families resorted to pawning and selling jewellery, aimed at raising cash resources to meet the revenue demands. Women had to part with jewellery received from natal or marital families, which belonged to them and over which they had customary entitlement in substantial measure. The reduction in acquisition and accumulation of gold, along with mortgage and pawning, left the women in Punjab in a state of collective and individual impoverishment. When ‘normalcy’ returned, dowry increasingly became the accepted form of gift-giving at marriages. The shift away from bride price allowed for patriarchal norms to be reconfigured, with access and control over resources passing out of the hands of women. The Depression effectively undermined women’s economic security within the family and their control over the limited resources that they had access to, reinforcing the notion that their wealth and entitlement were at the disposal of their families.
Countries Going Global
Authors: Rose Richard
Published: February 2024

In the past three decades life expectancy, infant mortality, adult literacy, and access to secondary education have been improving in the vast majority of countries, and female employment and gender equality in employment have been increasing in up to three-quarters of countries. However, because of the distance of many developing countries from international standards, only a minority has caught up with global standards of welfare. Up to two-fifths of countries are at global standards for health; more than one-third have caught up with global standards for education; and almost half of countries have done so for gender equality. National progress reflects the influence of a country’s political and economic development, its religious culture and ex-communist legacy. Seven Asian countries, including China, are overachievers, with more welfare than their resources predict, while a dozen African and Asian countries, including India, are negative outliers in their level of welfare.
Introduction
Authors: Boyle Matthew
Published: February 2024

The topic of self-knowledge has been central to philosophy since antiquity, but if self-knowledge deserves to be, not just a goal that each person should privately pursue, but a topic that philosophers should investigate in general terms, on what basis does it claim this attention? This book urges a reconsideration of the classical idea that the topic of self-knowledge earns its philosophical significance in virtue of its connection with the distinctive nature of human minds. The author argues that the capacity for self-knowledge is a byproduct of the “first-person perspective” that all human beings possess, as rational animals, on their own lives, and seeks to defend this perspective against popular forms of skepticism about its soundness. In the Introduction, these issues are introduced in a preliminary way; the body of the book develops them in depth.
Self-Consciousness
Authors: Boyle Matthew
Published: February 2024

In reflective self-knowledge, each of us appears to ascribe his or her mental states to a single subject, whom s/he designates as “I.” Yet if one’s knowledge of one’s own mental states is grounded in a “nonpositional” consciousness of these states in which the conscious subject is not presented as such, then the emergence of the first person in these reflective self-ascriptions can look mysterious. Where exactly does this “I” come from, and how is its introduction justified? In the present chapter, the author argues that the approach to the Problem of Transparency developed in earlier chapters can also explain our basis for including “I” in ascriptions of self-knowledge, and that the resulting account throws a valuable light on the nature and significance of first-person thought.
The Speaking Window
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

Since the very existence of this life-sustaining planet Earth, be it the search for food or a new water resource or a place fit for shelter to sustain life, almost every living being has had to travel hundreds and thousands of miles when needed. This book is about the world’s biggest migration in human history which was not a choice of those who migrated! After a long period of struggle for independence when a nation fought for its freedom to liberate itself from the shackles of slavery, little did they know the cost to be paid would come in the form of a new pair of chains… the partition, the scars of which are remnant till date. The partition of 1947 claimed the lives in millions and affected countless families which got burnt in the fire of communal violence. This book is an effort to acknowledge the facts which were collected from the survivors who suffered the atrocities of times and still could muster the courage to rise again. This book has 47 such stories covering 52 cities, across 5 countries, with sole aim of bringing forward the real-life experiences of the people who faced partition, who still feel it should be the harmony and peace that one must seek in their respective story over violent behaviour of mankind in desperate times.
The Red Carpet
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

This chapter unfolds the story of Sajjad Kishwar, a great artist, born in Ludhiana who found endless fame in the Pakistan television and radio industry. From the carpet of leaves leading to his school to the red carpet of the entertainment industry, he’s seen it all. He recalls his exhausting journey of migration guarded by the Baloch Army to Rawalpindi. His career started with ‘Raizgari’ while working with PTV studios, leading him to win a series of never-ending accolades. This is the Red Carpet, a rags-to-riches story of an artist whose art did know no boundaries and how his dogged determination was finally paid off.
Wounded Flower
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

This chapter narrates the story of a five-year-old Pushpa from Montgomery and her ordeal during partition which led to a military gate. The story revolves around three Hindu kids who were hiding their identities for days to survive. The storyteller recalls the soul-trembling episodes from her past of her family getting slaughtered mercilessly at the hands of the extremists. How she got separated from her mother and remained at the mercy and kindness of others. Read about how her life is no short of a living proof of a miraculous survival which reminds us all of the proverb: ‘The one who is sheltered by God cannot be killed by anyone’.
Love Migrants
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

This chapter reflects upon the story of Jannat Bibi, and how love and determination can change the course of life when it comes to the struggles with the forces as big as destiny. Read about how the partition of the country tore two families apart and left the storyteller to choose from two impossible choices. How she, along with her two-year-old son, was kept under house arrest by her father to prevent migrating to Pakistan with her husband, nevertheless, the duo made it work for the next decade and had to start life from scratch not once but twice. The story, Love Migrants, is a tale of passionate romance that was patient but relentless and did not flinch in desperate times.
Lost Friendships
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

The chapter unravels the undying love and compassion in a friendship which partition could not divide. The storyteller, Abdul Rashid, recalls how his father had formed deep friendships in Amritsar and it was for that they were able to escape safely. The same man also helped feeding the family when it was starving in Khilchian for 27 days. Read about the migration story of Abdul Rashid whose family suffered many ordeals in Hudiara. He also mentions about the Walton camp in Lahore before they could make it to their relatives in Chak 27. The story, Lost Friendships, is about the narrator who often wonders if his friends whom he left as a child, would be able to recognize him.
The Salvation Story
Authors: Dutt Sandeep , Hayat Faisal , Ritika
Published: February 2024

The chapter reveals the story of Sai Ramte Shah Chisti, a man who has lived many lives. He was born in 1910 in Malerkotla. Having spent 15 years of life in jails, he remembers his martyr father whose death as a martyr during Jaito Morcha inspired him to choose the path of a freedom fighter. He recalls attending a secret conference where Bhagat Singh, Chander Shekhar Azad, and Teja Singh Sultantar. The chapter belongs to the man who was on the run for years, penned his speeches under the pen name of comrade Dukhiya, worked as an activist after independence, and later went on journey that took him closer to God. The story is journey of the man’s salvation.