bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Imaginaries of Prosperity as Constitutional Imaginaries
Authors: Bartl Marija
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the question of what renders imaginaries constitutional. Should we expect to find constitutional imaginaries in constitutional texts and doctrine? Or should we look for them elsewhere in our societies? While constitutional documents or conventions have occupied much of our political imagination, the truly constitutional imaginaries can be only those imaginaries that have actually shaped, or constituted, the ways in which we go about making and re-making our societies. I will argue that the two main constitutional imaginaries of modernity, that is, the social imaginaries that have in fact shaped the deep structure of our societies, have presented themselves as stories of prosperity. These imaginaries of prosperity, through directing individual and collective efforts and resources toward either private or collective routes to prosperity, have shaped the way we think about not only constitutions, but also economy, politics, government, and law. This chapter first explores the relation between social imaginaries and social change, after which it turns to developing the concept of imaginaries of prosperity. Subsequently, it traces the collective imaginary of prosperity behind the Weimar constitution and contrasts it with the privatizing imaginaries of prosperity underlying the European Constitution. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the role of constitutional law and scholarship for social change.
Conclusion
Authors: Komárek Jan
Published: March 2023

In the concluding chapter a follow-up (and necessary) endeavour is presented: the need to explore national imaginaries of Europe, with particular emphasis on the post-communist Europe and the importance of 1989 for both ‘Old Europe’ and its utopia of ‘Ever Closer Union’ and its ‘Other’: post-communist Europe, which believed in the ideology of its return to the former.
The Interconnections between Tax Crime, Organized Crime, and Corruption
Authors: Turksen U , Vozza D , Reger F , Djakovic A
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the interconnections between tax crime, organized crime, and corruption from phenomenological, conceptual, and legal perspectives to shed light on under-explored phenomena and their impact on the EU institutions and Member States. On the one side, organized criminal groups often engage in sophisticated tax fraud schemes and exploit current limits in the legal and institutional frameworks at the national and EU levels to make illegal gains. On the other side, public officials in tax and customs administrations and law enforcement agencies involved in the fight against financial crimes can be enablers of tax evasion in cases of bribery and collusion with criminals. The dirty money generated by these criminal offences is also often cleaned through money laundering schemes developed with the assistance of some dishonest professionals. Organized tax crime and fiscal corruption, coupled with money laundering, are serious threats to security at the EU and national levels. Considering their correlation, they should be targeted explicitly from an operational perspective by enhancing an integrated model which combines a ‘whole-of-government approach’ and ‘responsibilization strategy’ in the public and private sectors.
Public Interest Disclosure and Whistleblower Protection
Authors: Turksen U , Abukari A , Kreissl R
Published: March 2023

This chapter examines the germane issues affecting the use of whistleblowing to support the fight against tax crime in the EU. One of the proven ways to address the problem of tax crime is the use of whistleblowing as a crime discovery tool to complement the efforts of LEAs. The EU’s PROTAX project established that whistleblowing/public interest disclosure facilitates the mitigation of tax crimes such as tax evasion and VAT fraud in the EU. However, whistleblowers have been exposed to the risk of retaliation, which has the propensity to dissuade them from engaging in necessary disclosures to protect the public interest. Although the EU has since 17 December 2019 introduced a Whistleblower Protection Directive (WBPD) to enhance the protection of whistleblowers from many detriments, it is yet to be seen the extent to which the WBPD will be successfully operationalized. Even when implemented in its current shape, the WBPD has deficits including lack of clear sanctions for organizational breaches and evasive material scope. In addressing the challenges and deficits, the chapter also provides enquiry-based toolkit for effective whistleblower protection. The chapter concludes that although the WBPD remains challenged by procedural and substantive inadequacies, which can be addressed by collaborative efforts of all stakeholders, the Directive will significantly improve the legal protection mechanisms for whistleblowers in ways that can support the fight against tax crime in the EU.
Political Culture, the State, and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

This book examines how the strategic problem of containing threats of religious war and violence shaped political culture and the development of the state in Britain and Ireland between Elizabeth I’s last serious courtship and the death of James VI and I. In doing so it shows how the religious politics of England, Scotland, and Ireland were thoroughly intertwined with each other, and with developments on the European Continent, requiring a treatment that moves beyond a framework of national history by connecting events in different countries in a continuous narrative. Specific topics covered include the interaction of religious and dynastic politics not only in relations between royal families but also among the nobility and gentry; efforts by the Elizabethan state to contain threats of Catholic rebellions; the often fraught relations between the Elizabethan regime and James VI in Scotland; cultural attitudes related to military entrepreneurship on both land and sea; challenges to Protestant state power in Ireland; English intervention in the wars of the Netherlands; the interplay between English and Scottish conflicts over Presbyterianism in the 1590s; efforts to create a more integrated and effective state encompassing all of Britain and Ireland after 1603; and the European policies of James VI and I.
An Ambiguous Dynastic Threat
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

As religious tensions mounted within England, the English government lost control of Scotland after its adolescent king, James VI, fell under the influence of his newly arrived French cousin, Esmé Stuart, soon created duke of Lennox, and other Scots wishing to challenge English dominance. For several years the English privy council attempted, with limited success, to regain control by supporting dissident Scottish nobles and radical presbyterian clergy, whose views and behavior Elizabeth would never have tolerated in her own kingdom. In 1583 Patrick Adamson, archbishop of St. Andrews, traveled to England and attempted to persuade Archbishop Whitgift to oppose this policy, but failed because evidence of Scottish collusion with Elizabeth’s European enemies was too compelling. A fragile alliance between the two British sovereigns was finally negotiated in 1585, reinforced by secret understandings between James and the earl of Leicester. It helped seal the fate of James’s mother, Mary Stuart, but remained tenuous until after the Armada. Thereafter James tried to position himself as a godly Protestant king by mending fences with Scottish presbyterians and sheltering a few English puritans, even while he continued to protect Catholic nobles. His religious position therefore remained ambiguous.
War, Virtue, and the State
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

Elizabeth’s last favorite, Robert Devereux second earl of Essex, has long been associated by historians with both the patronage of avant garde political ideas and a rise of factionalism within the court. This chapter re-examines both views by placing the earl’s career in a longer-term perspective, identifying major strands of continuity between his outlook and behavior, and those of previous Elizabethan swordsmen like the earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. It shows how Essex’s circle built upon but simultaneously reconfigured established patterns of thought and conduct. Essex’s outlook centered on his views about connections between the state—a concept he invoked with great frequency—and a set of noble virtues and virtuous passions, involving honor, courage, and public service that he associated with himself and his followers. He saw those virtues as opposed by the “base” qualities he associated with his court adversaries and, increasingly, the queen and her aging ministers. His critique of the queen and court built upon earlier Catholic polemical arguments, which he stripped of their partisan confessional dimensions. It was also influenced by readings of the Roman historian Tacitus, although Tacitean histories did more to reinforce and refine attitudes the earl and his circle already held than to provide an original template for political interpretation.
Peace Without
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: March 2023

The chapter questions the traditional view that James’s policies toward Europe were determined by his philosophical commitment to peace and principles of legitimacy, arguing that he primarily sought to advance his own interests by playing European states off against each other, while limiting his risks and financial commitments. This meant promoting solidarity among Protestant states while simultaneously seeking cross-confessional alliances based on shared secular interests. Pacific and legitimist rhetoric often served to excuse his maneuvers to achieve these goals. But especially after the Twelve Years Truce between Spain and the United Provinces in 1609 and Henry IV’s murder in 1610, James grew alarmed by religious and political divisions in the Dutch Republic, and his belief that Spanish, papal, and Jesuit influence had increased significantly in France. His fears of Protestant disunity and resurgent Catholic militancy impelled him to meddle in the internal affairs of both countries. He tried to silence the Dutch theologian Vorstius and backed a campaign by Calvinists and Maurice of Nassau to suppress Arminianism and the Arminians’ chief supporter, Oldenbarnevelt. He also underhandedly encouraged French rebellions by the prince of Condé, the duke of Bouillon, and the Huguenots against the regency government of Marie de Médicis. While he had some success in the Netherlands, his efforts to reorient French policies failed.
Sexualizing Economic Modernity
Authors: Psomiades Kathy Alexis
Published: March 2023

This chapter draws on the anthropological theory of Henry Maine and John McLennan to show how Anthony Trollope’s schematizations of women, property, and circulation participate in the logic of primitive marriage. Maine’s Ancient Law told a modernity story about the movement from status to contract that connected patriarchy, family, and inalienable property on the one hand, and gender neutrality, the contractual individual, and transferable property on the other. In Primitive Marriage, McLennan recivilized patriarchy by positing a non-patriarchal “before” of sexual chaos that made both patriarchy and private property into achievements, but that also paradoxically destabilized their naturalness. In The Eustace Diamonds (1871), Anthony Trollope imagines a world in which property and exchange operate systematically in both economic and erotic registers. The Eustace Diamonds is often read in relation both to William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), to which it self-consciously refers. The chapter uses these earlier novels to show the difference anthropology makes in the realist plot of the materialistic heroine that Trollope borrows from Thackeray, and in the sensation-fiction plots of theft, rape, and madness that Trollope simultaneously borrows from Collins and repudiates.
Sexualizing Political Modernity
Authors: Psomiades Kathy Alexis
Published: March 2023

This chapter centers on how Victorian anthropology sexualizes the political theory of the social contract, and the binary opposition between tyranny and consent that underwrites it. Henry Maine and John McLennan went beyond drawing analogues between marital and political relations to put sexual tyranny and consent at the center of the story of civil society. We tend to think that it is late twentieth-century feminism that first articulated insights into the gendered terms of liberal political theory. Victorian anthropology was already disrupting the problematic story of contract and consent in the late nineteenth century. This chapter begins with readings of two important late twentieth-century theorists of the sexual contract, Carole Pateman and Nancy Armstrong, to situate their work in relation to Victorian theory. It goes on to read Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe, Junior, arguing that social theorists and novelists alike drew on anthropology’s sexualized modernity stories to think about how radically different national subjects can find common ground, how self-interest and generosity can coexist, how association can be voluntary and lasting.
Diagonal Operators
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the properties of diagonal operators norm, eigenvalues, spectrum, compactness) and extends these concepts to general Hilbert-space operators.
The Fourier Transform
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

We study the Fourier transform, show that it is a unitary operator, and compute its spectral decomposition. Along the way, we discuss the Hardy space of the upper-half plane, where the Fourier transform plays a crucial role.
The Compressed Shift
Authors: Garcia Stephan Ramon , Mashreghi Javad , Ross William T.
Published: March 2023

These compressed shift operators provide concrete, function-theoretic models for certain Hilbert-space contractions. As a guiding example, this chapter focuses on the compressed shift on the model space corresponding to an atomic inner function.
Principle 2: The Text
Authors: Calnan Richard
Published: March 2023

Chapter 2 explains that the words of the statute are the source of legislature’s objective intention. It has been seen from Chapter 1 that the guiding principle of interpretation is to establish the legislature’s objective intention. The source of that intention is the words of the statute. New provisions cannot be implied into statutes. Nor can statutes be rectified. What must be interpreted is the words of the statute itself.
Principle 7: Unnatural Meaning
Authors: Calnan Richard
Published: March 2023

Chapter 7 describes the circumstances in which the interpreter can give a meaning to the words of a statute that differs from their natural meaning. It explains that this only occurs very occasionally in order to deal with a result that appears to be unfair or unreasonable. The ultimate aim of statutory interpretation is to establish the objective intention of the legislature; and the more unreasonable or unfair the result, the more unlikely it is that the legislature can have intended it. An example of this principle is that clear words are needed to override a person’s fundamental liberties. The chapter also discusses the approach of the courts to the interpretation of section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998.
Positive Obligations as a Means of Establishing State Responsibility for ‘Modern Slavery’ in Human Rights Law
Authors: Jovanovic Marija
Published: March 2023

The chapter clarifies the mechanism for establishing state responsibility for ‘modern slavery’ in human rights law, which is grounded in the doctrine of positive obligations. It explains how positive obligations apply in the context of rights which are considered ‘absolute’, especially when the interference with such rights stems from the conduct of non-state actors. The discussion considers positive human rights obligations in general, their origins, rationale, nature, and scope. Particular attention is paid to the difference between rights infringements by state and non-state actors and the often neglected distinction between positive obligations and remedies for established human rights violations. The chapter finally explores several taxonomies of positive obligations proposed in the literature, and explains why the matrix comprising of general and specific obligations serves as the best analytical lens for examining the evolving human rights jurisprudence on state responsibility to address ‘modern slavery’.
Conclusion: Human Rights Law, Slavery, and State in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Jovanovic Marija
Published: March 2023

The chapter reflects on the range of legal domains relevant for addressing ‘modern slavery’, stressing out the limits of human rights law as the ultimate response to such serious forms of exploitation. The conclusion emphasises the discrete agenda of the book, which sought to explain the responsibility of states for ‘modern slavery’ in human rights law by considering their obligations to protect individuals from such grave forms of exploitation. It then points to another dimension of state responsibility for ‘modern slavery’ that is broader, more elusive, and harder to establish in the strictly legal sense, and which remains outside the scope of this enquiry. This second dimension of state responsibility for ‘modern slavery’ concerns wider legal structures that create conditions in which practices of ‘modern slavery’ are allowed to flourish, despite a number of instruments and initiatives designed to address it. While the book focused on the role of law, and human rights law in particular, as part of the solution to the problem of ‘modern slavery’, the chapter reminds that the full account of the relationship between the state, law, and slavery in the twenty-first century must also consider the ways in which law creates and perpetuates structural conditions that allow slavery to persist.
Elite Conspiracies
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: March 2023

The distrust of science is part of a more general populist backlash against the political, economic, and technocratic elite. To the extent that scientific research is used by governments to justify policies that people dislike, science is viewed as part of the problem. Science created the tools that allow businesses and governments to—there is no better word for it—spy on us. They also created the Internet and social media that the most paranoid use to spread zany conspiracy theories that discredit scientists and sow distrust.
Most Medicines Disappoint
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: March 2023

Medical advances have been among the greatest scientific successes, including germ theory, anesthesia, vaccines, antibiotics, X-rays, and organ transplants. Scientists also instituted the randomized controlled trials that allow them to obtain reliable estimates of the benefits and side effects of proposed medical treatments. However, randomized controlled trials are gauged by statistical significance, which encourages the p-hacking that is partly responsible for the disappointing performance of many “proven-effective” treatments and the resulting disillusionment with medical researchers.
The Replication Crisis
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: March 2023

Our lives have been enriched immensely by the scientific method’s insistence that beliefs and theories should not be accepted uncritically, but tested empirically. Unfortunately, clever researchers have found ways to game the system; for example, by data mining and p-hacking in order to achieve statistical significance. The consequence is the replication crisis that threatens to undermine the reputation of science and scientists. Real science still moves forward with honest tests of plausible theories that can be replicated with additional tests. Our challenge—and the challenge for scientists—is to distinguish real science from junk science.
Shakespeare’s Choicest Flowers
Authors: Tregear Ted
Published: March 2023

Returning to Thomas Deane, the reader of Shakespeare introduced in the Introduction, this chapter uses Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedére to read Venus and Adonis. By returning to the floral metaphors of the anthology, it outlines the relations between style, schooling, and gender in early modern England, to reveal a persistent association in humanist writings between rhetorical flowers and a rhetorically suspect femininity. It reads Ovid, and the epyllia by Lodge and Marlowe that imitated his writing, as picking up on this danger, using the rhetorical techniques of the schoolroom—above all commonplacing—to unsettle its social and political ends. Venus and Adonis, it argues, is a study in the hazardous potential of poetry’s flowers, and their transformations of rhetoric into poetry: from the salacious lessons Venus teaches, to the pert couplets the poem produces, to the short-lived metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower, no sooner transformed than plucked.
The Dictator’s Party
Authors: Wolf Anne
Published: March 2023

Chapter 1 argues that the politics of ideas is central to scrutinizing the durability of dictatorships with ruling parties, challenging studies focusing primarily on incumbents’ use or threat of force. It proposes that the root of dictatorial stability is internal: incumbents seek to accumulate power, but through this they risk losing the support of their constituency. To counter this threat, dictators have two ideational strategies at their disposal: correctivism and the creation of new normative priorities. Both involve the promotion of innovations, ostensibly for the good of the party but through which incumbents in fact seek to fortify their own rule. For these strategies to succeed, the proposed changes need to resonate with party followers and to appear desirable and credible. If followers consider the incumbent’s power reinforcement to be unjust and illegitimate, they may rebel against him. Any internecine contention encourages wider political instability, possibly regime collapse.
Geometry and Complex Arithmetic
Authors: Needham Tristan
Published: March 2023

This chapter discusses geometry and complex arithmetic. A complex number is a single, indivisible entity-a point in the plane. Only when one chooses to describe such a point with numerical coordinates does a complex number appear to be compound or “complex”. Cartesian and polar coordinates are the most common ways of labelling complex numbers, but they are not the only ways. The chapter then looks at Euler’s formula, which was discovered by Leonhard Euler around 1740. It differentiates between the moving particle argument and the power series argument. A simple but important consequence of Euler’s formula is that sine and cosine can be constructed from the exponential function. The chapter also considers the applications of complex arithmetic to different areas of mathematics, including trigonometry, geometry, calculus, algebra, and vectorial operations. Finally, it assesses transformations and Euclidean geometry.
Complex Integration: Cauchy’s Theorem
Authors: Needham Tristan
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores conditions under which the value of an integral does not depend on the choice of contour. One such result is an analogue of the Fundamental Theorem of real analysis, and in deference to that subject it bears the same name. However, there exists a still deeper result which has no counterpart in the world of the reals. It is called Cauchy’s Theorem. It is not only possible, but sometimes useful to integrate non-analytic functions. However, new phenomena arise if one concentrates on the integrals of mappings that are analytic. Cauchy’s Theorem is the essence of these new phenomena. Essentially, it says that any two integrals from a to b will agree, provided that the mapping is analytic everywhere in the region lying between the two contours. Almost all the fundamental results of the subject flow from this single horn of plenty.
Vector Fields and Complex Integration
Authors: Needham Tristan
Published: March 2023

This chapter explains the relationship between vector fields and complex integration. It begins by defining the concepts of flux and work. Although the chapter primarily focuses on two-dimensional flows, it is important to mention the concept of flux in three dimensions. If a fluid is flowing through ordinary space, it no longer makes sense to speak of the flux across a curve, but it does make sense to speak of the rate at which the fluid crosses a surface. The total flux is then obtained by integrating this quantity over the whole surface. Just as in two dimensions, the incompressibility of a three-dimensional flow is equivalent to the statement that all closed surfaces (that do not contain sources or sinks) have vanishing flux. The chapter then considers the complex potential.
Brazil
Authors: Binder Andrea
Published: March 2023

In Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, offshore financial services have a deep impact on state power. They affect Brazilian state power through both sides of the balance sheet—taxation and money creation. Yet, it is offshore banking that is more consequential. In Brazil, offshore finance has become an integral part of the domestic cycle of money, tax, and debt. Starting in the 1960s, offshore banking largely replaced onshore money creation. Offshore banking enhanced state power by providing access to preferential liquidity. It helped finance Brazil’s ‘economic miracle’ in the late 1960s–1970s and boosted growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, offshore banking also undermined state power during Latin America’s 1982 crisis. Following this economic and political fallout, the Brazilian state built defensive measures against offshore finance. It protected its tax base through a mix of domestic and international measures. And it effectively mitigated the risks of offshore banking through regulation and central bank interventions. Brazilian state power became resilient towards offshore finance. Nevertheless, given the structural dependence on offshore banking, and the level of corruption it enables, offshore finance remains a double-edged sword for the Brazilian state.
Introduction
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2023

The Introduction anticipates in seven steps the main thesis about the relation of ‘the people’ (as transgenerational democratic sovereign, author of the constitution) to its pro-tempore living cohorts. First, it specifies what law the people’s constituent power may be under, compatibly with the people’s presumed sovereignty. The second step aims at clarifying how the people’s constituent power should relate to the electorate’s power to amend the constitution: both can be understood as relating according to a serial or sequential model of democratic sovereignty. In a third step specific principles are articulated for evaluating the legitimacy of exercises of constituent and amending power by the transgenerational people and its living cohorts. A fourth step focuses on the bearer of constituent power and offers a ‘political conception of a people’. Not being endowed with agency, as the living citizens, the people need to be represented. In a fifth step ‘representing the people’ is defined as the mandate to interpret the people’s will, scripted in a constitution, and a clarification follows of: (i) the exact nature of that mandate, (ii) its relation to democracy, and (iii) the quality of the mandate’s execution. In the sixth step the criteria are outlined for evaluating a constitutional court’s fulfilment of its mandate to represent the people via adjudication. Finally, the seventh step consists of identifying the limits of amending power and justifying them in terms of cross-generational reciprocity. In closing, the Introduction anticipates the contents of the chapters of the book.
In Revolutionary Russia
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

This chapter looks at Nâzım’s first years in Moscow, between the spring of 1922 and the summer of 1924. Beginning with the arrival of Nâzım and his friends in the Soviet capital and the time they spent at a summer camp outside Moscow, attention then shifts to a discussion of Communist University of the Toilers of the East and the other educational institutions established by the Comintern in the early 1920s. Subsequent sections trace the backgrounds of the other Turkish students whom Nâzım and his friends encountered at the university, and the individuals with whom Nâzım and Vâlâ socialized during their initial months in Moscow. The final section of this chapter discusses Nâzım’s poetry from these years, and in particular his adoption of the Russian Futurist style.
Epilogue
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

This epilogue examines Nâzım’s legacy and explains what happened to others whose lives were discussed in this book. It goes up to the late 1980s, focusing upon the late-life activities of the last of Nâzım’s friends, lovers, and comrades. Another section discusses the TKP in the aftermath of Nâzım’s death. The final section of the epilogue offers a concluding analysis of Nâzım’s life, his generation, and the transition from the late imperial age to a post-imperial one. The book ends with a return to the original point of contact with Nâzım: on the shores of the Bosphorus, awaiting his brother-in-law Refik to pick him up in the motorboat.
Contours of Family Dynamics
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

The chapter seeks to enter the private household of medieval Islamic lands and determine its internal composition, hierarchies, and relationships. These were guided by a patriarchal order which imposed considerable limitations upon its female members. At the same time, the chapter reveals moments that afforded women considerable agency in their different family capacities. In addition, there is much to be said for the liminal nature of the place of women within the family. Their movement between the private and the public, between different households, and their changing images, both motherly and seductive, lending support and positing a threat to their male counterparts, imbued women’s positions with a liminality that reinforced their agency. Women’s agency became the focus of a set of norms and practical considerations that resulted from an ongoing attempt to balance between the two primary poles of commitment that feature in this book, namely kinship and the religious community. Whereas the former was governed by material considerations, sentimental attachments, and legal principles, the latter was motivated by a profound commitment to religious ideals that were upheld by communal agents and stipulated in sacred texts.
Religiously Mixed Families as Sites of Competing Religious Traditions
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

Chapter 3 is concerned with the phenomenon of religiously mixed families in early and medieval Islamic contexts. The significance of this historical phenomenon for understanding related phenomena such as conversion to Islam, religious syncretism, as well as the survival of non-Muslim religious communities, cannot be overstated. It is here that the tensions and interplays between kinship and community were most pronounced, rendering religiously mixed families a valuable framework for historical inquiry into female religious agency. Accordingly, the chapter reads into legal principles of separation between family members of different religious affiliations as reflections of instances of religious hybridity. These reveal not only aspects of daily life but also the questions, dilemmas, and conflicts that emerged from a religiously mixed kinship setting. As can be expected, religiously mixed families were the outcome of two primary trends—conversion to Islam and marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims. The defiance of communal identities, however, did not necessarily result in the severance of ties between converts and those who married outside the fold on the one hand, and their original religious communities on the other. In fact, there is much to suggest the obverse, thus resulting in an extensive body of normative literature that came to terms with the phenomenon, yet at the same time attempted to contain it.
“No bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another” (Q 53: 38)
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

Chapter 4 turns to examine the significance of women’s liminal position in the context of religiously mixed kinship settings. It shows that the intrinsic qualities that afforded women a mediating agency between different social, spatial, and normative arenas rendered their place particularly meaningful in relation to cross-religious exchanges. As mothers and wives, women were in a unique position to introduce ideas and practices that originated in one religious tradition to a home that was dominated by another. The chapter reveals, however, different concerns, or emphases, on the part of different religious leaderships regarding the presence of women in religiously mixed families. While Syrian ecclesiastical authorities appear to have been concerned with the contribution of that presence to an ongoing state of communal fragmentation, rabbinic legal discourse reflects a preoccupation with its practical implications, and Islamic legal principles with its potential threats to the religious integrity of Muslim believers. The extent to which these differences allow for generalizations, however, remains an open question.
Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Gall
Authors: Steffen William H.
Published: March 2023

This chapter shows how the stage’s physical materials create meaning and position race as a construction of degraded European environments. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron’s black “hue” both begets and justifies the physical, bodily “hews” he orchestrates against the Andronicii, which are figuratively aligned with the excessive consumption of timber. In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazar’s furious “gall” (referencing both his ire and a popular ingredient in both ink and blackface cosmetic recipes) informs his audience how they should read his “Inky” face. The chapter investigates these material wooden puns in the context of England’s timber crisis and economic expansion at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through reorienting our understanding of Aaron and Eleazar around the wooden commodities that may have constituted their black skin on stage—namely, cork and galls—this chapter shows how the performance of “race” on stage was mediated by the natural world and the human commodification of it.
Fighting Power
Authors: French David
Published: March 2023

An account of the ways World War II was fought, in the air, on land and at sea. The focus is on the key technologies, whether tanks, or bomber aircraft or submarines. Over the course of the war the Allies learned from past mistakes, organized their forces more effectively for major operations, used intelligence soundly, and developed more advanced weapons. The chapter argues that without these many improvements in fighting ability, the war would have lasted longer and Axis defeat more costly to achieve.
Front Line I
Authors: Snape Michael
Published: March 2023

The chapter examines the way armed forces were recruited, trained, and organized for World War II. The armed forces were mainly civilians in uniforms, a fraction of them volunteers. There were also women serving in most armed forces, though only the Soviet Union gave women combatant roles. The social structures of armed forces varied between the warring powers, but the importance of propaganda, ideology, religious belief and popular culture were common to many. These many aspects of military life defined the nature of the institution and explain the capacity of the military organization to keep large numbers of civilian-soldiers fighting despite the costs.
Unnatural Deaths
Authors: Bessel Richard
Published: March 2023

World War II resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of civilians, unnatural deaths caused by bombing, deliberate terror, genocide, starvation, and imprisonment. The chapter examines the military impact on casualty rates before looking at the mass murders committed by security forces and the regular military. The most notorious was the genocide of the Jews, which is examined here alongside the pattern of atrocity in occupied areas of Europe and Asia. In addition to deliberate killing, there was widespread starvation, notably in Greece, China and India, and epidemic diseases caused by the conditions of war, particularly typhus. The chapter concludes by asking how this level of casualties was possible.
University Drama in Performance, Manuscript, and Print
Authors: Blank Daniel
Published: March 2023

This chapter examines several impressive, large-scale university theatrical productions from the 1570s and 1580s, illustrating both their theatrical complexity and their influence on the burgeoning commercial theater. It focuses mainly on two academic playwrights, Thomas Legge and William Gager, whose productions bring forth the tremendous capabilities of the university stage. The chapter begins with Legge’s Richardus Tertius, a lengthy three-part tragedy which to some extent may have inspired Shakespeare’s Richard III. It then turns to Gager’s surviving corpus, demonstrating how the theatrical effects his plays featured in performance resist the longstanding notion that they were merely straightforward neoclassical adaptations. These were the kinds of elaborate productions, the chapter argues, which caught the attention of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It considers how commercial playwrights might have encountered university plays and the different forms—manuscript, print, word of mouth—in which these plays circulated. The chapter’s concluding section focuses on Gager’s relationship with Joseph Barnes, Oxford’s first university printer, and it discusses how print became an invaluable tool for the distribution of his plays both within and beyond the academic sphere.
The Insular Academy
Authors: Blank Daniel
Published: March 2023

This chapter discusses several sixteenth-century plays that dramatize the inwardness of the early modern university. It begins with Edward Forsett’s comedy Pedantius, which debuted at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1581. The play was ostensibly a satire of the scholar Gabriel Harvey, but in a larger sense it presented an unflattering portrait of academic culture, signifying how university drama provided a medium for institutional critique. The chapter shows how this trend moved from the university stage to the commercial stage in the hands of two “University Wits,” Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene. The chapter examines two of their plays in particular, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which brought onto the public stage elements of the academic satire that the authors had witnessed at university. The public stage, this chapter argues, became a space in which playwrights could critique the insularity of the university—a tradition that had its origins in the universities themselves. The chapter shows how Shakespeare participated in this tradition with Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play primarily concerned with a particularly virulent aspect of academic isolation: the exclusion of women.
Shakespeare’s Sweet Boy
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

In Chapter 2, I argue that Shakespeare used several topoi from Reformed devotional culture to describe both stage performance and erotic performance in the Sonnets. Although previous readers of the Sonnets have regarded the poet’s rote performance and reiteration of praise from the public liturgy as evidence of devotional hypocrisy, I maintain that these interpretations stem from a misunderstanding of the role of the Book of Common Prayer in English devotional culture. Liturgical devotion in early modern England operated within a nexus of social exchange and straddled the divide between private and public worship. For Shakespeare’s poet, to co-opt those modes of devotion in describing his erotic entreaties to his boyfriend would not have been regarded as evidence of hypocrisy. On the contrary, these forms of public devotion allowed Shakespeare to imagine a distinctly early modern sense of self that existed at the crossroads of public expression and experiential devotion.
Adam and Eve in Bed and at Prayer
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

In Chapter 6, I explore a paradox in Milton’s theological understanding of the liturgy in my readings of his Eikonoklastes and Paradise Lost. In his polemical writings, Milton vehemently criticized Charles I’s use of set prayer, describing the king’s appropriation of set prayers in Eikon Basilike as a form of devotional plagiarism. At the same time, Milton also used set liturgy in crafting his own literary prayers, and appropriated the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer as the basis for Adam and Eve’s worship in Paradise Lost. I argue that while these Edenic prayers would have sounded like the state liturgy for Paradise Lost’s Caroline readers, Milton in fact intended to strip those prayers of their political and theological contexts by imagining an Edenic origin for these forms of worship. In doing so, I suggest that Milton intended to present these Edenic forms of prayer as having the devotional equivalency of a number of other bodily acts of praise and worship. Milton saw bodily acts such as sex and eating as having the devotional power of prayer itself; to have sex and to eat in Eden was, for Milton, as good—if not better—than formal worship in the state church.
Globalization
Authors: Wirtén Eva Hemmungs
Published: March 2023

This chapter is focused on how we might think of the book and its attendant practices of publishing, bookselling, and reading within the broader history of globalization and digitization. One of the main lines of inquiry concerns questions of copyright and censorship, both crucial to questions of ownership and control, authorship and creativity, as well as to the ongoing question of where the boundaries of cultural works are drawn. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works from 1886 constituted a watershed moment in the international and later global history of the book. At the close of the nineteenth century, the interconnectedness of sophisticated communication networks meant that it was essential to create an international infrastructure securing protection for these assets, assets that were prone to cross-border competition. Copyright mediates social relations, and the Berne Convention addressed several of the most important relationships that can be identified within the orbit of the book: those between authors and readers, between new technologies and the stability and instability of the work, between publishers and the market, and between the global North and the global South. Such dependencies and relationships were enabled by more efficient transportation and communication networks and set within fast-moving economic and cultural transformation. Changes included new book technologies, geopolitical alliances that sought to redress previous imbalances in global access to knowledge, and the integration of publishing into larger media conglomerates from the 1960s.
Rent-seeking Business Elites and Populism in Poland and Hungary
Authors: Szanyi Miklós
Published: March 2023

This paper describes the evolution of economic structures and business elites in Poland and Hungary during the process of transition. After the successful completion of the post-socialist transition process, East Central European countries started to give up rigorous compliance with the liberal political and economic model advocated by the international advising community and the EU. A more authoritarian approach to policymaking gained influence and the concepts of illiberal democracy and populism replaced the liberal concepts. The chapter analyses this process of change and its determinants. It interprets the U-turn as the revival of the strong rent-seeking traditions in the region. This turn served the interests of the nationalistic political elite that was pushed to the background during the liberal phase of the transition process by a ‘comprador’ elite. Populism replaced the role of advisers in the legitimation of the new rent-seeking practices.
Business Factions, Populists, and the Social Bloc Perspective
Authors: Ban Cornel
Published: March 2023

How do growth regimes characteristics constrain the choices of populists regarding their relations with business? What business factions are likely to uphold, and respectively oppose, the national-populist turn in the neoliberal policy regime of foreign direct investments (FDI)-led growth regimes? To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the organizational linkage between populists and business via changes in the dominant social bloc of the dominant growth regime. By examining the case of resilient (Hungary) and fleeting (Romania) populist projects, the empirical analysis makes three claims. First, while populists in FDI-led growth regimes can challenge crisis-ridden multinational financial capital due to its secondary relevance to the growth regime, they are better off politically when they do not challenge the structural power of multinational industrial capital. Indeed, in contrast to Romania, multinational industrial business was an essential social bloc ingredient in Hungary, bolstering its resilience. Second, since attacks against foreign financial institutions comes with sovereign bond risk, the fate of the attack hinges on having institutional capabilities such as a central bank ready to credibly monetize debt and a revenue agency with an enforceable commitment to adequate tax collection. Third, the chapter reaffirms the centrality of the medium and petite bourgeoisie for the populist project, thus challenging the claim the interest of the SME sector is to be opposed to populism. However, the case of Romania shows that under certain conditions the populists may lose the support of the domestic SME sector, thus cracking the populist social bloc.
The Populism of Transnational Plutocrats
Authors: Harrington Brooke
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the historical context and implications of the asymmetrical merger of commercial and political elites in right-wing populism. While this merger has given rise to some of the most consequential figures in politics over the past century, it is not new: in fact, its origins and even some of its key practices, go back to the ancient world. And now, as then, the commercial-political elite threatens the very systems of governance that enriched and empowered them in the first place. What’s new is their transnationality, which I link to the rise of financialization and the growth of the offshore system. A key insight offered by this reading is that right-wing populist movements represent the arrival onshore of an ethos that has been the distinguishing feature and primary appeal of the offshore world for decades: elite impunity. This is offered to voters both as entertainment, and as a luxury good in which they can partake by proxy in return for their support. The chapter thus extends the late twentieth-century tradition in elite theory to incorporate contemporary understandings of the global mobility of wealth, power, and spectacle.