Although maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health is a well-established determinant of health across the lifecourse and across generations, the underpinning concept of DOHaD has not had significant impact on policymaking. This chapter identifies some of the barriers involved and how DOHaD researchers may overcome them. Policymaking is a complex process that is influenced by many factors other than science. Translating evidence to policy requires brokerage that explains the implications of science in a clear, frank way, accompanied by impactful solutions. Yet, the largely preventive approach advocated by DOHaD science does not inherently offer simple, high-impact interventions but rather a broad shift in thinking within the policy community. DOHaD advocacy will need to demonstrate short- and medium-term, as well as long-term, benefits. A complementary approach is to engage with communities to adjust scientific ideas to local knowledge and expertise.

Using the rich funerary epigraphy from Rome and environs, this chapter reconstructs the organization of court domestic service, establishes a taxonomy of the various service roles attested at court, and explores the significance of the structural differentiation that can be observed among the (mostly servile) domestic servants. It then considers the impact of the emperor’s domestic servants on court politics, exploring the relationships that developed between the court and the outside world. Literary texts suggest that some domestic staff controlled access to the emperor, that others acted as brokers in distributing imperial patronage, and that a few became favourites of the emperor. The latter could rise to great heights of influence, but could also become lightning-rods of discontent with the regime. As a result, a reconfiguration of power within the court or a change of regime could see the expulsion of favourites from the inner circle – or worse.

Under some emperors, the imperial court was a social space in which writers could seek and obtain patronage. However, as this chapter cautions, later generations of writers romanticized such patronal relationships (especially those of the Augustan era), so we must be wary of accepting fantasy as truth. The chapter accordingly commences with a discussion of evidence and methodology. What counts as evidence for an author’s presence and activities in the imperial court? It then focuses on common themes that reflect the experience of authors from Augustus to the Severan dynasty, after which evidence for court patronage becomes even patchier. These are: the court as a privileged performance space for literature; the polarities of ‘autonomy’ and ‘subservience’ that defined the patronage relationship between author and emperor; and the ways in which the writer both contributed and conformed to the official messaging of the regime.

As research over the past few decades, including the studies in this volume, has revealed, there is ample evidence indicating that a vibrant market economy, including highly specialized cash-crop farming, was practiced for sustained periods of time in certain parts of China from the northeastern and southeastern coasts to the Yangzi river delta and valley to the north China plain and the Shanxi plateau between the year 1000 and 1800. This chapter is concerned with the question whether the legal framework of imperial China facilitated or hindered the development of China’s market economy during this period.

Imperial China was largely an agrarian society. Alongside the widespread agricultural activity came the long and winding history of landownership that eventually saw the legal protection of private property rights in land during the Song dynasty (960–1279), which helped regulate economic activity more effectively. The law was highly relevant to the lives of the farming population, as it required the legal establishment of landownership as well as land transfers to family members and non-family members in order to sustain continuity and development in agriculture.

This is an overview of the foundation for, and substance of, emerging research on network broker behavior, research that constitutes a second generation of work on network brokerage. I begin with a capstone of key past results along with my cautions and enthusiasms about directions in which things are going. I discuss the information breadth, timing, and arbitrage advantages of network brokers, and returns to those advantages contingent on a broker’s social standing. Research linking network structure with success has been a first generation of work. That work is well advanced, but far from complete. I discuss the current position becoming stronger and broader with replication, attention to negative results, and attention to dynamics. Shifting to an exciting second generation of work, research has emerged focused on the behavior by which broker advantage is linked with success. I discuss framing and frame shifts, the importance of personal engagement, the uncertain moderating effects of culture and personality, and a few behavioral variations in brokerage. I discuss the context dependence of tertius gaudens tactics iungens versus separans, and the distinction between brokers who consume versus produce emotional energy in their colleagues.

After an in-depth analysis of the making of Dutch territorial power in the Indonesian archipelago, Ceylon and Malabar, the two final chapters take an even more Asian perspective on the more marginal Dutch presence in South and West Asia. Through a Dutch window, this chapter perceives a so far undetected Indian world-economy that focuses on the bustling Mughal port city of Surat. Other regional chapters likewise stress the crucial role of Indian commercial brokers, not only in the Indian subcontinent but extending towards the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Dutch can only accede to these already highly sophisticated and integrated trading systems of the Indian Ocean. Their operations are crucially facilitated by their increasingly monopolised access to both Indonesian spices and Japanese bullion. Despite its marginal position in the Mughal and Safavid Empires, it was not the spices of the archipelago and Ceylon, but the products of India (opium, saltpetre and in particular textiles) which started to dominate the global markets of the eighteenth century. These commodities gave the edge to the previously overpowered but now re-emerging British, be it as Company or, increasingly so, as private traders.