When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

Chapter 2 is a study of divergence (also known as information divergence, Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence, relative entropy), which is the first example of a dissimilarity (information) measure between a pair of distributions P and Q. Defining KL divergence and its conditional version in full generality requires some measure-theoretic acrobatics (Radon–Nikodym derivatives and Markov kernels) that we spend some time on. (We stress again that all this abstraction can be ignored if one is willing to work only with finite or countably infinite alphabets.) Besides definitions we prove the “main inequality” showing that KL divergence is non-negative. Coupled with the chain rule for divergence, this inequality implies the data-processing inequality, which is arguably the central pillar of information theory and this book. We conclude the chapter by studying the local behavior of divergence when P and Q are close. In the special case when P and Q belong to a parametric family, we will see that divergence is locally quadratic, with Hessian being the Fisher information, explaining the fundamental role of the latter in classical statistics.

This chapter reports on trends of continuity and divergence within the heritage generations examined and between heritage and homeland varieties. It discusses the degrees of similarities between the varieties in terms of (a) rates of use of innovative forms and (b) conditioning factors in the constraint hierarchy. The three variables examined are voice onset time (VOT, n=8,909), case-marking on nouns and pronouns (CASE, n=9,661), and variable presence of subject pronouns (PRODROP, n=9,190), each in three or more languages. The similarity in rates and conditioning effects across generations for (PRODROP), examined in seven languages, particularly contrasts with findings for this variable in experimental paradigms. Similarly, findings of little simplification or overgeneralization of the case system in three languages stands in contrast to the outcomes of several previous studies. (VOT) shows a drift toward (but not arriving at) English-like values for only some of the languages examined. For each variable, models are presented and interpreted; a table then details which aspects of the analysis contribute to the interpretation of stability and of each type of variation.

Here, we dive deeper into the realm of reversible Markov chains, via the perspective of network theory. The notions of conductance and resistance are defined, as well as voltage and current, and the corresponding mathematical theory.The Laplacian and Green function are defined and their relation to harmonic functions explained. The chapter culminates with a proof (using network theory) that recurrence and transience are essentially group properties: these properties remain invariant when changing between different reasonable random walks on the same group (specifically, symmetric and adapted with finite second moment).

This chapter discusses distinctive features of Darwin’s theory of evolution, noting when they coincide with contemporary biology and when they depart. Darwin held ● that all life on earth today traces back to a common ancestor ● that natural selection is the main but not the exclusive cause of evolution ● that evolution is opportunistic, not pre-programmed ● that natural selection often causes traits to evolve because they help the organisms that have them to survive and reproduce, but sometimes selection causes traits to evolve because they help groups to avoid extinction and to found new daughter groups ● that evolution by natural selection is a gradual process ● that novel traits (now called mutations) have their causes, but they do not happen because they would be good for the organisms in which they occur ● that the distinction between species and sub-specific varieties is a matter of convention ● that middling phenotypes are usually fitter than phenotypes that are more extreme ● that traits acquired in the life-time of parents can be passed along as inherited characteristics to offspring.

The chapter examines the corporate governance institutions that developed during the Legal Modernization Era. It analyzes the traditional corporate governance mechanisms, both internal and external to the firm, that were embraced in China and adapted to domestic political–economic circumstances. The chapter discusses how China’s superficially convergent, investor-oriented corporate governance framework actually diverged in practice. It illuminates the political functions of law, showing how the corporate governance framework was ultimately directed to support the reconsolidation of political–economic powers and the shift toward state capitalism. The chapter offers comparative insights drawn from alternative systems of corporate governance and analyzes the implications of the Chinese framework for investors in the Chinese market.

Summary: Rural India has faced a persistent credit problem. High credit prices and harsh borrowing conditions perpetuated underdevelopment in colonial times and continues to affect the livelihoods of millions today. Whereas development economists have approached the rationale behind these lending arrangements in modern times, history of the lender’s strategies and actions in rural India has received little attention. This chapter constructs the framework applied in the rest of the book, drawing from economic theory and situating the puzzle of credit constraints in colonial India against credit and development in regional and global economic history.

A generalization of the classical theory of flight dynamics is presented that includes quasi-steady aeroelastic effects using residualization approach. This is then used to investigate static stability of the aircraft, which may result in torsional divergence, as well as its controllability, which results in a metric for control effectiveness and potentially control reversal. Several illustrative problems are finally considered: a simplified model for the dynamics of a aircraft with a rigid fuselage, the aeroelastic trim of an aircraft with high-aspect ratio wings, and roll control with aeroelastic effects.

The equations of motion for an elastically-supported airfoil are first derived. This is followed by a extensive review of the classical results of linear unsteady aerodynamics. State-space realizations are then introduced for those solutions, which result in time-domain formulations in dynamic aeroelasticity. They are used to introduce basic aeroelastic concepts, including flutter, divergence, and response to discrete gusts and continuous turbulence.

The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine-learning methods to categorize jurisdictions into ten legal families, challenging the existing paradigms in economics and law. Using also other cross-country data, this book empirically tests theories about property law and comparative law. Using economic efficiency as both a positive and a normative criterion, each chapter evaluates which jurisdictions have the most efficient property doctrines, concluding that the common law is not more efficient than the civil law. Unlike many prior studies on empirical comparative law, this book provides detailed citations to laws in each jurisdiction. Data and documentation are released with the book.

Chapter III centres on the jurisdiction-neutral analytical framework applied in Chapters IV–VII, the target jurisdiction-specific chapters. The analysis covers the history, grounds, scope of protection, applicable parties, and the mandatory/default nature of each jurisdiction’s withdrawal remedy. Key findings from each jurisdictional chapter are summarised and compared, with salient similarities and differences, such as the fault/non-fault distinction, between the jurisdictions in these aspects highlighted. Observations about the legal actors (judges, legislators, scholars) involved in the creation and development of withdrawal regimes, and other themes emerging from this, are made. Further, this Chapter identifies the phenomenon of ‘spontaneous functional convergence’ of the four jurisdictions towards two distinct conceptual models of withdrawal (‘corrective’ and ‘insurance’ models), situating this contribution within the broader corporate law convergence and divergence debate. The comparative findings and insights from the four target jurisdictional studies in this Chapter form the basis of a model withdrawal remedy that is presented in Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX summarizes this Book’s key findings and explores applications and extensions of the corporate law concepts and comparative law methodology developed in this Book. This Book contributes to legal scholarship in three ways. First, it establishes a coherent set of corporate law concepts and terminology that clarifies and expands our understanding of shareholder conflict and withdrawal across diverse jurisdictions. Second, it develops and applies a novel comparative law method (named the ‘tripartite method’). Third, I identify and analyse the phenomenon, which I call ‘spontaneous functional convergence’, in withdrawal law. This subtype of convergence occurs where jurisdictions appear to have – largely independently of other jurisdictions – developed legal regimes that are functionally similar but formally different using mostly, if not exclusively, domestic legal sources and inspirations. The spontaneous convergence observed in the withdrawal regimes of the target jurisdictions point to withdrawal as an evolutionary milestone for close corporation law.

The concluding chapter argues that the Asian leniency programmes only converge on the core elements of a leniency programme. The core elements are the building blocks of a leniency programme. However, the composition of these blocks is often different. Some of the differences are subtle. Other differences make the respective leniency programme distinct from the others. Some of the distinctive elements are not necessarily part of the building blocks any more and thus give a unique character to the respective leniency programme. This chapter further claims that these differences can be explained by either the political economy of a country, experimentation due to prior negative enforcement results and a desire to achieve better enforcement results, or foreign influence. Since the result of experimentation cannot always be predicted, the authors estimate that further amendments will be made to the Asian leniency programmes.

This chapter is about the evolution of language contact as a research area from the late nineteenth century to the present. It underscores the catalyst part that the discovery of creoles and pidgins by European philologists and other precursors of modern linguistics played in highlighting the roles of population movement and language contact as actuators of language change and speciation. It draws attention to the significance of the study of language evolution in European colonies in making evident the realities of language coexistence. These include the possible competition that can cause language shift and the death of one or some of the coexistent languages, a process that has affected competing European vernaculars faster than it has, for instance, Native American languages. It underscores the expansion of the field as linguists became interested in phenomena such as interference, codeswitching (or translanguaging), codemixing, diglossia, language diasporas, and linguistic areas, as well as factors that facilitate or favor the evolution of structures, sometimes of the same language, in divergent ways, owing to changes in population structures.

There have been increasing and stronger calls for greater integration of many Asian economies, either within the confines of ASEAN or on a more geo-economically strategic scale that would include major Asian jurisdictions like China, Japan, and Korea. A number of key personalities within the regional legal fraternity have advanced views that such integration ought to occur through the harmonization of legal rules, arguing amongst others that in so doing uncertainty and other transaction costs would be reduced and commercial confidence within the region concomitantly increased. That commercial law has come under the lens as a particularly suitable candidate for harmonization is, in a sense, unsurprising. It is for one ostensibly seen as a technical and relatively uncontroversial area of law, as opposed, for instance, to public law. For another, or probably for that precise reason, this area has been the historical choice for attempts at harmonizing substantive law – think of the CISG, the UCC in the United States or the recently proposed CESL in the European Union. This edited volume brings together eminent and promising scholars and practitioners to investigate what convergence and divergence means in their respective fields and for Asia.