Disciplines traditionally designated as ‘comparative’ – Comparative Literature, History, etc. – have radically called into question comparison as their apparent methodological foundation, even postulating its ‘obsolescence’. Such tendencies have also been informed and driven by the insight that the label ‘comparative’ is a legacy of the nineteenth century, when the ‘comparative method’ spread from biology and philology to other developing academic disciplines. This awareness of its roots in the peak period of colonialism and imperialism has opened ‘comparison’ itself to postcolonial critiques in these disciplines. ‘Comparison’ is no longer necessarily accepted as a timeless and ‘neutral’ methodological constant, but is rather viewed as a contextual historical phenomenon. By contrast, ‘Comparative Law’ scholars have been more hesitant to challenge that radically the role of comparison and the ‘innocence of method’ (Günter Frankenberg). This chapter explores the role that a lack of disciplinary historical self-awareness plays in this display of intellectual restraint. It interrogates, in particular, the traditional self-portrayal of Comparative Law as a ‘young’ discipline and the narrative of the famous 1900 Paris Congress as a mythical point of origin. The trope of such a ‘new beginning’ in or around 1900 insinuates a critical caesura that eclipses Comparative Law’s intellectual roots in the canon of nineteenth- century comparative disciplines, obscuring how these disciplines related to a colonial/imperialistic historical context. The chapter seeks to establish that the entanglement of our disciplinary history with that of the ‘comparative method’, that the coloniality of comparison itself is indeed an important subject in its own right. It suggests a context-sensitive recovery of the discipline’s institutional and discursive history, theoretically informed by scholarship specifically aimed at resisting ‘the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’ (Leela Gandhi).

Languages are constantly changing. The reasons for the changes can be both internal (i.e., when monolingual speakers adopt new ways of saying things according to social factors like age, gender, and class) and external (e.g., language contact). Although toponyms are ‘linguistic fossils’ that tend to retain older linguistic features and can withstand violent population shifts more so than the general lexicon, they are also affected by the process of language change. This is explored through several examples from around the world. It is only through analysing language change – with an approach that incorporates historical-linguistic methodologies like the comparative method and dialectological interpretations – that a toponymist can reconstruct the original (and most remote) toponymic root of a place name. The latter half of the chapter demonstrates how toponyms can be used to ‘crack’ hitherto undeciphered languages, the most notable being Linear B (a syllabic writing system transcribing Mycenaean Greek, an archaic form of Ancient Greek). The authors also apply an experimental methodology, using toponyms, to provide a possible interpretation of place names possibly transcribed through Linear A (the grammatological ancestor of the Linear B writing system).

We adapt a method from mammalian comparative biology to study spatial cognition in relation to lifestyle. We compare members of the family Pitheciidae (titi monkeys, sakis, bearded sakis, and uakaris) to one another and to two cebid relatives, squirrel monkeys and owl monkeys. We review experimental studies that directly compare titis and squirrel monkeys in spatial tasks and social settings. Titis occupy small, defended home ranges and live in small groups comprising an adult male-female pair and young. In contrast, bearded sakis, uakaris, and squirrel monkeys, occupy large, undefended home ranges, move rapidly, and live in large groups. White-faced sakis illustrate an intermediate condition. Lab studies show that titis and squirrel monkeys differ in their use of visual information in travel tasks and in responsiveness to environmental novelty. Proximate sources of titis’ cautious, sedentary lifestyle include attention to contextual detail, preferences for familiar pathways and areas, behavioral inhibition, parasympathetic dominance, and adult heterosexual attachment bonds. A speculative scenario for the evolution of titis within the Pitheciidae is offered, in which spatial cognition is included as a factor. Further potential applications of this approach within the primate order are considered. We maintain that a holistic, biological, and evolutionary methodology is most likely to elucidate the underpinnings and form of complex cognition.

This chapter presents the case for employing Bayesianism as a universal, unified framework for inference that narrows the divide between qualitative versus quantitative data, within-case versus cross-case analysis, and observational versus experimental research. It offers a Bayesian critique of various other approaches to qualitative methods and multi-method research.

The chapter explains the basic principles of linguistic change from a sociolinguistic variationist perspective. It begins with an explanation of the inextricable relationship between linguistic variation and change, and proceeds to demonstrate how language change can be observed, investigated, and explained. Sociolinguists can document and analyse language change using either the real-time method or the apparent-time construct; these methods and their advantages and pitfalls are explained and exemplified.

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.

Chapter 2 deals with methodological preliminaries and introduces the central theoretical concepts. It begins by outlining the extra-linguistic historical background regarding the present habitat of Central Chadic languages. It identifies the exceptional typology of Central Chadic languages, in particular regarding their enigmatic vocalic domain. The chapter introduces the problems of applying the classic comparative method and explains the value of internal reconstruction. It discusses problems of dealing with various formats of data transcription, and it introduces central notions such as vowel epenthesis, weak radicals, vocalisation, and prosodies. Finally, it positions the current study against the background of previous studies on the subject.

The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included in broader examinations of the Hellenistic World. This book proposes a more dynamic comparison, with a particular, though not exclusive focus on the interaction of the royal centers with local populations and elites. Both political entities are approached as multiethnic empires whose resemblance and entanglement are sufficient to make comparisons meaningful. In the process of comparing them, differences and connections become more salient and better explained. We aim to explore the different structural capacities for, and levels of, integration that were either aspired to or achieved by the kings and populations of each empire.

This introduction sets the context for my study of the governance of official statistical agencies in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom and United States of America. It presents the theoretical framework used in the study, based on dramaturgical sociology. The research approach is discussed, including the selection of case study countries, the use of in-depth interviews and the dramaturgical approach to data analysis. An overview of the argument of the book is provided along with a summary of the remaining chapters.

Chapter 8 examines how languages change and what the past stages of languages may be. It distinguishes between diachronic linguistics, which looks at languages over time, and synchronic linguistics, which focuses on a particular stage. It also contrasts the concept of language as applied to a speech community (E-language) and language as the state of knowledge of an individual speaker (I-language). The chapter offers readers an understanding of changes that occur in languages' phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon, thus linking this chapter to previous ones. It explains how linear descent can be established by finding regular correspondences between the forms in one stage and a previous stage, and that the changes that occur can be attributed to imperfect transmission between one individual and the next, and the results may then spread to the community. It contrasts this with non-linear descent, in which similar forms are not due to a common ancestor. It compares present languages to their past, and explores the reasons why languages change. The chapter also examines in detail how unattested languages are reconstructed by applying methods of comparative linguistics.

Rooted in historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics is often concerned with diachrony as reflected in synchronic grammars. World Englishes (WEs), which emerge through particular sociohistorical factors (e.g. colonialization, language contact, mass migration, dialect mixing, etc.), provide an ideal window for examining questions that are central to this mission: the inheritance of shared features, ongoing evolutionary mechanisms, and pathways of innovation as dialects interact and settle within new local linguistic ecologies. These varieties thus extend our knowledge base concerning the underlying mechanisms of language variation and change. In so doing, they enable theoretical and empirical advances through application of the comparative method, exposing the interaction between external social forces and internal linguistic ones on linguist forms and functions. In this chapter, I review variationist research that targets multiple varieties, both in the Inner Circle and, where available, the Outer Circle, to outline the gains that are possible by harnessing the synergistic energies of WEs through a variationist lens.