This introduction gives an overview of the scope of “bitch”, following its twists and turns from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog, through to its popularity in the present day.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

DOHaD and epigenetic research that investigates causal mechanisms and predictive biomarkers has often occurred in the absence of discussion of ethical, legal, and social implications or engagement with disability communities. These implications include maternal blaming, labelling, stigmatisation, and ableism. Considering the debate on different models of disability by disability activists and social scientists, this is a timely opportunity to optimise the design of epigenetic research into conditions labelled as disabilities. Research aims should address the needs of disability communities, acknowledge diversity, and move away from medical to social models of disability. Here we focus on the autistic community as an example. We argue that there is a need to work with autistic people and their supporters to co-design studies that facilitate a better understanding of autism’s challenges and assets and to use this knowledge to assist these individuals and communities. We also stress the importance of autonomy and information provision in relation to autistic individuals’ engagement with epigenetics tests. We conclude by urging researchers planning DOHaD and epigenetics research to listen to and engage with disability communities when they say, ‘nothing about us without us’.

Swift was, in modern parlance, a Dubliner: he was born in the Irish capital, died there, and for more than half of his life kept his principal residence there. But he was bitterly critical of the urban world around him, repeatedly declaring his preference for the Irish countryside or for English hospitality in place of the depressing reality of life in the heart of Dublin. This chapter explores Swift’s troubled relationship with the city of his birth, looking at its social and political make-up during his lifetime, and how he portrayed the city in his writings.

Although Swift was not a Londoner by origin or in spirit, references to diverse quarters of the town and many facets of life in the capital turn up in several of Swift’s creative works. This chapter illustrates this pervasive presence in some key writings. First is the milieu evoked by the narrator of the Tale, lodged amid the landmarks that inscribed the cultural semiology of London on its streets and buildings. Poems follow from Swift’s most influential phase in London, such as the ‘Description of a City Shower’. Finally come a set of works that were composed long after the time when, however reluctantly, the author had shaken the dust of England off his heels.

Population and Irish confessional demographics feature heavily in Swift’s political pamphlets. His writing on these topics helped shape popular perceptions of Ireland in the eighteenth century, a period that witnessed the emergence of an Irish diaspora across the British Atlantic world. This chapter considers the role that confessional demography played in Swift’s Irish political writings and the later influence of those writings on the formation of early anti-Irish nativism in colonial America. This first section looks at the role of demographic anxieties in A Modest Proposal. The second section addresses Swift’s concerns about religious dissent in Ireland. The third and final section explores the influence of Swift’s writings in colonial America.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

Examples of misinformation having real-world consequences aren’t hard to find, and misinformation has been a hugely important topic of discussion in popular media, among politicians, and in scientific research. This chapter discusses whether misinformation poses a problem for society: for example, by damaging the democratic process or fostering potentially problematic health behaviors. We discuss competing perspectives in detail: scientists disagree over the extent to which misinformation can be harmful at a societal level, and what definition of “misinformation” is used matters a lot in determining the scope of the problem. The chapter concludes with a case study: information warfare in the present-day Russian–Ukrainian war.

Relationality captures how people want others to relate to them, and how they will relate to diverse others, yet as this chapter shows “relating to others” may include many different elements and be person- and/or context-specific. This chapter uses interviews with nonprofit practitioners and researchers, and also national surveys of policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders, to lay out some of the ways in which different kinds of people who seek change in civic life express uncertainty about relationality.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

Meaningful conversations require skills we develop when making thoughtful decisions. More than a common-sense approach to living, the Decision-Maker Moves enable us to effectively discover and express what matters in ways that get things done. By expanding our scope to include the wellbeing of others, even if the lives of the other people are very unlike our own, we can level up from the personal to the social – from ourselves to family members, to people living in our communities, to our cities and provinces or states, and – in some cases, such as with Abhay – to our world.

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

This Conclusion resituates the book’s reconstruction of the early Tudor Court of Requests within the broader scope of late medieval and early modern history. Royal justice was a constant, and constantly controversial, element of English government across these periods. Social demand for more flexible and authoritative dispute resolution, combined with the political expediency of displaying good governance in turbulent times, led successive regimes to further routinise the existing practices of justice-giving in the royal household. Here the rise of the new royal justice system is taken to its conclusion, with the dissolution of this jurisdiction on the eve of Civil War, in 1641. This episode epitomises the complex relationship between principles and practices that has been charted across this book. Returning to the three themes raised in the Introduction, the book concludes with some reflections on the value of interweaving political, social, and legal histories together: for strengthening both institutional and socio-legal studies, and for qualifying existing narratives about litigation as a pillar of state-formation.

This chapter explores the constitutional ramifications of the French Revolution’s transformation of the old regime of property. It reinterprets the abolition of feudalism as part of the revolutionaries’ larger attempt to draw a conceptual and legal line of demarcation between property and power. Their double aim was to make property truly private by stripping from it all attributes of public authority and to make power truly public by eliminating its former patrimonial characteristics. The attempt to implement this demarcation in practice was still underway decades after the Revolution had formally ended feudalism. Over time, it largely succeeded. From this distinction between property and power flowed some of the key conceptual binaries – the political and social, state and society, public and private, sovereignty and property – through which we still apprehend the world. The abolition of feudalism was thus much more than simply the eradication of an archaic form of property. Rather, it played an essential role in shaping the conceptual building blocks from which modernity was built.

Although there have been attempts to make relationship science more diverse and inclusive, as it stands, the external sociocultural forces that impact relationships have not been at the forefront of research. We argue that romantic relationships cannot be divorced from the sociocultural context in which they exist. This chapter reviews the literature to explain the “context problem” faced by relationship science, highlighting the importance of including intersectional, context-driven research in the field. We then provide an overview of each chapter in the volume.