Alexander the Great envisioned a city network designed to control “spear won” territory in the wake of his conquests. Alexander imagined a world bridging Greek and Asian cultures – a new era of globalization. He was willing to force whole populations across continents to this end, via city mergers, mass deportations, and resettlements. From its Macedonian foundations, the Hellenistic Age had urban roots. Greek economic influence spanned from Afghanistan to the Atlantic. Trade increased markedly, as did cultural exchange. There was unprecedented hybridization, closely reflected in city building. The urban form dwarfed what existed in the old poleis. Their geopolitical importance increased under territorial empires, the dominant form of statecraft. Cities managed flows of resources. They defended trading routes against nomads, projecting royal military power. Out of Alexander’s splintered empire, his namesake Alexandria was the closest realization of his global vision. There were darker sides to this: Alexandria was part of a system entailing political domination over peripheral zones.

This chapter is a reading of the sea episode (Exodus 14) as a largely coherent narrative in which the Israelites move from self-determination, to dread, and finally to wonder and trust in both God and Moses because of what they witness at the sea. It was added as a new introduction relatively late in the literary history of the wilderness narrative. The case for this reading is grounded in the idea that productive tensions are an element of how literature works, while unproductive tensions can show us historical depth in the literary landscape. This chapter also addresses the relationship between literature and history, which is not mimetic but a matter of play with cultural repertoire from diverse historical and social contexts. Finally, the anonymous authorship of the Torah is usually attributed to the role of scribes as tradents, but this chapter draws on the idea that they transformed what they preserved and argues that those transformations could be as much political acts as literary ones. It proposes that the authors are implied in the literature, and that anonymity may be a function of genre (or mode).

The Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of Donald Trump were a surprise to many, on both sides of the fence. In this information age, it is useful to ask how so many people could be so wrong about issues of so much importance. If we all knew what everyone else was thinking there could be no surprise. We are, in fact, wrong about many things when it comes to estimating the beliefs of the majority. Many of our errors arise not because our brains are tricking us, but because our appreciation of structure is underdeveloped. For example, for the majority of people, the places they vacation to are not average destinations, just as the traffic they experience is not average traffic nor the classes they sit through of average attendance. This is because, by definition, the most crowded places are attended by the most people. Similar illusions lead us to overestimate how many friends the average person has, confuse us into making backwards inferences about class and gender divisions, and allow politicians to misrepresent their populations. All of these are guaranteed outcomes of certain kinds of structure which an understanding of networks demystifies.

This chapter posits that the emerging methods, perspectives, and goals of legal design fit squarely within the history of law. It offers a quick sketch of the history of the development of the rule of law over the last 4,000 years, which sets the stage for an examination of that history as a design history – humanity’s collective work over four millennia of ideating, prototyping, testing, and refining the systems of rules we use to live collectively. It then makes a few points about the benefits of design as design – its relative speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to making things that are useful to people. It will then introduce the concept of “longtermerism,” which refers to a concept or ideology that emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and decision-making in various aspects of life. The chapter wraps things up with a note of urgency and optimism based on the argument that no human should be denied the benefit of the rule of law.

Opening with an account of the emergence of spiritualist practice in nineteenth-century America and Britain, Chapter 6 analyses the range of sonic phenomena – from raps and taps to more elaborate musical manifestations – which were frequently used to register the supposed presence of spiritual phenomena in séances. To date, cultural histories of attempted communications with the dead have tended to focus on the technological appropriations or extra-sensory abilities which were believed necessary to access the spirit realm, while overlooking the profound social, emotional, bodily, and sensory experiences associated with the intimate space of the Victorian séance. This chapter, in contrast, is dedicated to the human, rather than the technological, connections forged by the séance, and the profound desire on the part of many séance attendees to obviate the need for spiritual telegraphy altogether by once more realising the actual physical and intellectual intimacy that technology could only simulate.

Describes simple mathematical models for bacterial growth and death and how to experimentally measure growth curves.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

This chapter explains how researchers can design studies that include multiple methods. It starts by defining multiple-methods research as bringing together multiple perspectives at the methodological and other levels to obtain a deeper and more inclusive understanding of a phenomenon (and, in the end, to make a better-informed decision) than would be possible using one method alone. Using four real-life examples, Part I of the chapter shows the four consecutive steps of multiple-methods design: including multiple perspectives, exploring them, integrating their conclusions, and using this integrated conclusion to make a decision in practice. Part II shows that multiple-methods research is emergent and discusses the most important of these emergent elements: emerging aspects, focusing, searching for explanations, emerging data, and emerging subgroups. Part III discusses concepts that are relevant to combining qualitative and quantitative data sets: meaningful connections, purposes of mixing, theoretical drive, timing, and fully integrated research designs. The chapter concludes with recommendations for research with multiple methods.

The British imperial state’s immigration projects examined in this book were always improvised, frequently challenged, often attenuated, and always circumscribed. Nevertheless, its relationship with the worldwide movement of poor people at the dawn of the first age of mass overseas migration provides an important way of understanding how, two generations after Emancipation, the Empire remained deliberately bifurcated – between white zones of relative freedom and autonomy and Black and Brown zones of ongoing coercion and subordination.

This prologue sets out the rationale of a book-length study of Stockholm as a central place in the rise of global environmental governance. The main reason is necessity. Ever since the 1970s, the importance of the 1972 UN Conference on “the human environment” has been underscored in the scholarly literature. However, precisely how this importance grew and why and how it was linked to Stockholm and Sweden have never been very well articulated. The prologue explains how the book intends to fill this gap with a rich “Stockholm story” based on primary sources. It also elaborates on the rationale of the book’s title. “The human environment” is a play on the multiple meanings of the words “human” and “environment.” Stockholm institutions and Swedish politics provided a human environment for work in science, diplomacy, and activism that engaged a highly international community of insightful human beings and their institutions and networks. Sharing many humane values, these actors have been turning threatened nature into planetary governable objects and hence a prerequisite for global environmental governance.

Describes passive and active liquid crystals including defect textures and order parameters.