Chapter 1 discusses the shift in Britain’s paper currency from being backed by the metallic standard to becoming an inconvertible currency. It explains how Britain’s war against Revolutionary France disrupted the nation’s fiscal and monetary system, leading to the provincial financial panics that preceded the financial crisis of 1797. This chapter highlights the declaration movement, a nationwide phenomenon where people declared their acceptance of paper currency as money. The movement was not limited to the metropolis and English financial centres, but also occurred across English provinces, Scotland and Ireland. This chapter examines the participants of the movement and argues that its success was due to its inclusive nature, which united people despite their geographical, political and economic differences. It concludes that the declaration movement represented the currency voluntarism that Edmund Burke identified as a key aspect of Britain’s democratic monetary system. This belief in the communal and voluntary nature of currency circulation facilitated the transition to the new regime of inconvertible paper money.

This chapter offers three case studies to illustrate the main theoretical claim of this book. The rise of ISIS was animated by a narrative of historical humiliation of Sunnis by “apostates.” This narrative featured key elements of our account of humiliation in international affairs – from dismissal of past promises to contempt towards cultural and geographical realities. Russia’s foreign policy in the last two decades is also deeply tied with a sense of national humiliation, both reflected and manufactured by Vladimir Putin, according to which Russia has been displaced and discarded as a serious world power by the United States and its NATO allies. Finally, we look at the 1973 Middle East war as an example of a conflict fueled by a need to reverse an earlier humiliation. Egypt’s primary aim in this war was to erase or counteract the humiliation it suffered in the 1967 war with Israel. Interestingly, in this case, the officials who negotiated the war’s conclusion took the sentiment’s potency into account as they designed the terms of the ceasefire and armistice.

Chapter 4 reinterprets the celebrated debate on monetary theory and policy, the Bullionist Debate, by embedding the episode within the social context of wartime Britain and by identifying the continuing relevance of the communal-currency idea in parliamentary debate, the legal court and contemporary publications. It traces the development of politico-theoretical debate about paper currency from the 1790s up to the late 1800s, when paper currency was predominantly discussed from the communal perspective, despite the growing influence of metallist theory. It then turns to the legal cases of coin sales as a challenge to the inconvertible currency system, which were also entangled with French economic warfare through illegal smuggling of precious metal. This chapter considers the high-profile 1810 parliamentary report on currency for its practical implications for the Bank’s engagement in monetary policy. Contemporary legal cases made the new legislation on ‘forced’ circulation of paper – the Stanhope Act – an urgent issue in parliament. This legislation to protect inconvertible currency, however, undermined the communal and voluntary foundations of Britain’s paper currency.

This book identifies and analyses, on the basis of recently discovered sources and original research, three story-patterns associated with human kingship in early Greek and ancient Near Eastern myth. The first, which I call the Myth of the Servant, is a well-attested but so far unrecognised story-pattern that was used to explain how an individual of non-royal lineage rose to power from obscure origins. As will be shown in Chapter 1, this myth is first documented in connection with the early Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian dynasty in the third millennium bc. In later periods the story-pattern was applied to other rulers who seemingly emerged from nowhere and created influential new royal dynasties: these include king David of Israel and Judah (according to the Hebrew Bible), and Gyges of Lydia, Cyrus of Persia and Semiramis of Assyria (according to Greek historians).

The concept of unconscious bias is firmly entrenched in American society, yet evidence has accumulated in recent years questioning widely accepted claims about the phenomenon, including assertions that it can be measured reliably, influences behavior and is susceptible to intervention. We adopt a two-pronged approach to investigating the state of affairs: First, assessing claims made about unconscious bias in the public sphere; and second, conducting a national public opinion survey – the first of its kind, to the extent we can ascertain – designed to measure public understanding of unconscious bias. Results show that broad majorities of Americans think unconscious biases are prevalent, influence behavior and can be mitigated through training. Confidence in its accurate measurement is lower. The public sees unconscious biases as more prevalent than biases that are consciously held, and as worthy of mitigation efforts by businesses and government. Our chapter assesses these attitudes and understandings and compares them with the state of the science on unconscious bias.

In this chapter we identify scientific gaps research to date regarding the ability of IAT scores to explain real world racial gaps. We use the term “IAT scores” rather than “implicit bias” because, as we show: (1) Implicit bias has no consensual scientific definition; (2) A definition offered by Greenwald (2017) is shown to be logically incoherent and empirically unjustified; (3) Exactly what the IAT measures remains unclear. Nonetheless, meta-analyses have shown that IAT scores predict discrimination to a modest extent. Alternative explanations for gaps are briefly reviewed, highlighting that IAT scores offer only one of many possible such explanations. We then present a series of heuristic models that assume that IAT scores can only explain what is left over, after accounting for other explanations of gaps. This review concludes that IAT scores probably explain a modest portion of those gaps. Even if the IAT captures implicit biases, and those implicit biases were completely eliminated, the extent to which racial gaps would be reduced is minimal. We conclude by arguing that, despite its limitations, the IAT should not be abandoned, but that, even after twenty years, much more research is needed to fully understand what the IAT measures and explains.

Fast-forward

Chandni had started working in a quest to earn her own money and contribute to her family at the age of 16, a few years earlier than her peers. Her first job was at a call centre, which her father initially opposed but was compelled to accept when Chandni did not relent. Following the call centre job, Chandni went on to do administrative work in a smaller but more upscale office. While she was eventually disappointed at her lack of progression there, she still talked about it as a transformative phase in her life. It was while working there that Chandni changed from a naive girl with oily plaits to a fashionable young woman who drew the attention of boys (Chapter 5 discusses these bodily transformations). It was in this office that she met her first boyfriend – Rohan. Although Chandni was initially reluctant about this romantic liaison, the relationship was encouraged by her boss and colleagues. Chandni and Rohan started going out on ‘dates’, often with friends and sometimes just the two of them. She had told her mother about him, claiming ‘… she is like a friend to me’.

Rohan's family, Chandni told me, was fairly wealthy. They lived in Madangir, a slightly higher-income neighbourhood than Chandni’s, and owned multiple properties across various cities. While Chandni's family, at the time, did not have any private vehicles, Rohan's family had recently bought a car – a Tata Nano – which he was driving around. The Tata Nano, it needs to be noted, is not just another car. Launched in 2008, the Nano, with its modest price tag of INR 100,000, captured the aspirations of a growing middle-class population who had previously only had access to motorbikes. As the world's cheapest car, the Nano was dubbed ‘the people's car’, becoming an object that symbolised India's capacity to innovate and integrate with global lifestyles. For Chandni, the car was a novelty, and her relationship with Rohan a learning experience. To her surprise, her colleagues, who had initially encouraged the relationship, now seemed envious:

We define a motivic measure on the Berkovich analytification of an algebraic variety defined over a trivially valued field, and introduce motivic integration in this setting. The construction is geometric with a similar spirit to Kontsevich’s original definition and leads to the formulation of a functorial theory that mirrors, in this aspect, the approach of Cluckers and Loeser via constructible motivic functions. A version of the integral over nontrivially valued fields and its relation to Hrushovski and Kazhdan’s integration are also discussed.

After nationwide protests in 2013, Turkey was convulsed by a “clash of Islamisms” on the one hand, and the breakdown of a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdish movement on the other. Driven by the fraught interplay of charismatic personalities, rousing ideologies, and an increasingly unstable regional context, these processes exacerbated the turns to illiberal governance and religious populism. Two key results of these processes were (i) the Erdoğan-led AKP’s pivot to an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and (ii) a failed coup attempt on July 16, 2016. A critical juncture in the fullest sense of the word, the coup attempt led to the consolidation of the ruling alliance around a renewed version of Turkish-Islamist synthesis.

On average, Black Americans’ health is poorer than that of White Americans. We examine three pathways by which implicit racial bias may contribute to racial health disparities. First, implicit and explicit racial bias cause racial discrimination, producing chronic stress and limited access to resources among Black targets of discrimination. This directly and negatively affects their health. This pathway has substantial empirical support. Second, physician implicit racial bias negatively affects treatment recommendations to Black patients, causing racial health disparities. Although intuitively appealing, currently there is little empirical support for this pathway. Third, physician implicit racial bias negatively influences the quality of healthcare interactions with Black patients, causing racial health disparities. This pathway has substantial empirical support. We conclude by highlighting differences in the ways social cognition and applied health disparity researchers study implicit racial bias, and make an argument for the benefits of dialogue and mutual collaborations between these two groups.

Moving from Cologne to the Hanseatic cities, this chapter demonstrates remarkably similar Heimat revivals and trends in local identity narratives in early post-war Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen. All three cities saw a major renaissance of local culture and emphasis on the value of Heimat in repairing community bonds and mobilizing for reconstruction. Democratically engaged locals argued for “democracy” and “openness to the world” as Hanseatic values and redefined the long-standing metaphor of their cities as “gates to the world.” Abandoning nationalist narratives of them as exit points of German power, such groups argued for their maritime cities as sites of international reconciliation. Locals wove such narratives by drawing on useful local historical memories. Hanseatic locals, however, reflected the same shortcomings in democratic practice, including persistent attempts to evade guilt for the Nazi past, gendered understandings of Heimat, and exclusion of newcomers. As in Cologne, more inclusively minded locals, however, sought to combat hostilities towards newcomers by engaging with the Heimat idea and arguing for “tolerance” as a local value.