This chapter examines e-book realness in terms of identity and love: e-books shared or not shared, displayed or not displayed, and made a cherished part of the reader’s personal history or barred from such status. It examines aspects of display and cultural capital in forms specific to digital and forms specific to print. It investigates how stereotypes (of some readers as unqualified and some reading practices as inferior) and assumptions (including tropes of furtive reading) interact with existing narratives of literary decline, technology as a threat to culture, and women as incompetent readers. It explores love for reading devices as well as love for print, and how identity as a bibliophile proves compatible with e-reading. E-books are only sometimes real, but it is their very flexibility that makes them so valuable to book lovers. They can be public or private, permanent or ephemeral, valuable or valueless, intimate or distant, depending on one’s usage and settings but also on one’s idea of what an e-book is; and, as demonstrated, that idea is highly adaptable and at least sometimes under one’s conscious control.

Chapter 2 presents the current institutional framework, with a special focus on the exercise of the legislative function. After a brief presentation of the most relevant institutional principles, notably those of effectiveness, institutional balance, and sincere cooperation, the chapter turns to the Parliament, the Council, and the Commission and explains their prerogatives and internal structures in the light of the concept of “executive federalism.” The chapter shows that the legislative institutions of the EU, in line with the principles of autonomy and internal differentiation, allocate important preparatory tasks to different internal bodies (that is, parliamentary committees, Coreper, and GRI) and analyzes the role of those bodies in the adoption of legislation.

This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

The eighteenth century was a time of change. Some elites responded by forging new relations with layfolk mediated by Sindhi poetry (Chapters 4 and 5). These communities were not regional, which is to say they were not Sindh-wide. Rather, they were local, rooted, in the case of Hashim, in Thatta, and, in the case of Latif, in Bhit. At the same time, they were networked more broadly. Hashim's descendants moved out to Oman and Gujarat. His contacts extended all the way to the Hijaz. Latif, in turn, enjoyed recognition in Kachch and Jaisalmer. Unlike Mir Masum and Yusuf Mirak, their networks did not follow the circuits of the Mughal state but rather moved along different infrastructures of communication.

Under Ghulam Shah Kalhoro, the state had intervened in favor of these new experiments. Ghulam Shah had passed Hashim's decree in 1759, enforcing a form of Sunni public order in Thatta while also patronizing Latif's tomb sometime after Latif's death in 1751. Historically based in upper Sindh and Balochistan, the Kalhora had not cultivated close ties with the elites or people of Thatta and lower Sindh. Between 1757 and 1761, Ghulam Shah was forced into lower Sindh as a result of a succession struggle with his brothers. His patronage was most likely meant to build ties here in the context of fraternal conflict. These overtures may not have been wholehearted. In 1759, Ghulam Shah ordered the construction of Hyderabad, a new Kalhora capital in lower Sindh, passing over Thatta as a base of power. Yet the literary innovations of lower Sindh left an impact. During the reign of Sarfaraz Shah (1772–75), Ghulam Shah's son and successor, Sindhi poetry was incorporated into courtly culture, marking a major milestone in Sindhi literature.

It was another eighteenth-century resident of Thatta, Mir Ali Shir Qani (d. 1788–89), who synthesized the diverse developments of the century into an overarching vision of regional social order, connecting individual with region and Thatta and Sindh with the rest of the world. Qani belonged to a landholding sayyid family from the city. His

This chapter shifts the analysis to the macro-structural (discourse unit) level. Short-text MDA reveals five dimensions at the discourse unit level (ten distinct functions). This chapter deals with the first three dimensions. The analysis begins with a brief discussion of the first dimension before exploring in depth the second and third dimensions. Throughout the analysis is guided by an exploration of prototypical discourse units – those discourse units most strongly associated with either side of a dimension. This allows an exploration of the roles of the L1 and the L2 speakers in the use of the functions as well as the interaction between discourse unit function and task, level of proficiency and attainment in the examination. These early studies show that that discourse unit functions are sensitive to task in particular and that the role of the examiner in the examination may be seen to vary through discourse unit functions as the proficiency of the L2 speaker increases. The chapter also remarks on links between micro-structural discourse functions and those at the macro-level.

The evolution of banking regulation and banking crises are highly intertwined. The post–World War Two period was marked the globalisation of banking and increased banking instability. This initiated a trend towards harmonised frameworks for banking regulation, leading to a common framework for measuring capital adequacy in 1988 (Basel I). The path towards the Basel framework in 1988 was very different in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. When statutory capital requirements were introduced in Switzerland in 1935, most banks were indifferent. This indifference changed towards the end of the 1950s, when capital regulation became a bottleneck for growth. The United Kingdom lacked the experience of a solvency crisis during the 1930s, resulting in capital in banking becoming an almost irrelevant topic. It took until the secondary banking crisis in 1973/4 for banks’ regulation to be reconsidered. The United States did experience a deep banking crisis in the 1930s but introduced statutory capital requirements only in the 1980s, following increased domestic banking instability and the threat of potentially high losses from the Latin American debt crisis.

In the Introduction, I referenced a coin minted under the emperor Titus (Fig. E.1). On one side appeared the figure of the emperor sitting amid a heap of weapons, a reference to his roles in the Jewish War, the capture of Jerusalem, and the construction of the building depicted on the coin’s opposite side, the Flavian Amphitheater. The coin adopts an unusual perspective, showing the Colosseum’s façade while also permitting a glimpse into the building. We spy the columns tracing the uppermost reaches of the interior and a few heads peeping out between them. Lower down two more rings of spectators are visible, the lower one pierced by an entrance and split into wedges by staircases. When we last examined the coin, we remarked about how only one individual appeared – the emperor – while everyone else was merely an undifferentiated head.

Capital/assets ratios in banking declined substantially during the two world wars. Three drivers severely impacted the capitalisation of banks. Banks invested heavily in government debt, which led to an expansion of balance sheets. High inflation ratios devalued the paid-up capital of banks. Moreover, formal and informal constraints restricted banks from issuing capital in wartime. The Second World War, in particular, had long-lasting effects on the evolution bank capital. The United Kingdom controlled capital issuances after 1939 and reinforced the financial repression of banks. The Swiss Banks operated in a regulated but much more liberal framework. In the United States, the belief in informal capital requirement guidelines was very pronounced. By the mid-1930s, the United States had already three federal bank supervisory agencies, which all had developed opinions on how capital adequacy was assessed. However, the rapidly growing government debt in banks’ balance sheets overturned these conventions, leading to the first risk-adjusted measurements for capital and triggering the development of new measurement approaches that became the forerunner of the Basel I guidelines.