This chapter presents a brief background. It treats the Old Regime in Central Europe, the impact of the French Revolution, the postwar settlement, social and economic change, revolution in 1848, and national unification.

This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.

We prove that for every $ϵ>0$, there is a birationally super-rigid Fano variety X such that $\frac{1}{2}⩽\alpha (X)⩽\frac{1}{2}+ϵ$. Also we show that for every $ϵ>0$, there is a Fano variety X and a finite subgroup $G\subset \text{Aut}(X)$ such that X is G-birationally super-rigid, and ${\alpha }_G(X)<ϵ$.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

Chapter 3 focuses on massively multiplayer online game and chat software Club Penguin that was popular with children until the desktop version was closed down in 2018. The chapter reveals unique aspects of Club Penguin chat environments, including evanescent posts which constrain interaction due to users’ lack of access to review of their conversation. The analysis of Club Penguin chat interaction distinguishes between open conversation, which is similar to ordinary conversation but in written form, role-play and more structured play-oriented social interaction, which is constrained by game rules. The chapter identifies available linguistic resources to ascertain their potential to create naturalistic conversational sequences and routines. The analysis of real life chats reveals that children use the restricted language creatively and effectively in social interaction and virtual play with other users, with greater variety of linguistic devices and negotiations evident in small group exchanges. Some of these exchanges include negotiations related to inclusion of other children, which suggest that this environment may provide opportunities for children’s social development, ideally under adult supervision. Linguistic analysis in fact indicates that despite the software’s linguistic restrictions, which are intended to promote safety, children’s safety can be elusive when users deploy ambiguous polysemic vocabulary.

We compute Coxeter diagrams of several “large” reflective two-elementary even hyperbolic lattices and their maximal parabolic subdiagrams, and give some applications of these results to the theory of K3 surfaces and hyperkahler manifolds.

The Epilogue traces the afterlives of West German debates about Heimat in post-reunification Germany. It shows how public debates about the concept over the past three decades have primarily revolved around three issues: popular desires for home in the face of economic demands for mobility and flexibility, questions around immigration and integration, and the ongoing question of left-wing engagement with or disavowal of Heimat. All three issues have clear connections to the earlier West German debates, even if memories of these connections have often been lost. While the Epilogue shows how attempts to define the Heimat concept from the political left have remained contested, it demonstrates a growing trend towards engagement in the most recent Heimat debates over the past decade. Disengagement with desires for home, many have argued, has proven self-defeating, while many immigrant groups themselves have expressed deep desires for home in new places and have often argued for engagement with Heimat.

BUDDHIST CALCUTTA

By the late 19th century, Calcutta was not only one of the most important cities of the British empire, it had also emerged as a pivotal city for Buddhists in South Asia and colonial Southeast and East Asia. From the first decade of the 20th century onwards, Calcutta was visited by various Buddhist leaders—Japanese priests, Tibetan lamas that included the Thirteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet and the Grand Lama of Siberia, Burmese reformers and others, who addressed gatherings and offered prayers. Calcutta would soon boast of a Burmese Buddhist pagoda and an association of Burmese Buddhists, Buddhist temples in Howrah and Lake Road, and Chinese Buddhist temples in Chinatown. A number of new societies and study circles focused on Buddhism and Buddhist study were established. There was the Buddhist Text Society started by Sarat Chandra Das, the Buddhist Shrine Restoration Society, which had a life of about 10 years, and the popular Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha and the Mahabodhi Society, which still exist. A branch of the Young Men's Buddhist Association was set up in Darjeeling in 1912. Many Buddhist periodicals were in circulation in Calcutta too. The scholar of Pali, Beni Madhab Barua, and Nepali Buddhist activist, Dharma Aditya Dharmacharyya, began a journal called Buddhist India in 1927, which lasted until 1929. Numerous articles on Buddhism found their way into the pages of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Indian Culture, Indian Historical Quarterly and many others. The Mahabodhi Society had an English-language journal that brought together figures involved in the Buddhist revival. For a time, it also had a Hindi journal called Dharmadhuta that was published from Sarnath. Participants in the emerging public sphere were not only from the bhadralok but included a much more international presence with people like Dharmapala and Dharmacharyya, art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and others. This lent a global aspect to these discussions.

Colonial Calcutta was witness to wide-ranging discussions on Buddhism and comparative religion in the burgeoning media, that is newspapers, journals, pamphlets and modern publishing, and in venues like the new university in Calcutta, study circles and religious reform societies.