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.

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.

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.

In his Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that during the Enlightenment period, under the influence of Kantian ethics and aesthetics, European intellectuals came to understand aesthetic judgment, or “taste,” as something other than “truth.” Kant, Gadamer continues, legitimated a subjective universality of aesthetic taste that was devoid of any true knowledge of the object. In doing so, he made it impossible to acknowledge the truth claims of the “human sciences.” The consequences of this move, Gadamer points out, were far-reaching, removing all bodies of knowledge not based on “natural science” methodology from the domain of objective knowledge and casting them into the realm of subjective opinion. What is important for Gadamer here is the catastrophic impact of Kant’s analysis on the veracity of ethical truth claims. For me, however, what is interesting is its implications for aesthetic judgment itself. It meant that, for instance, aesthetic judgments about good and bad music – consonance and dissonance – were no longer statements of truth and by extension, no longer scientific. Rather, consonance and dissonance – and music in general – became matters of subjective opinion. For the medieval scholars whose works I have examined in this book, however, Kantian analysis meant nothing. Free from its restrictions, they understood music to be science, and aesthetic judgments of consonance and dissonance to be valid truth claims. At the outset of this book, I posed a series of questions about medieval Islamic understandings of science. Now that I have concluded my examination, it is pertinent to provide answers to those questions.

The chapter analyzes the material and ideological impact of globalization, particularly the experience of colonial empire.

The chapter focuses on Germany’s international relations, the development of the German army and military policy, the domestic consequences of military policy, and the origins of war in 1914.

Chapter 3 examines the various uses of Bank notes based on the Lost Note Books and other archival sources. Besides being used to buy goods and services, the Bank note frequently appeared in specific monetary transactions, making it a form of ‘special purpose currency’. The high value of Bank notes made them more likely to be used for round sums, such as paying employees’ wages. Paying wages for seamen and navy employees had a significant impact on the spread of Bank notes, expanding their user base geographically and socially. Other notable uses of Bank of England notes include interregional payments, rent and tax payments, which demonstrate how Bank notes became a special currency in Britain’s diverse monetary landscape. This chapter also highlights the different modes of Bank note use, particularly through social endorsement. Although not legally significant as in the case of bills of exchange, note users widely endorsed Bank notes during the Bank Restriction period. This social form of endorsement represented a sense of communal currency and the belief that note users played a role in generating monetary value.

The chapter examines the political mobilization of women and its limits, and sectoral tensions among women’s associations.

Chapter 5 starts with the definitions of the note and the acoustics of sound production. Here, I first examine the acoustical underpinnings of the classical Greek writings on the subject and the impact they had on how the musical note was conceptualized. I then demonstrate that scholars of the medieval Islamic world approached their received wisdom with a skeptical eye and occasionally disagreed with their intellectual masters. These disagreements resulted in illuminating conversations about the nature of a musical note, how it should be differentiated from mere sound, and what role do acoustics of sound production play in these discussions.

Before Enid Blyton's stories about picturesque girls’ residential schools entered the Indian literary market, colonial boarding schools, with their distinctive architectural form and curriculum, held a unique place in the educational landscape. We can discern three kinds of boarding schools during this period, identifiable by the geographies in which they were located and the social character of their pupils, but essentially, as Satadru Sen notes, ‘paralysed by an articulation of difference that implied that native children were essentially small, perverse adults’. As with early European military-style institutions, the boarding schools established by Catholic and Protestant missionary societies and the British colonial administration had strict timetables, corporal punishment, and physical and intellectual training aligned with specified educational goals regarding children's capacities and futures.

First, the boarding schools established during the 1870s mainly catered to children of royal parentage in many parts of India, aimed at training them (mainly boys) in habits and codes of behaviour befitting their status. Located in remote locations, these schools were immersed in a curriculum aligned with those similar to British public schools, which included horse riding, classical languages, and military training, among other subjects. In this way, imperial administrators considered young sons of princely rulers, enveloped in colonial discourses of effeminacy, to be removed from their immediate surroundings to soften any propensity to rebel against their imperial masters. The second type of boarding school, known as Lawrence Military Asylums and based in the cooler climes of hill stations, was designed to educate and train mainly children of British soldiers serving in the subcontinent and reluctantly admitted a handful of children of mixed-race descent. In the tropical heat, these schools served as enclaves amid constant anxieties about racial miscegenation. This chapter analyses the third type, the oldest, most modestly resourced charity boarding schools run by Christian missionary organizations that offered education to orphaned, destitute, famine-stricken, runaway, and poor Indian children in villages and towns since the 1830s. Often, orphans presented ‘a problem of governance’, resulting in sharp disagreements over financial management and the kind and duration of instruction these pupils should receive.

Chapter 1 will examine the ontological and epistemological questions surrounding music in the knowledge system of the medieval Islamic world by exploring the philosophical system of Ibn Sina and his later followers, all of whose works laid the foundations for scholars of music in the centuries to come. In particular, I will address how mathematics was conceptualized vis-à-vis the cosmology of the falsafa tradition as the discipline that examined the existents whose existence was dependent on physical matter but could be conceptualized without the said matter. Through this conceptualization of music and mathematics, scholars of music were able to broaden their subject matter to cover topics from the melodic modes in vogue in their time to the poetics of music. At the same time, since everything in the universe was connected to one another, music was linked with many other scientific disciplines such as astronomy and medicine.