Chapter IV delves into Piero Sraffa’s price system, a cornerstone of modern economic theory, emphasizing the relationship between prices, income distribution, and production structures. The chapter begins by introducing the framework of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, outlining key assumptions about single-product industries, circulating capital goods.

A detailed analysis of relative prices is provided, examining their behavior under varying profit rates, with discussions on extreme cases: a pure labour theory of value, and a pure capital theory of value. The relationship between the wage rate and the profit rate is highlighted.

The chapter then introduces the “Standard system”, showing that it is possible to treat income distribution independently of prices, and that this possibility is not tied to the pure labour theory of value.

This chapter focuses on the Milan Exposition of 1906, an event of major national and international significance. I consider the Exposition’s musical and more broadly cultural activities in relation to contemporary fascination with Argentina, which was increasingly framed as a ’second Italy’. Musical highlights at the Exposition included a celebrated revival of Verdi’s classic La traviata: the first Italian staging of Verdi’s opera in period costume, featuring a creative team famous for their performances in Latin America. I examine the musical and cultural displays at the exposition before exploring the relationship between the Milan exposition and the La Scala production. If the exposition sought to reflect a specifically Milanese idea of ‘global’ space, I argue, operatic productions could at times operate in strikingly similar ways. In the context of shifting power relations between Italy and Argentina, operatic staging can therefore be understood as a significant discursive site for negotiating transatlantic relations, as operatic production became a vehicle of urban renewal at the end of Italy’s operatic nineteenth century.

The Sulcis region of southern Sardinia not only hosted the earliest Phoenician colonial settlement of the island (Sulky) but was also home to thriving Indigenous settlements of Iron Age Nuragic culture. The site of Nuraghe Sirai has yielded remarkable evidence that offers an insight in the relationships and interactions between these communities. Three detailed case studies of ceramic production and architecture show different skills and production techniques that were adopted and adapted over time. In the process, new traditions were invented, new economic connections were created and new power relations were built and imposed.

This chapter looks at the governance of information in the last two decades of the twentieth century, when the ambition of the New World Information and Communication Order was superseded by the sweeping wave of liberalization. Free trade became a prominent frame with which to conceptualize information and build institution for its governance. This chapter discusses institutional and conceptual changes during this period. Institutionally, privatization of telecommunication – especially in dominant countries like the United States – affected the organizational structure of international telecommunication organizations. Particularly, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization underwent considerable reforms to ensure an international institutional environment for the privatization of telecommunication. Conceptually, telecommunication was no longer perceived as a public utility; it had become an issue of trade in services, eventually brought to the world trade regime. As a result, the World Trade Organization, with which the ITU formed a complementary relationship, became a primary forum for the regulation of telecommunication.

This volume’s first set of essays draws together the antecedent of death, the process of dying, and the care, labor, and rituals that constitute deathwork. What can we know of death through understanding the events and experiences preceding and producing it – as transformation or transcendence; as “good” or “bad,” aberration or rupture; a process embedded within a web of relations and imbued with meaning particular to the society or community in which it occurs? How should we theorize about death’s work and those who undertake it? What is the relationship between the “hurt and wounded” and the “soothing hand” that seeks to pacify, and, later, once the body is drained of life, to tend in word and deed?

This book has examined the lives of non-Muslims in Iranian society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In towns and cities, religious communities often lived in distinct quarters or maintained separate villages on the margins of urban life. Within these spaces, they enjoyed limited autonomy – practicing rituals, constructing temples, and later establishing schools. Beyond these confines, however, they were readily identifiable by clothing, language, and accent, and their interactions with Muslims were constrained by local power structures. Restrictions affected where they could live and work, even as they were paradoxically entrusted with sensitive professions such as banking, moneylending, and goldsmithing. This tension – between trust and suspicion, purity and impurity – shaped broader social attitudes and reinforced their classification as outsiders.

Chapter 5 examines the renegotiation of kinship and gender relations within Tunisia’s post-revolutionary public sphere. Activists across gender and ideological lines confront the persistence of patriarchal discourses that shaped both the 2011 revolution and the subsequent democratic transition up to 2016. Legitimising hierarchy in both private and public spheres. In response, activists work to dismantle traditional filiation and its gendered consequences, seeking new forms of alliance and intimacy. This process challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian public and reflects broader efforts to rethink social relations in democratic spaces. Drawing on the anthropology of revolution and democracy which considers both experiences as profoundly social’, the chapter engages with North African scholarship on the intersection of kinship and politics, applying it’s insights to the evolving dynamics of Tunisia’s (post)revolutionary democracy.

This chapter examines 1940s African American poetry, nonfiction, and drama that share tropes of being outside time to explore attitudes on visual and historical representation, national sovereignty, and civil rights. Contextualizing this work between 1920s New Negro literature and 1960s Black Arts Movement literature, it charts changing African American perspectives on the uses of history, the symbolism of apocalypse, and the ever-elusive promises of democracy. The 1940s texts are Melvin Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Langston Hughes’ The Sun Do Move and “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, and Roi Ottley’s New World A–Coming. These authors expand global 1940s conversations about colonialism, democracy, and sovereignty to include domestic civil rights in the US, seeking capacious literary and visual means to capture an interconnectedness with Western European artifacts, contrasting both 1920s and 1960s African American texts, which tend more toward spotlighting African American achievement.

Consumed by thoughts of a blue flower, Heinrich leaves his cold homeland and travels south until he meets Mathilde, who opens his eyes to the world’s mysteries. Then a tragic event reveals the secret power of poetry …

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction and a classic of German literature. This highly detailed and original interpretation is the most comprehensive and systematic study of the novel ever written. Developing fresh insights into the philosophical ideas of the novel while also attending to its symbolic, literary, and creative qualities, Owen Ware explores how Novalis probes the core problem of modern life – fragmentation, and our sense of alienation from the world. Ultimately, he shows us, this novel is a timeless expression of the Romantics’ idea that only the imagination, guided by love, can bring us back to our spiritual home.