This chapter is concerned with moral reading and focuses on a collection of short moral stories known as the Gesta Romanorum (Tales of the Romans), which were being copied, printed and circulated during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It discusses the aesthetics of the pages in Gesta with particular reference to Wynkyn de Worde's addition of illustrations in his printed version of c. 1510. The chapter considers the evidence for the circulation of Gesta stories and their qualifications as a popular form of literature in conjunction with their role as sermon exempla. It talks about how symbolism is made with particular reference to the use of inscription and how readers may have perceived this element in the narrative structure. A number of the stories seem to deal with issues that clearly have relevance to contemporary society whilst also persisting with the very Christian framework for their moralisations.

Originally the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that replaced the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1961 was thought of as an alternative producer of independent policy ideas. The chapter discusses the historico-political context of the OECD at the macro-level. With the end of the Cold War, a large number of other countries soon managed to fulfil the criteria for OECD membership: a belief in and a consolidated practice of a market economy and a liberal democracy. The chapter also discusses the committee structure at the meso-level, where politics meets international bureaucracy. Clearly, there are important links between the 'political' level related to the Council, the Executive Committee and the many sub-committees, and the 'administrative' level in terms of the OECD Secretariat. The chapter describes the secretarial dynamics at the micro-level.

During the 1870s, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) declared its intention to open more missions 'among the non-Aryan hill-people', who it was feared were coming under Hindu influence. The Bishop of Lahore felt that more missions were needed to work amongst the 'aboriginal' Bhils. A new mission to the Gonds of central India had been opened and efforts had been made from time to time to reach the Bhils, particularly in Khandesh, where the society had a base at Malegaon. In the Bhil areas, the thakors established themselves as the patrons of particular Bhil pals, providing support for them when they raided pals that were under the protection of a different thakor. The leader of the Bhil Bhagats, Surmaldas, lived in the village of Lusadiya. This lay within the small estate of the Thakor of Karchha, a Rajput who was a tributary of Idar State.

This chapter presents interpretive synopsis of Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions. Elemental Passions consist of fifteen chapters. It introduces key events in the relationship between you-man and I-woman. You-man has responded to I-woman's invitation to a mutually empowering love rather than a love which controls and consumes. Elemental Passions presents a meditation on the element of fire. It is full of references to flame, the sun, the sky, the clear horizon, flashes of lightning; and their contrasts: night, darkness, shadowy enclosure. In Speculum, Irigaray gives a reading of Plato's myth of the cave which reveals its implicit gender connotations. In language reminiscent of Speculum, Irigaray suggests that even when they come out of the cave, Plato's prisoners have to impose binary categories of thought in order to cope with reality. Elemental Passions offers a meditation on the nature of time, space, infinity and movement.

This chapter analyses identity formation among state servants and suggests that it explains why bureaucracy would eventually be gendered as unquestionably masculine. The built environment is served to inculcate a sense of selection and identity in state servants. State administration was built on notions of service to a master and further buttressed by a requirement of mutual help among state servants. Soldiers, customs officials and other lower state servants were constantly instructed, criticised, monitored, punished, supported and praised in their capacities as state servants. Marriage brought status, authority and resources to both men and women, in early modern Sweden and elsewhere. The activity patterns of Swedish women clearly show that marriage was a decisive factor for their agency. In the interactions with the state, the ideas about women's and men's roles were shaped and reshaped.

This chapter presents a critique of Luce Irigaray's method and her claims regarding the development of a female subject. Irigaray argues in This Sex Which Is Not One that women are in a unique position on the borders of patriarchy. The question of difference among Irigaray's possible addressees is closely related to her choice of discussion partners. Moreover, it is not surprising that since Irigaray pays attention chiefly to male thinkers, the primary difference she sets up between herself and her dialogue partners is sexual difference. In terms of Irigaray's intentions, as evidenced both in Elemental Passions and throughout her other writings, there is little to indicate that she herself thought of 'I-woman' as a signifier for difference itself. The barriers that divide can be replaced by fluid boundaries that allow for mutuality between subjects with multiple differences.

In September 1999, Russian federal forces moved into the Republic of Chechnya, a constituent part of the Russian Federation located in the North-Caucasus region. This military campaign came to be known as the second Chechen war, following on from the first Chechen war of 1994–1996, and an uneasy period of peace and de facto self-rule lasting for three years between 1996 and 1999. The existence of conflicting discourses in relation to the situation in Chechnya illuminates well the way in which Vladimir Putin's government, and particularly in this case Putin himself, have consciously used the discourse of securitisation in some settings, at the same time as employing the conflicting discourse of ‘de-securitisation’ or ‘normalisation’ in others. International criticism of Russia's actions in the republic has been countered by the insistence that the Chechen conflict is a key part of the war against terrorism. After describing Russia's counter-terrorism in Chechnya, this chapter discusses Putin's commitment to political normalisation through the support of accelerated reconstruction, social provisions, and economic recovery.

During the years after David Livingstone's death it became the powerful myth underpinning the outburst of missionary enterprise in Africa, embracing all denominations, but perhaps particularly associated with Scottish missions, prominently in Nyasaland/Malawi. When Livingstone's body was returned to Britain after the heroic journey across Africa of his followers, led by James Chuma, Abdullah Susi and Jacob Wainwright, he was welcomed into an English Valhalla. The missionary Alexander Hetherwick subtitled his memoirs, ending in 1928, with the assertion 'How Livingstone's Dream Came True'. The association of the name of Livingstone with resistance to colonial rule can certainly be charted through the activities of many of the Scottish missionaries in Malawi. Missionaries had to grapple with disappointing post-colonial political developments as they have described in an oral history project, interviewing Scottish missionaries who worked in Central Africa, mainly in Zambia but also in Malawi.

This chapter proposes to test the BBC's proposition with regard to the British Empire and imperialism. The period selected embraces fifteen years of John Reith's command of the BBC to 1938 and fifteen years after his departure. Early in its history, the BBC developed a tradition of what might be described as flagship programmes. Although there is little audience research until 1936, and it is even then only fragmentary until the fifties, these programmes were often described as being extremely popular, and all attempts by BBC programme planners to kill them off were thwarted. They frequently caused embarrassment within the Corporation, but they seemed to provide it with an admiring national audience, a good press, and social and political respectability. The activities of the BBC cast a very curious light on the notion that popular imperialism was killed by the First World War.

The Allied bombing of France is little discussed in France, and it is no better known in Britain or America. During the Second World War in France, children comprised just over a quarter of the population. The twentieth century's total wars thrust their way into the domestic space, affecting children as never before. Bombing is just one potentially traumatising trigger in war. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book compares three French towns with different experiences of bombing: Boulogne-Billancourt, Brest, and Lille. These towns had different histories, different characters, different administrative systems and different bombing experiences. The comparative analysis is across events with different chronologies. For some, the first Allied air raid was in July 1940, for others, April 1944. Four years of war separated those experiences.

This chapter begins with an argument that both philosophical and physiological theories constrained and informed the construction of British sports medicine. These ideas were part of the shared values and liberal education of a generation of middle-class men who, as doctors or amateur athletes, contributed to an understanding of the athletic body in the early twentieth century. Individualism, like moderation, allowed for an extremely flexible mainstream of exercise science and sporting advice. The use of exercise as a curative therapy is bound up with the histories of massage, physiotherapy, passive movement, medical gymnastics and all allied treatments such as hydrotherapy or electrotherapy. Movement and modernity were intimately related. Massage appeared at the most elite levels of sporting activity; at the first modern Olympic Games the American high jumpers appear to have sought the services of a masseur in the middle of their contest.

This chapter concerns with the presentation of the Shanghai Baghdadi Jewish community from a fresh perspective, that of its marginal position within the Shanghai Western community. Upon his arrival in Bombay David Sassoon set up a trading house, and in less than a decade he became the most respected member of the local Jewish community. The chapter attempts to delineate the modus operandi of the Baghdadi Jewish merchants in the India-China trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. It compares the Baghdadis' commercial role with that of Parsi and Ismaili merchants. The chapter traces the Baghdadis' relationship with the British, focusing on a number of interdependent aspects: nationality, Anglicisation, and social interaction. It aims to define the ambiguous positioning of the Baghdadis vis-a-vis the British, and to show that their marginality did not represent, as a whole, a significant hindrance to their sojourn in the Shanghai foreign settlements.