In the early modern period, history and tragedy were understood to be intimately related. The terms are often paired on the title pages of printed text and they share common roots in the de casibus tradition which traces the life and death of nobles and rulers. One of Shakespeare’s central achievements as a writer of history plays was to fuse the de casibus model with chronicle sources to create a complex dramatisation of relationships between king and country. In chronological terms, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck can potentially be inserted between Shakespeare’s Richard III and Henry VIII, and self-consciously addresses a lacuna in Shakespeare’s account of Tudor history. However, it is notably called not after a king (as Shakespeare’s histories are) but after a man who would be king. By boldly centralising Warbeck’s challenge to the crown, the play sets up a tension between historical priorities and dramatic priorities, in which Warbeck is a compelling protagonist. In so doing, Ford prises apart the elements of historical tragedy which Shakespeare so successfully synthesises.

Chapter 5 examines court cases in Xinjiang (1912–25). Consular officials worked a compromise between administering consular law, carrying out imperial objectives and allowing the jurisdiction of local custom over British subjects. Consuls were aided by aqsaqals, senior merchants who resolved minor disputes of the British communities in various towns. Consuls not only incorporated this indigenous administrative practice into British administration, but also arranged the aqsaqal system that had clear influences from Indian community organisation. The chapter therefore shows how Indian communities and Indian influences shaped British administration in Xinjiang.

Geoffrey Parker's exploration of the common soldiery in the seventeenth century broadened our understanding of the social profile of men fighting in the various armies of the period. This chapter revises Parker’s concept of the Universal Soldier and delves into ‘the human behavioural repertory’, connecting it to the history of early modern warfare. Focusing on warfare in seventeenth-century Italy, it shows how sociology and anthropology can be used to understand the behaviour of the common soldier as ‘the human animal in collective danger’. This chapter is a call to return to the primary sources to see what these texts can teach us about the way soldiers behaved in times of war, and to this end makes use of many recent valuable insights stemming from the social sciences. It also reviews some of the salient writing in the field and suggests how historians might insert warlike behaviour they encounter in early modern Europe into a species-wide framework. Hopefully in the future we will possess a huge database of war narratives that can bring us further in understanding human behaviour surrounding war.

The Nation was the most effective propagator of nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland and became an important Repeal ally. The Nation had 'distinct' ideas from its contemporaries and was far more successful in promoting them, but between 1843 and 1846 the newspaper's status was as a function of the Repeal Association. The objective of the newspaper was to foster a public opinion in Ireland, and make it 'racy of the soil'. The Nation preached a tenet, which was embodied in the title of the journal: that Ireland was a distinct nation and as such should be independent of Great Britain. The Nation included Daniel O'Connell's speeches, Repeal Association reports, letters to the editor, and first-hand accounts of Monster Meetings rendered it a necessary ally to Repeal. In making Young Ireland a liability, O'Connell protected his political base of the Catholic bourgeoisie and the clergy.

The chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the EU discourse on higher education and the role of LLL within it. It highlights the underlying neoliberal tenets of the overall discourse which is occasionally laced with social democratic trappings. The themes include those of internationalisation, diversification, innovation and competitivity, entrepreneurship, marketablity.

In this chapter Beatriz Santiago Belmonte looks at one of the most chaotic years of the Revolt. In March 1576, the death of Governor General Luis de Requesens created a power vacuum that would worsen during the following months, leading up to the infamous Sack of Antwerp on 4 November the same year. This chapter proposes opening up the discussion on the Sack of Antwerp by looking at hitherto understudied sources: the letters of the Spanish commanders playing a prominent role in the events. The information conveyed within their letters has a strong episodic character. They saw things differently, but they also saw different things. The power vacuum created a growing disunity between the Spanish commanders and the members of the Council of State that had officially received full authority. Political and military affairs became divided for the first time since the outbreak of the Revolt. The case of the almost forgotten previous Sack of Maastricht on 20 October 1576 moreover enables us to put the events in Antwerp into a broader historical perspective.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central questions: Why have labor activists in Europe turned to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to claim trade union rights, and what impact does this international litigation have on labor movements? While organized labor has historically relied on collective action rather than courts, this chapter situates that shift within broader transformations, including the erosion of union power under neoliberalism and the expanding authority of international courts. Yet the limited reforms states often undertake in response to ECtHR rulings rarely meet activists’ expectations. To explain how international litigation became a resource for workers, the chapter introduces the concept of strategic mobilization of human rights: an instrumental approach in which activists deploy human rights law to pursue concrete goals without necessarily embracing its ideals. Even pending or unsuccessful cases can catalyze social movements and shift political dynamics. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodological approach, which combines an original database of ECtHR labor rulings (StrasLab) with fieldwork on labor movements in Turkey and the UK. Situating the book’s contribution to debates on legal mobilization, labor revitalization, and international courts, it argues that the transformative potential of human rights courts ultimately depends on mobilization from below.

Analysing interactions between niches and regimes is critically important for understanding sustainability transitions. What complicates interaction is the fact that sustainability is often understood and pursued differently in regimes compared to niches. That means the aims and criteria for innovation can be different on either side of the interaction. A paradox arises in which interaction will be easiest when there is already good alignment between niche and regime sustainability criteria, but such alignment will by definition not demand very great changes in the regime nor empower more radical niche experiments. In practice, four different interactions coexist: differentiation; co-option; hybridisation; and criticism. These interactions work in both directions, can be interdependent upon one another, and influence wider change processes over time. It becomes problematic to conceive reconfiguration as a single transition process originating in niches and linking to regimes. This is illustrated with an example that contrasts sustainability in the automation regime of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) with a niche space that we call post-automation. In becoming attentive to niche-regime interactions, so the politics of sustainable transitions becomes clearer.

Chapter 1 identifies geography’s central role in the earliest texts produced by and about the Irish ca. 700–900. I begin with the first Holy Land pilgrimage account composed in Britain, Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, a foundational text for spatial writing. I consider how Adomnán applied this model to North Atlantic holy sites in Vita Sancti Columbae, and show how accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage inform Irish texts about voyages in the waters surrounding Ireland and Britain, the Western herimum in ociano. The islands of the North Atlantic (including Ireland) are often envisioned as otherworldly lands of milk and honey, whose nature is largely determined by their position limning civilization and the unknown watery regions beyond. A desire to investigate these places and be changed by them motivates the monastic Irish voyagers whose stories are told in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, which circulated widely throughout Europe; the lay protagonists of the closely related vernacular Irish voyage texts (immrama) undergo parallel experiences as they travel these same geographies. Irish spatial narratives provided an early and influential model for composers in Ireland, Britain and Europe to write texts inviting imaginative travel to holy places from the Dead Sea to the Irish Sea.

The new ‘urban squirearchy’ created by municipal reform, in contrast to the traditional Toryism of the Donegalls, was a forward-looking and dynamic group that initiated large-scale schemes of urban redevelopment. Both public and private building reflected a strong ethos of civic pride. The new urban elite was less effective in dealing with the environmental and public health problems created by urban growth. It was also deeply rooted in sectarianism, ruthlessly excluding Catholics from any share in the running of the town. At popular level too, there was segregation between Catholic and Protestant districts in the expanding working-class areas, and sectarian clashes became progressively more prolonged and violent.

Tiny presolar grains include C polymorphs, carbides, nitrides, oxides, silicates, metallic Fe-Ni, and organic compounds. Rare CAIs and AOAs contain refractory oxides and silicates. Major phases in type-3 OC include olivine and low-Ca pyroxene with variable FeO/(FeO+MgO), metallic Fe-Ni, troilite, and nearly exclusively within chondrules, crystallites of Ca-pyroxene, rare pigeonite, and tiny grains of merrillite. Whole-rock thermal metamorphism produced secondary phases: orthopyroxene, diopside, chromite, ilmenite, rutile, phosphate, and plagioclase. Diffusion facilitated by metamorphism causes increasing compositional homogeneity in olivine and pyroxene. Some minerals and mineraloids are formed at high shock pressure. These include lingunite and maskelynite from plagioclase; ahrensite, asimowite, poirierite, ringwoodite, and wadsleyite from olivine; akimotoite, bridgmanite, hemleyite, hiroseite, and majorite from orthopyroxene; chenmingite and xieite from chromite; tuite from merrillite; wangdaodeite from ilmenite; and TiO2-II from rutile. Parent-body aqueous alteration produced phyllosilicates, Ni-rich sulfides, Ni-rich metal phases, carbides, oxides, and small calcite crystals.

Chapter 3 examines capitalism’s core principles through a three-way comparative analysis of American capitalism, Nordic capitalism, and Soviet socialism. It establishes capitalism’s defining features – private ownership and market mechanisms – while revealing crucial variations in how different societies implement these principles. The chapter introduces the distinction between oligarchic and democratic capitalism, highlighting how power distribution shapes market outcomes. Through detailed examination of property rights, labor markets, and price mechanisms, it demonstrates how Nordic and American capitalism differ despite sharing fundamental market principles. The chapter concludes by exploring sustainable capitalism’s dependence on democratic institutions, arguing that well-functioning democracy is essential for markets to serve broader societal interests. This analysis sets up the book’s central argument that Nordic-style democratic capitalism offers valuable lessons for realizing sustainable capitalism.

While most sustainability transitions researchers agree on the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration, such collaborations can be difficult in practice. Scholars often disagree on (a) how to understand the world (ontology) and (b) what constitutes important knowledge about transitions (epistemology). From this observation, this chapter explores ontological and epistemological debates in sustainability transitions research. It begins by outlining dominant frameworks, particularly the multi-level perspective (MLP), and their foundational assumptions drawn from evolutionary economics and science and technology studies (STS). The chapter identifies two main criticisms of the MLP: the need for an expanded epistemic focus and ontological critiques from proponents of ‘flat ontologies’ and critical realists. It then discusses new epistemological approaches that challenge the dominant narrative that transitions primarily emerge through innovation journeys. These criticisms focus on capitalism, coloniality, and justice, highlighting how mainstream transition studies tend to externalise such concerns. The chapter concludes by supporting radical theoretical pluralism as key to understanding sustainability transitions’ increasing complexities.

This chapter focuses on typical language contact phenomena of German as a heritage language in the area of lexical and phrasal units as well as idiomatic constructions. The first part addresses lexical borrowing, i.e. the transference of form–meaning pairs and explains motivations for lexical borrowing and its typical domains in German heritage communities. The second part deals with the transference of meanings in lexical-based constructions, generally referred to as semantic borrowing. Following the categorization of Haugen, it discusses different types of meaning transference such as homologous, synonymous and homophonous extensions which are illustrated by examples from different German heritage communities. A special focus is on the formation of new form-meaning pairs in lexicalized constructions (e.g. light verb constructions and idiomatic phrases). In a concluding section, the psycholinguistic explanations for semantic restructuring processes and the formation of new constructions are discussed by presenting a model that explains the connection of lemmas in the mental lexicon. Furthermore, the emergence of new construction types through the process of interactive activation in speech production is illustrated and speakers’ agency and awareness of transference processes are discussed.

Polish people currently form the largest ethnic minority in Northern Ireland. Sectarian divides within Northern Irish society have affected how Poles have felt included and excluded in local communities. The focus of this chapter is on perceptions of inclusion and exclusion among Polish migrants in Belfast. It critically examines migrants’ constructions of space in Belfast, which is a city entrenched with social divisions, along lines of religion, ethnicity and class. The chapter draws on longitudinal interviews with fifteen Poles who have lived in Belfast for a decade in Protestant, Catholic and mixed areas of the city. Particular attention is paid to how the Polish migrants make sense of spaces ‘in between’, which include streets, alleyways, sidewalks, bus stops, parks and open spaces. The chapter sheds light on the everyday experiences of exclusion and inclusion and how the perceptions of Polish settlers have shifted over time. It also addresses the reactions of interviewees to changes in social and political attitudes in the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote.