This fourth empirical chapter is called ‘Reconstruction’ and describes the use of the clean 800-year-long tree-ring chronology to reconstruct the Scottish climate before the start of temperature records in the early nineteenth century. The main body of the chapter describes how the scientists compared the 800-year-long temperature reconstruction for Scotland against other datasets. I show that the scientists established the accuracy of the Scottish reconstruction by assessing its similarity to canonical reconstructions and temperature datasets. This conclusion is important for public debates about the nature of scientific consensus. Rather than conceiving consensus-building as if it were a matter of simply piling up datasets (like the widespread metaphor of ‘the brick wall’), this chapter shows that agreement among scientists is always temporary and partial, and involves ongoing negotiations and disagreements.

This book focuses on modern warfare. It examines the conduct of war in its different environments and forms and provides an introduction to the issues, ideas, concepts, context and vocabulary necessary to develop an understanding of the subject. It is not a history book, although relevant historical examples are used throughout to illustrate the analysis. Rather, the book is designed to equip the reader with a sophisticated introduction to the concepts, issues and debates that will help them to understand current concerns and future possibilities and also to unpick past campaigns.

When colonial rule began in the mid-nineteenth century, India and Britain were both poor by modern standards, although Britain was somewhat richer. In 1947, when colonial rule ended, the gap between the two was gigantic. Britain was a sophisticated and wealthy economy where per capita income, health and education had improved dramatically, whereas India was still exceedingly poor on all these metrics. India’s economy changed over 200 years: it was far more engaged in international trade, a modern industrial sector had developed and railways criss-crossed the country. At the same time, productivity was low in all sectors of the economy, especially in agriculture. Life was precarious: as late as 1943, a devastating famine took millions of lives in Bengal, a horror that indicted colonial rule. We introduce the reader to this complex story of transformation without enrichment, briefly commenting on how each chapter fits in the narrative.

Long prior to public revelations of institutional abuse, novelists such as Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien portrayed the realities of institutions such as Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools, and Mother and Baby Homes. Works such as The Land of Spices and the Country Girls trilogy examine private and individual experiences of these institutions, and their effects on the subsequent lives of women. Catholic institutions in such fiction are populated by abusive clergymen, cruel nuns, and exploited chidren. More recent fiction has adjusted its focus to scrutinise the enabling role of the public in institutional abuse. Claire Keegan and Emma Donoghue are among the authors who remind us that Catholic institutional cruelty has been facilitated by society economically – by use of Magdalene Laundries, for example – and by wilful obliviousness to inconvenient truths.

This third empirical chapter is entitled ‘Standardisation’, which is the term used by dendroclimatologists to refer to the removal of non-climatic factors from tree-ring chronologies so that the resulting data represent, as clearly as possible, the effects of climate on tree growth over time (the so-called ‘climate signal’). The main body of the chapter outlines the process by which the scientists refined existing methods for removing ‘noise’ from the Scottish data. I show how they learnt about and further developed these methods through informal seminar conversations and laboratory visits and by being attuned to the needs of their peers. This conclusion addresses public discussions about the need for a ‘disinterested’ and ‘depoliticised’ climate science. I argue that the advancement of science – as shown in the stage of standardisation – occurred due to the existence of personally implicated and fully socialised individuals who used the communicative channels of their academic community to pursue both professional and political goals. In this way, I suggest that climate science free from social influences and politics would be irrelevant and inexistent.

Medical autobiographies begin as pseudonymous case histories for medical doctors’ consideration of supposedly pathological conditions, and become accounts of the ways mid-twentieth-century physicians’ psychiatric practices harmed and inhibited, and did not treat or assist, gay, memoir-writing patients. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts then recount their lives and therapeutic practices as living examples, which run contrary to conventional, prevailing professional opinions on homosexuality, and eventually negotiate their professions’ important, redefining turning points of 1969, 1973, and 1992. As a later generation narrates stories of addiction, disease, and physical abuse at family members’ hands, they can commence with the confident assumption of the health of a gay male body.  They can, unlike their predecessors, see homosexuality as the least of their worries. Initially a sign of a psyche gone awry, same-sex sexuality, over the course of five generations, becomes the healthy norm, from which the most recent gay American autobiographers draw their strengths, instead of seeking supposed cures.

Trade and finance together formed the third-largest livelihood type in colonial India. These two activities were interdependent because banks and moneylenders mainly financed commodity trade. The combined share of the two activities rose significantly in national income in the early twentieth century. Behind this growth, the expansion of transport infrastructure and an open economy with few barriers to foreign trade were responsible. It was not, however, a business without friction. A great deal of the historical scholarship around these activities asks how environmental risks, information asymmetry, law and politics shaped the decisions of merchants, lenders and firms, as this chapter shows.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Clarke School hereditydivision worked with leading figures of eugenics andmedical genetics, e.g. geneticist Madge Macklin, orthe NIH. During this time, the school became aleading centre of hereditary deafness research – aposition it would lose by the 1960s, when geneticsbecame part of large, laboratory biomedicine. Eventhough it was part of larger developments ineugenics and genetics, the school retained itsunique small-school character of heredity researchand counselling. Education, medicine, and eugenicsintertwined in its mission to turn deaf childreninto normal, productive, and responsible citizens –which also meant discouraging them from marrying adeaf partner. While in the 1930s and 1940s,eugenicists and oralist educators could agree onthis, by the 1950s and 1960s, geneticists becamemore confident about predicting reproductiveoutcomes, and believed that such decisions should beleft to the individual.

Love, desire and sexuality, as depicted in the world of Claire Denis' films, elude the conventional romantic framework that defines and binds them together in mainstream fiction. From Chocolat to Vendredi soir, the sexual and emotional dimension emerges with the contradictions and uncertainty inherent in its complexity. The representation of desire, explored in its emotional, sexual and subversive aspects, is indis sociable from the director's elaboration of a 'cinema of the senses.' In its mise en scene of desire, Denis' filmmaking not only creates correspondences between the senses, but also confuses the traditional process of identification and point of view. The exploration of the thematic of desire and sexuality initiated with US Go Home and Nenette et Boni and continued in Trouble Every Day. This kind of thematic drove Denis further away from conventional models, towards the reinvention of a cinema of the senses most explicitly celebrated in Vendredi soir.

This chapter identifies key features of Leibnizian theodicy in order to bring out its historical peculiarity and significance. To this end, it distinguishes between the surface form of Leibniz’s project, which exhibits typical traits of traditional explanatory theodicy, and its underlying motivational structure. The latter can be seen as arising from a confluence of three currents: the articulation of a perceived threat to the adequacy of creation, an extreme variety of theological and metaethical intellectualism, and a rationalist understanding of goodness. Elaborating this gap between surface form and motivational structure shows Leibniz to have a transitional status: while viewing God as an absolute explanatory and metaphysical principle, Leibniz begins to liberate criteria of goodness, rendering them principles of reason to which even the divine will is subject and by which his creation can be judged. Exploring the resulting tension helps us appreciate the novelty involved in his reconfiguring theodicy as a juridical enterprise, that of putting God on trial.

This chapter considers the role of Irish newspapers in the peace process which ended the War of Independence and led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. It focuses on the three most popular Irish daily newspapers at the time: the Freeman's Journal, Irish Independent and The Irish Times. The Freeman's Journal had made its own attempt to foster peace as early as August 1920 through one of its journalists, Jerry McVeagh. In July 1920, the Freeman's Journal published an editorial and report which advocated a settlement involving 'Dominion Home Rule based on the constitution which Canada won'. Martin Fitzgerald and his newspaper played a more productive role in the summer of 1921 as the Freeman's Journal was heavily involved, as an intermediary, in the negotiations leading to the truce. When the Truce was agreed on 9 July 1921 the Irish press across the political spectrum responded positively.

In principle, economic development can be environmentally sustainable and compatible with the rights of the poor to the commons – forests, water and land. In practice, however, the economic transformation of India since independence – rapid increase in agricultural productivity, industrialization, urbanization and the building of much-needed infrastructure, has come at the expense of environmental degradation and the rights of the poor to common property resources. Indian economic policy has for the most part favoured ‘development’ over environmental concerns. But India is a democracy in which civil society and the people can protest and exert pressure to prevent environmental degradation and defend their rights to the commons. The Indian judiciary, the Supreme Court in particular, has also been proactive in intervening to protect the environment. As of now, the impetus toward natural-resource-intensive and polluting growth is winning the day, but the struggle to find a better balance continues. Climate change is making the task much harder.

Chapter 7 deals with neuroimaging methods for investigating the structural components underlying brain function. Beginning with lesion-symptom mapping (LSM), which identifies relationships between localized brain damage and specific cognitive deficits, the chapter examines how structural abnormalities correlate with functional impairments. Three primary approaches to measuring brain structures with MRI are discussed: structure tracing for hypothesis-driven volumetric analysis, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) for whole-brain comparison of tissue concentration, and surface-based morphometry (SBM) for analyzing the cortical sheet’s unique properties including thickness, curvature, and gyrification. The chapter then explores diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a technique that visualizes white-matter tracts by measuring the anisotropic diffusion of water molecules along axon bundles. DTI tractography reveals the brain’s “highways,” short, intermediate, and long-range fiber pathways that connect functional modules within and across hemispheres. Together, these complementary techniques provide critical insights into the structural architecture supporting brain networks, offering a more complete understanding of brain organization when combined with functional imaging methods.