To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
People often 'miswant.' They buy goods that do not make them happy and refuse to buy goods that would make their lives better. In The Price of Happiness, Cass R. Sunstein focuses on people's 'willingness to pay,' which is the foundation for free markets. He argues that willingness to pay deserves respect, and high honors in the annals of history, when buyers know what they are getting. It's when buyers lack information, or suffer from behavioral biases, that they might miswant. Special conundrums also arise when we try to monetize goods we don't normally consider in monetary terms, like pristine areas, human dignity, and social media. Exploring behavioral biases and their effect on human welfare, Sunstein shows how behavioral economics can be used to increase human happiness.
This book explores the nexus between ecological research and restoration through the long-term Mulligans Flat – Goorooyarroo Woodland Experiment. It synthesises 20 years of collaboration between researchers, government decision-makers, and conservation practitioners, offering valuable insights into the challenges, successes, and best practices of ecological restoration.Designed for researchers, policymakers, and restoration practitioners, this book is an essential guide to establishing long-term restoration projects with multiple partner organisations. Challenges and successes are discussed throughout, with chapter summaries highlighting key takeaways, making it a practical resource for both practitioners and academics. A dedicated chapter on Synthesis for Ecological Teaching distils insights from the Recovering Threatened Species and Ecosystems course developed at The Australian National University, providing an invaluable case study for undergraduate, graduate, and professional education. The book concludes with reflections from land managers and a vision for future directions to guide to the integration of research and restoration for lasting ecological impact.
Musa Sadr was a leading force in Lebanese politics from the early 1960s until his disappearance in Libya in 1978. Like now, this was a time of turmoil, violence, and change in the Middle East. Sadr has been portrayed as primarily a charismatic man of action whose inspirational qualities led Lebanon's Shia Muslims to the centre of the political stage. This book also reflects his position as a thinker whose actions were firmly rooted in universal ethical and religious values, and for whom Islam was social philosophy as well as faith. With twelve texts taken from lectures or talks given by Sadr between 1966-1977, an introduction, and a chronology of Sadr's life, the book situates Sadr within currents of humanist intellectual thought. Detailed contextualising footnotes accompany the translations, highlighting the enduring relevance and topicality of Sadr's ideas.
Offering a systematic exploration of blockchain networks from both technical and analytical viewpoints, this book introduces the core structures that underpin blockchain systems, transactions, addresses, and smart contracts and explains how these can be modeled, visualized, and analyzed using modern data science methods. Bridging computer science, finance, and statistics, it integrates algorithmic reasoning with economic intuition to study decentralization, risk, and trust in digital economies. Through examples drawn from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Monero, Zcash, IOTA, and DeFi, readers learn how blockchain data can be transformed into graph and temporal models for fraud detection, systemic risk analysis, and network behavior prediction. Featuring clear explanations, illustrative figures, and Solidity code, this volume serves as an essential reference for students, researchers, and practitioners in finance, data science, statistics, machine learning, and distributed systems.
Representationalists view thought and language as mirrors of a mind-independent world. On this view, knowing is about accurately representing reality, and meaning lies in representational content. This book offers a pragmatist alternative: it argues that our practices are not just relevant but fundamental to both knowing and meaning—and that knowing-how should be seen as the primary form of knowledge. Building on neopragmatist tradition and engaging with classical pragmatism as well as recent work in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science, the book develops and defends methodologism. This novel framework reorients questions of knowledge and meaning around rule-guided rational practices. The book will appeal to students and scholars in these fields, as well as readers across the humanities and social sciences interested in language, rationality, and their role in communities.
There is much recent talk of shifting power dynamics in international relations and of expanding Chinese influence abroad. How much of this talk is hype and how much of it reflects reality? This volume provides an up-to-date and comparative studies of Beijing's influence attempts abroad in a variety of countries. It shows significant variations across these countries, and often the limits of Chinese influence.
Few ideas have had a more powerful effect on the modern world than that of race, yet few ideas are less understood. Bringing together contributions from leading international scholars, this volume traces the crystallisation of this concept in western intellectual discourse in the eighteenth century, its rapid rise to prominence as a governing concept across the world from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, and its legacy from the Cold War and era of decolonisation to the present. Through multiple case studies, the chapters provide new angles on more familiar contexts, such as Enlightenment Europe, while introducing related themes in areas including India and New Zealand. Race in the Modern World offers a comparative understanding of the multiplicity of ways that race has been conceptualised, how these ideas changed over time, and how the world of ideas shapes the world in which we live.
Introduces the concept of legacy-making: future-oriented actions and ideation concerning the material and environmental effects that humans leave behind with reference to their eventual demise. Interviews conducted in Italy, Sweden, South Korea, and the United States are drawn upon to illuminate material-environmental relationalities and entanglements constructed through everyday legacy-making practices. Material and environmental legacies are made by people within the small worlds of their environments and kinship structures, yet they are also connected to the small world of shared global practices and processes that engender the biggest challenges of our time: socio-economic inequalities, environmental degradation, and climate change. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Beyond Magic in the Roman World reconsiders how Romans understood ritual, deviance, and alterity by moving past the modern category of 'magic.' Instead of treating magic as a single system, Andrew Durdin reveals how Roman authors used labels of ritual deviance to negotiate cultural diversity, social tension, and political authority. Drawing on texts from the late Roman Republic through the Principate, and written by Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Tacitus, and Apuleius, he offers clear, engaging explanations as to how Romans classified the unfamiliar. The result is a vivid portrait of a society using language, accusation, and imagination to make sense of an expanding world. Durdin's book equips readers with the tools to recognize how scholarly categories – especially 'magic' – carry colonial and imperial legacies that shape interpretation. Accessible and compelling, his study will appeal to readers of Roman history, ancient religion, and anyone curious about how cultures create – and contest – categories of difference.
Over a career spanning fifteen novels, two short story collections, and eight volumes of nonfiction, Sir Martin Amis helped to define his era. Through his published work and public commentaries, his voice featured prominently in the important socio-literary debates of his time. His work contributes to literary discussions about realism, postmodernism, satire, and comedy, and his core themes range across the Holocaust, nuclear anxiety, apocalyptic millennialism and, more recently, the war on terror. His words were rarely without controversy. This Companion identifies the essential elements of Amis's work and then evaluates their potential for longevity. From his earliest publications in the 1970's to his death as one of England's most well-known writers in 2023, Amis was an outspoken critic of social myopia: how societies – and their citizens – continually choose selfishness over altruism, fatalism over improvement, and blindness over enlightenment.
How did writers reimagine self and nation in the postcolonial moment? After the brutalities of partition and the triumph of Independence, decolonization in South Asia unfolded in a dramatic sense of disillusion and alienation. In this transnational study, Toral Gajarawala explores the cultural afterlife of decolonization in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and its profound moment of existential reckoning. In new genres and forms, artists registered a growing sense of estrangement from nation and nationalism, and crafted a new aesthetic landscape. This book reconsiders modernism in the subcontinent, charting the unlikely affiliations and aesthetic experiments it generated. Each chapter discusses a distinct artistic experiment- Hindi novels set in snow and ice, and a Pakistani painter's Paris moment; the existential novel of Bengal, and absurdist plays on famine and extinction- in light of key philosophical concepts of the moment: askesis, responsibility, commitment. The result is an illuminating microanalysis of the 1960s that reshapes our understanding of postcolonial aesthetics.
Unemployment in British and American Literature since the 1930s explores the literary history of unemployment-from the Great Depression to today-arguing that the feelings culturally associated with unemployment shape its political use. The literature analyzed in the book spans a wide array of contexts and formats: from Depression-era Britain, to the American Rust Belt. Through readings of British and American novels and ethnographies by Walter Greenwood, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Alan Sillitoe, James Kelman, Sarah Smarsh, Douglas Stuart, and others, the book interrogates the feel of unemployment and connects it to changing economic conditions, cultural representations, and political struggles.
Judging Through Narrative explores the normative frames, or judicial narratives, that non-Muslim courts construct when adjudicating Muslim Family Law disputes. The book examines how these narratives shape the rule of law, gender reform, and public trust in the justice system. Drawing on over 400 interviews with judges, lawyers, and litigants, and an analysis of nearly 3,000 judicial decisions from Ghana, India, Israel, and Greece, the book reveals how coherence and fragmentation in judicial storytelling influences legal legitimacy and reform. Introducing the concept of 'narratival (in)cohesion', this work offers a new framework for understanding how courts mediate between religion, rights, and state authority. Bridging law, political science, and socio-legal studies, it is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how judicial narratives shape the lived experience of law in diverse, multi-religious societies.
This is a study of the financial system that sustained the sixteenth-century empire of Philip II of Spain. Detailing the links between royal revenue sources, trade fairs, credit market, long-term debt, and contracts with Genoese bankers, it reveals how Philip's financial and military strategy complemented each other. Central to the narrative is Philip's struggle with the Cortes, which, under Castile's implicit constitution, imposed limits on public debt, forcing repeated renegotiations as military expenses and debt escalated. In this first analytical study of Philip's financial policies, Carlos Álvarez-Nogal and Christophe Chamley draw on extensive archival research and secondary sources to show that Philip's main challenge was not the bankers but the Cortes. He used temporary payment suspensions and financial crises as tools to pressure the Cortes for additional taxation. The book highlights the interplay between debt, political power, and state formation in early modern Europe.
The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs. This book is a collection of essays that examine the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, in portraiture, literature, contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. It falls into three sections. The first part looks at the diverse range of religious and quasi-religious images that were employed by and about Elizabeth, such as the Prophetesse Deborah, the suggestive parallel with Joan of Arc, and finally Lady Alchymia, the female deity in alchemical treatises. When Queen Elizabeth I, the first female Protestant monarch, was enthroned in 1558, male poets, artists, theologians, and statesmen struggled to represent this new phenomenon. The second part turns to one of the major enterprises of the Elizabethan era, the attempt to colonise the New World, during which the eastern seaboard of America was renamed Virginia in celebration of the Virgin Queen. The last part focuses on the ways in which the classical world was plundered for modes of imaging and figuring the queen. Finally, the book summarises the enormously wide range of Elizabeth's iconographical repertoire of its appeal, and provides a fitting end to a book which ranges so widely across the allegorical personae of the queen.
The book explores how we understand global conflicts as they relate to the ‘European refugee crisis’, and draws on a range of empirical fieldwork carried out in the UK and Italy. It examines how global conflict has been constructed in both countries through media representations – in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news. In so doing, it examines the role played by historical amnesia about legacies of imperialism – and how this leads to a disavowal of responsibility for the reasons people flee their countries. The book explores how this understanding in turn shapes institutional and popular responses in receiving countries, ranging from hostility – such as the framing of refugees by politicians, as 'economic migrants' who are abusing the asylum system – to solidarity initiatives. Based on interviews and workshops with refugees in both countries, the book develops the concept of ‘migrantification’ – in which people are made into migrants by the state, the media and members of society. In challenging the conventional expectation for immigrants to tell stories about their migration journey, the book explores experiences of discrimination as well as acts of resistance. It argues that listening to those on the sharpest end of the immigration system can provide much-needed perspective on global conflicts and inequalities, which challenges common Eurocentric misconceptions. Interludes, interspersed between chapters, explore these issues in other ways through songs, jokes and images.
The Generative AI revolution is driven by corporations demanding legal superpowers. If we allow it to continue unchecked, the implications will be profound. This urgent, critical book exposes the unprecedented push by trillion-dollar companies to build AI on billions of unauthorized human works and redefine fundamental areas of law, including copyright, contract, and free speech. Written by an industry insider who turned from AI champion to AI critic, this highly accessible work promotes AI literacy and provides essential tools to pierce the hype. Readers will learn how to assess AI's profound societal risks to democracy and autonomy and ensure that we are the architects of-and not bystanders in-our artificial future.
"Republics and empires showcases transnational perspectives that address the significance of Italy for American art and visual culture while outlining the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture. Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War, this collection of chapters illuminates the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two relatively new nations together. It also pays substantial attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States.Taking into account the significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, Part I: ‘Hybrid Republicanisms’ and Part II: ‘The Courses of Empire’ highlight important cross-cultural issues. The first section concentrates on the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics in the long nineteenth century. Rather imperfectly, both nations attempted to bind a community of diverse peoples together on the common values of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. The second exposes how the liberal tendencies of nationalism gave way to imperial ambition, and how this transition was given visual and cultural form in Italian and American high art and popular culture.The anthology serves as a valuable introduction to American-Italian cultural relations. Its fourteen historicised case studies by Italian and American scholars trace how gender, race, ethnicity, and class interests intersect with the powerful political and cultural dynamics of both nations.
Written by a team of leading experts, this groundbreaking handbook provides the first comprehensive and current account of Natural Linguistics. It offers a state-of-the-art survey of the theoretical developments that have arisen from, or are related to, the framework of Natural Phonology – across subfields as diverse as phonology, morphology, morphophonology, syntax, pragmatics, and text linguistics. The handbook is split into five parts, with chapters covering the origins, foundational principles, semiotic, cognitive, and functional bases of Natural Linguistics, as well as external evidence for the theory, and a critical appraisal of its position amongst modern linguistic theories. It fills a gap in the available accounts of modern linguistic theories and demonstrates the potential of the theory to a wider audience, addressing both advocates of the school and those who are open to alternative approaches to linguistic science. It will be a definitive reference work on Natural Linguistics for years to come.
Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.