This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.

Historical pragmatics studies the use of language in earlier periods and the developments of usage patterns over time. Recent research in this area has increased our understanding of how usage patterns develop, and we have gained insights into a range of pragmatic phenomena at specific times in the history of English. This chapter provides exploratory accounts for each of the traditional periods in the history of English, from Old English up to Present-day English by focusing on those areas within historical pragmatics that have already received sufficient scholarly attention, in particular the use of pragmatic markers, speech acts and the use of politeness. These overview sketches of the individual periods will be linked through an analysis of specific development patterns.

Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.

Zombie ideas are awful ideas that ought to be dead, but which keep getting revivified and so are still walking among us. Three prominent zombies which we discuss are:

1. 1. coaching for admissions tests gives a large unfair advantage;

2. 2. admitting strivers (kids from lower SES who score higher than expected) makes things fairer;

3. 3. making tests optional makes things fairer.

Finally, the analysis turns to forces of resistance and rebellion. World history may be suspected of occluding the life of ordinary people and forces that could resist the ruling imperial elites and cultures so far discussed. This is a misunderstanding. World history has revealed a broad range of forms of resistance. These insights yield crucial tools for the Roman historian. The Greco-Roman literary record is teeming with references to rebellious activities, but most are very brief. By using the perspective of world history, these brief references may be brought to life and tell us about rebellions fuelled by millenarian prophecies, banditry and other forms of resistance. A world history perspective will also confirm the impression that peasant risings rarely succeeded in turning over the agrarian order. If we want to look for ‘revolution’, it more often came from frontier regions of the empire and usually arrived in the form of a new conquering force overturning the old imperial rulers. This was how the Roman world was brought to heal, both by its so-called Germanic federates and by the rise of the Arabs and foundation of their new empire on the basis of both Rome and Persia.

Rational choice theory is a social theory of decision-making that assumes individuals, groups, organizations, and states are strategic actors and thus make rational choices based on their preferences, available information, and the expected outcomes of their actions. The theory is based on the Enlightenment idea that individuals are autonomous and should seek their own self-interest, and that we can determine how an individual should behave by understanding how they might best maximize the utility of their decisions. Game theory is an approach within the rational choice framework that models mathematically the mutual best responses of each player according to their preference orderings.

This chapter provides an overview of the developments in syntax in the history of English. There is a long–term typological drift, with the language moving from synthetic to analytic, with functions that were earlier expressed in the morphology increasingly coming to be expressed by free morphemes. The main word order developments are the loss of Object–Verb orders in Early Middle English, and the loss of V2/V3 word order in the fifteenth century, leading to strict SVO order in which information–structural status was mapped onto syntactic function, with subjects as the only unmarked way to express ‘given’ information and objects as the only unmarked way for ‘new’ information. A number of ‘escape hatches’ develop to compensate for the loss of options for the flow of information in the clause: word order alternations such as the dative alternation or the particle alternation in phrasal verbs, cross-linguistically rare passives, ‘stretched verb’ constructions and clefts.

The concept of human security was first introduced formally in the 1994 UNDP Report and signaled a significant shift of focus from state security to the security of individual human beings and human communities. Unlike the abstract and theoretical debates within academia around that time about deepening and widening the definition of security, the human security approach was born from within the policy world and was policy-oriented. In the thirty years since its introduction, human security has undergone a series of reformulations, come under serious criticism, and inspired significant policy initiatives and numerous debates. Nevertheless, it remains the most formidable contender against traditional state-centered thinking around national and international security. In this chapter, we will look at the emergence and evolution of the human security approach, its core components, and its relationship with other important notions such as human development and responsibility to protect.

This chapter analyzes voluntary compliance in tax contexts, focusing on the importance of procedural justice and tax morale. It also explores conditions under which governments can achieve optimal revenue levels.

This chapter examines the development of a right to privacy against the press in Article 8 ECHR and the legal principles that apply in such cases. It considers the obligations that Article 8 imposes in respect of the activities of private actors, the criteria for balancing competing rights, and the role of the margin of appreciation and the ECtHR in that process. The chapter then considers the impact of Articles 8 and 10 on domestic law and the development of the tort of misuse of private information. This offers important insight into the ways in which the Convention rights and the HRA have shaped the common law. Finally, the chapter concludes with observations on prospects for the future and proposals to limits privacy rights.

Transitional justice consolidated in the early 2000s into what came to be called ‘mainstream transitional justice paradigm’, amalgamating prosecution, truth, reparations and institutional reform into a toolbox of mechanisms to be deployed in the aftermath of conflict or violence, in different parts of the word, as the most appropriate response to help societies turn the page to past atrocities. That paradigm put the spotlight mostly on state-sponsored atrocities and state-induced human rights abuses, of civil or political nature, during periods of political upheaval or conflict. This standardization of transitional justice came at the expense of a deeper engagement with the dynamics, factors and actors that bred, exacerbated and sustained violence, as well as with the particularities of each setting. Business actors comprise an example of such a prevalent but nevertheless marginalized actor. Their operations, despite widespread knowledge of their involvement in conflict, have remained in the background, and transitional mechanisms have either ignored them or improperly addressed their accountability.

Chapter 5 introduces readers to India’s regional diversity. The top-down and the bottom-up political changes in India discussed in Chapters 1 to 4 of this book are present more sharply in some parts of India than in others. In order to capture some of this variation, this chapter first provides some systematic comparisons of India’s states, including the context of Indian federalism and how that shapes center–state relations in India.

Chapter 4 argues that in the wake of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, the medieval, monarchical Tower of London had been superseded as the pre-eminent prison of the nation. Instead, the state prison that looms large in British fiction of the eighteenth century is the Bastille. This French prison is reliably depicted in a proto-gothic mode in British novels in order to frame and revile the absolutism of the French monarchy, and to celebrate the contrasting freedoms afforded by English law. This chapter elaborates the ways in which Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey complicates this commonplace by involving the British writer and reader within the carceral dynamic of absolutist France. Finally, it illustrates the uses to which Sterne’s fictional state prison was put by two of the most influential prison reformers of the eighteenth century: William Eden, one of the three authors of the Penitentiary Act of 1779, and George Onesipherous Paul, who rebuilt Gloucester’s prison into one of the first penitentiaries.