The Conclusions summarise the book’s themes, highlighting the importance of language in creating character. Male characters (Hector and Achilles) use language to express individuality and display their ability to ‘read’ interlocutors, explaining their actions to the community while withholding full disclosure to prevent counterproductive results. They also expose fissures and tensions in their community’s values. However, their attempts to master language clash with human and divine unpredictability and communication failures. Ancient commentators policed the text to deny women escape from linguistic and behavioural limits. Yet, Homer’s text subtly suggests alternative readings of women’s minds and actions. Helen offers strong meta-narrative comments, linking the poem’s existence to her violation of gender norms. The chapter argues that interpretive communities, ancient and modern, rely on strict gender definitions when reading character minds, even though Homer’s text occasionally questions these boundaries.

The chapter studies Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man (1896). Drawing on the pictorial and literary reception of the Thames Tunnel and the Parisian underground, the chapter investigates how the material change of subterranean space in nineteenth-century Britain and France stimulated the conception of a “new” underground associated with the technological future. Comparing the two authors’ intersection of the new underground with climate control, it ventures that Bulwer-Lytton Lytton demonstrates the calamitous aesthetic consequences of climate technology employed by an underground race. In contrast, Tarde portrays the flourishing of decadent underground civilisation prompted by the heat death of the sun. The chapter concludes that the discursive network turning the underground into an inorganic, climate-controlled place peaks in Underground Man, where the climate becomes an engineerable simulacrum, spelling out a progression from dystopian to utopian depictions of deliberate climate change.

This chapter studies how J.-K Huysmans represented climate control on the scale of the individual – the universe of protagonist Jean des Esseintes – in Against Nature (1884). While French poets such as Théophile Gautier and Stéphane Mallarmé used a climatological vocabulary in reflexively describing the character of decadence, Huysmans formulated an understanding of climate as something always already artificial, always already anthropogenic. Imagining a range of fictional climates – from the distant skies of the South Seas to the rainy colossus of London – the protagonist takes the climatological imagination to the extreme, explicitly fantasising about a decadent Anthropocene in which the planet’s atmosphere becomes a piece of art. Studying how Huysmans’s decadent fiction portrayed climate control as an imaginative faculty, the chapter contends that the author presented a nascent epistemology of anthropogenic climate change, making it into a form of art.

Chapter 4 examines the critical problem of Hector’s self-condemnation in Book 22, where he attributes the army’s destruction to his ‘recklessness.’ The text reviews the three interpretations that have been offered: that Hector acted hubristically against Zeus’s advice, that he was innocently deceived by an unfulfilled divine promise, or that his actions were due to double motivation. The chapter argues that none of these interpretations is correct. Zeus only influenced Hector via external messages, without direct mental intervention, and Hector’s actions were not hubristic. The argument proposes that one must ‘read’ Hector’s mind, interpreting his actions on the basis of what he knows. Hector’s fatal decision in Book 18 to remain outside the city walls, ignoring Polydamas’ advice, resulted from a misunderstanding. He mistakenly believed Apollo’s encouragement (Book 15) superseded Zeus’s earlier message (Book 11), perceiving it as a new, specific divine instruction. Hector’s tragic downfall is thus rooted in a failure of communication and his misinterpretation of Zeus’s will, leading to an outcome opposite to everyone’s intentions, and, subsequently, his negative self-assessment.

Chapter 6 offers an empirical analysis of stewardship disclosures under the UK Stewardship Code, using text analytics – including text length, readability, phrase overlap, lexical similarity, frequency analysis, and structural topic modelling – to examine reporting under the 2012 and 2020 iterations. It reveals shifts in narrative style, thematic focus, and institutional engagement. Topic modelling shows a move from governance-centric narratives in 2012 to a broader thematic repertoire in 2020, including ESG integration, multi-asset stewardship, and systemic risk. While the UK Code 2020 prompted more reflective disclosures in some cases, others remain formulaic, relying on generic language and procedural reporting. Patterns of convergence and divergence reflect institutional type, resources, and stewardship capacity. The analysis underscores both the promise and limits of stewardship reporting – highlighting its role in fostering innovation and reflection, while exposing challenges in achieving consistent, meaningful implementation. By unpacking form and substance, the chapter contributes to debates on institutionalising stewardship as a credible mechanism of investor accountability and long-term public value.

Chapter 5 examines Achilles’ refusal of the Embassy’s offer in Book 9, a refusal often interpreted as blindness or arrogance. The chapter argues his refusal stems from the interlocutors’ failure to grasp the offer’s implications. Achilles explains that he will die at Troy, if he resumes fighting. This implies that a crucial part of Agamemnon’s offer (cities and a daughter in marriage when he returns to Greece) is void. This is why Achilles threatens to leave the next day. Phoenix fails to ‘read his mind’ by asking him to fight solely for gifts. Achilles relents after Ajax’ speech and promises to resume the fight if the Trojans reach his tent and ships. The embassy members do not know that Achilles asked Zeus to make them be defeated in battle; only Ajax unwittingly touches upon this. Odysseus, reporting on the Embassy to the Greeks’ assembly, only narrates the version that will make the warriors fight most vigorously. If we read Achilles’ mind, he must think that his final version has been reported to the Greeks. That is why he refuses to fight in Book 16, sending Patroclus instead. Achilles’ downfall, like Hector’s, is caused by a failure of communication.

As economies become more complicated with increasing interdependence tied to exchange and specialization, inequality appears as an outcome of dispersed versus concentrated flows and accumulations of value that affect differences in well-being, power, and institutional formations. We look at the complicated institutional arrangements that favor or limit inequality, perhaps the most important of which is the development of institutional property and how it allowed control over production and distribution. The theoretical and empirical breadth of inequality is vast. For this comparative effort, we formulate an approach that can analyze inequalities in wealth and property from widely different social formations, including the segmentary societies of Pare, Tanzania, and Zuni in the American Southwest, chiefdoms in the Scandinavian Bronze Age (BA), and advanced states and empires such as Rome and the Inca. Within this broad spectrum, differences in the control of wealth, prestige, ranking and/or ascribed rank are intertwined but not necessarily overlapping. Our approach focusses on how access to and control over material wealth is distributed in our sample.

This chapter concentrates on two authors, two contexts, and two works: US schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and British-Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Extrapolating the techno-social emergence of female ballooning in the nineteenth-century United States and India, the chapter argues that the two feminist utopias intersect social and environmental freedom. Lane employs the underground setting popularised by Bulwer-Lytton to house a techno-feminist civilization controlling the climate at will, while Hossain describes the diffuse, oneiric terrain of Ladyland in which climate control supports a garden world. Comparing the two different feminist utopias and contexts, both marked by feminist aviation and atmospheric interventions, the chapters showcase the socio-political character of anthropogenic climate change: Hossain’s climate utopia is caring, inclusive, and decolonial, whereas Lane’s is cynical, exclusive, and imperialist.

This chapter introduces Governance by Emulation, a framework analyzing how public law models, particularly administrative and constitutional mechanisms like individual rights adjudication, are reproduced in private and regulatory governance. Focusing on corporate-controlled content moderation, it examines the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) under the Digital Services Act and Meta’s Oversight Board–conceptualized as Emulated Guardians. These institutions borrow the legitimacy of courts to regulate novel, bureaucratic private power structures while addressing public demands for accountability. Grounded in law, sociology, and political science, the chapter outlines the book’s methodology and contributions. It delves into four inquiries: the actors involved, their tasks, the power they seek to discipline, and how public law principles are adapted for private governance. These dynamics highlight emulation’s duality: it promises innovation yet risks performative legitimacy devoid of substantive reform. By situating Emulated Guardians within broader global governance challenges, this chapter frames content moderation as a microcosm of future issues in sectors like AI, biotechnology, and space exploration. It concludes that while governance by emulation addresses urgent accountability demands, its efficacy depends on public engagement and institutional evolution, offering a critical lens to assess emerging accountability structures beyond state control.

This chapter argues for custom as the predominant historical and experiential form in 1859 and looks at its treatment in J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, and Eliot’s Adam Bede. In Dickens, custom acts as a measure of the violence of the revolution; in Mill and Eliot, it is at the heart of their examination of identity and culture. Mill sees the ‘despotism of custom’ as essentially opposed to progress and individual liberty, but for Eliot, it is at the heart of community and needs to be recognised and accommodated by her most exemplary characters; it is a historical category that is commonly available and universally participated in. It enables all citizens equally to access the discourse of the historical and the experience of ‘society as incarnate history’. Eliot argues implicitly in Adam Bede that custom is fundamental to all human experience.