Chapter 3 focuses on the literature concerning the physical health of international adoptees before, during, and after adoption. As the literature indicates, specific health issues characteristic of international adoptees are directly linked to (1) the public health care systems in their countries of origin and (2) the policies of those countries toward orphaned children. This chapter provides a brief summary of what is known about the health challenges faced by international adoptees upon arrival in their new countries and the systems of care developed to address these challenges. It also briefly examines the situations of children with special needs.

This chapter examines the reciprocal development of climate understanding and intervention in the long nineteenth century. It studies the colonial practices of deforestation, cultivation, and drainage that philosophers and politicians such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Baron de Montesquieu, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder hoped would induce a global, Westernised utopia of climatological temperance. It examines how the emergence, institutionalisation, and development of the scientific practices, theories, and models of climatology provided empirical documentation of climate as a global system subject to natural as well as anthropogenic change. Providing a century-long history of science, it concludes that John Tyndall’s small-scale investigation and Svante Arrhenius’s large-scale calculation of the heat-trapping agency of carbon dioxide led to the emerging insight that the global climate needed anthropogenic correction.

This chapter sets out conditions in January, which saw Britain bracing for a war in Europe; starvation on the streets of London and major cities, where need outran resource and the organisation of welfare; a parallel discussion of food for the middle classes; and a series of accidents and building collapses, which also show up the lack of infrastructure in quickly expanding cities. All this suggests that the year might counter later appraisals of the 1850s as confident and optimistic. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London speaks to a nation perhaps more confident in its past than its present and future. The present had to deal with agitation for suffrage reform and the threat of French aggression in Europe. At the same time, is fiction being recognised as an important literary form in a year that saw significant personal upheaval in the lives of Dickens and Eliot.

Specialization characterizes all economies to some degree, but its variation is profound, and an objective of economic theory has been to explain its development. Since Adam Smith, economic specialization has been a focus of social scientific inquiry into the evolution of sociopolitical-economic complexity. In the words of Henrich and Boyd (2008:715), “Anthropologists and sociologists … have defended a wide variety of theories that link economic specialization, a division of labor, and the emergence of socially stratified inequality since the birth of their discipline at the end of the 19th century.” Archaeological inquiry, however, compels us to rethink this simple correlation. As the flip-side to self-sufficiency (Chapter 3), we examine variation in economic specialization found in thirteen ancient, premodern, or small-scale economies across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Our analysis looks at the nature, type, and scale of specialization found in societies of different sizes and internal complexity. This is followed by a discussion of production, distribution, and infrastructural/service specializations, and where they occur within the thirteen societies examined. Although specialization apparently has different causes related to efficiency, it links strongly to developing markets with their expanded access to demand.

Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

This chapter provides a comprehensive examination of the development and mainstreaming of anti-Zionist sentiments within Norway’s political and social landscape, particularly from the late 1960s onwards. Central to this narrative is the role of key individuals and organizations that influenced the shift in perspective towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, embedding radical anti-Zionist ideologies within mainstream leftist movements. The chapter also discusses the role of the Palestine Committee, established in 1970, which became a major pro-Palestinian organization in Norway. The committee’s activities included organizing rallies and distributing propaganda that portrayed Israel as a colonial and imperialist state, drawing on the rhetorical and symbolic repertoire offered by Third Worldist ideology.

Chapter 8 explores how female characters in the Iliad relate to anger. Only the goddess Hera openly expresses this emotion. Her anger serves a unique function: to preserve the course of fate. On the contrary, male anger (especially Zeus’s or Achilles’) often seeks to subvert fate. Mortal women, however, are compelled to suppress their anger. Ancient interpreters tried to eliminate female anger from the poem entirely, using linguistic arguments to redefine emotion words or philological strategies to delete relevant passages. Yet, Homer’s text resists this suppression, inviting audiences to look beyond the characters’ spoken words and into their minds, as women are not free to voice their true feelings. The chapter examines examples of this dynamic. Hecuba’s suppressed desires resemble Hera’s, even though the text avoids attributing the emotion of anger to her. Similarly, Helen suppresses her anger when facing Aphrodite. Both Hecuba and Helen oppose the course of events and fate; their suppressed anger acts as a counter-narrative to the Iliad’s main plot. Andromache’s signals the impossibility of expressing anger, and her difficulty in performing the expected emotional ‘script’ for female characters. Finally, Briseis masks the anger she cannot express with a show of affection.

Chapter 6 analyses the unfolding of Zeus’s plan in Books 1–4, often accused of narrative incoherence. In Book 1, Zeus promises Thetis to honour Achilles by making the Trojans prevail. Books 2–4 seemingly threaten this: in Book 2, the Greeks nearly flee, ending the war; in Book 3, the duel between Menelaus and Paris could end it; and in Book 4, Zeus suggests to Hera he wants the war to end. Interpreters often assume Zeus’s promise must be fulfilled immediately and that he never speaks duplicitously. The chapter argues the narrator plays with audience expectations, and Zeus demonstrates mastery in reading Hera’s and Athena’s minds. As discussed in Chapter 2, fate and divine action do not control human actions in every detail. Human unpredictability complicates Zeus’s plan, forcing him to grant the Greeks a temporary victory in Books 4 and 5 before redirecting the course of events.

This chapter evaluates the efficacy of Emulated Guardians, focusing on the EU’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs) and Meta’s Oversight Board, using criteria adapted from Peter Cane’s administrative law framework: rules, authority, and culture. It argues that neither body currently functions as a truly effective adjudicatory overseer of corporate power due to weak mandates and structural limitations. These shortcomings reflect a broader challenge of emulative institutions: they replicate formal structures from public law but lack the enabling sociopolitical contexts—such as democratic rulemaking or judicial authority—that underpin their role models. However, the chapter also identifies the performative potential of these bodies. By leveraging adjudicative symbolism and public expectations, both ODSs and the Oversight Board can incrementally expand their normative authority. This process, while slow and fraught, mirrors historical adjudicative strategies seen in domestic and international courts. Moreover, early practices show potential for innovation, such as integrating large language models into decision-making. By analyzing rules, authority, and culture, the chapter highlights the ambivalence of Emulated Guardians: while they risk becoming ceremonial “accountability theater,” they may also lay the groundwork for meaningful control over powerful private organizations. These findings have implications far beyond content moderation, applying to emerging governance challenges in AI, biotechnology, and other globalized sectors.

This chapter makes the argument that anti-Zionism and antisemitism have been mainstreamed in Norway in a way that is uncommon in Western countries. To help generalize these insights, the chapter looks at how the concept of mainstreaming is used in social science to analyze developments on the radical right in politics. Mainstreaming in social science refers to a process through which ideas, attitudes and practices that were previously considered peripheral and extreme become accepted and normalized within mainstream politics. The concept of mainstreaming is a theme, and a word, running through the chapters, which should help the reader make sense of the main narrative of this book. Revealing such mechanisms, it is hoped that the book can become a contribution to our understanding of antisemitism in particular and extremism in general.

The Conclusion puts the historical study in perspective. Describing the movement from the ontology to the epistemology of climate control – from material to literary worlds – the chapter ventures that a range of canonical authors inscribed the fiction of climate control into the narrative fabric of ensuing Western modernism long before the advent of global warming. It relates this literary and ideational genealogy of anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene to contemporary discussions, arguing for the importance of historical study to combat techno-futurist fantasies of geoengineering.

A renewed focus on “the common” in contemporary political theory, as it gained momentum in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is a direct response to the failure of community in political theory. I argue that Hardt and Negri develop what we can understand as an “insurgent democracy of the common.” On the one hand, such an insurgent democracy of the common seeks to preserve the revolutionary potential of democracy. On the other hand, this democracy of the common also tends toward political romanticism: the legitimacy of “the common” depends on a political subjectivity tied to a paradoxical nostalgia for failed revolutions. As such, the democracy of the common entails an escape from the realities of the political world that undercuts its emancipatory potential. This becomes particularly obvious in the hope that Hardt and Negri place in social movements of resistance, but also in their critique of neoliberal capitalism.