Diasporic communities played a crucial role in the vibrant trading system that flourished across maritime Asia during the Song period. They served as cultural middlemen with both local merchants and the maritime trade offices that supervised the trade, and they provided hospitality for arriving merchants while engaging in their own long-distance business. Within the port cities of Guangzhou and Quanzhou in particular, there were merchant communities from India and Southeast Asia, but by far the largest and best documented were the Muslim communities, which is the focus of this chapter. It covers where and how they lived (and were buried), their relations with the Song authorities, and the elevation of some to official status. It also contrasts their remarkably peaceful history under the Song to the violence that they endured at time during both the Tang and Yuan.

This chapter focuses on Spain, and investigates the culmination of the genre of the printed newspaper in the final years of the seventeenth century by focusing on the so-called Darien Scheme, the attempt by Scottish merchants to create a settlement colony on the Isthmus of Panama in 1699–1700. The Darien Scheme brings the book full circle to the same spot in the Caribbean where newspaper interest had peaked during Drake’s final campaign a century before. Transnational coverage of the Darien Scheme, and its collapse, provides an excellent opportunity to compare the different media landscapes – from strongly engaged (Scotland, England, and Spain) to neutral or indifferent (Dutch Republic, Germany, France, and Italy) – at a time when the European press began to lose its monopoly on periodical news in the Atlantic world.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Switzerland, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

I offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

This chapter analyses the management and control structures in EU corporate governance, with particular emphasis on the one-tier and two-tier board systems. It explores how different Member States implement these models, examining their respective roles, composition and legal requirements. The chapter assesses the advantages and challenges of each system in terms of oversight, accountability and stakeholder representation. By reviewing EU directives and comparative national practices, it highlights efforts to balance efficient management with effective supervision. The discussion provides insights into how these governance frameworks influence corporate decision-making and transparency within the EU’s diverse legal landscape.

This chapter examines the principles and legal mechanisms aimed at protecting minority shareholders and ensuring equal treatment within EU company law. It explores the balance between majority control and minority rights, focusing on safeguards against abusive practices and discrimination. Key case law, including the Siemens and Volkswagen cases, illustrates judicial approaches to shareholder protection and equal treatment. The chapter reviews EU directives and national practices related to information rights, participation and remedies for oppression. It highlights challenges in harmonizing standards and recent reforms promoting fairness and corporate accountability, underscoring their vital role in maintaining trust and stability in European capital markets.

Our SW1 insurgency was bolstered by the People’s Pledge, a cross-party campaign for a referendum, launched in 2011 by Daniel Hodson, John Mills, Mark Seddon, Dan Hannan, myself and others. It effectively pressured MPs in marginal seats by organising local referendums, pushing them to support a national vote. I saw its impact firsthand at a drinks party in David Cameron’s Downing Street flat, where an irate MP confronted me about the campaign’s activity in her constituency. My suggestion that she sign the pledge sparked a scene. (Ironically, this now-former MP later framed her parliamentary legacy as helping secure Brexit, another case of selective memory.) In a move that would prove significant in the long run, Boris Johnson, then the London Mayor, had signed the People’s Pledge at one of our street stalls in Romford. We had not only mainstreamed the idea of a referendum, but had been able to do so because we had taken control of the Eurosceptic movement inside Westminster. Once Cameron had conceded holding a referendum, it was what was happening with Euroscepticism outside Westminster that became of greater concern.

Individuals have a surprisingly high capacity for making decisions quickly and still considering a multitude of information. This capability – often referred to as intuition – relies on automatic processes that can be described with neural networks. Particularly parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) networks – a specific type of interactive activation networks – have been successful in capturing multiple aspects of choice behaviour. PCS models include restrictions to neural networks that capture specific features of cognition. This chapter will describe how PCS and other content models of decision-making can be evaluated and potentially improved by using artificial intelligence, specifically generic multi-layer (deep learning) neural network models. It will exemplify how choice behaviour can be modelled and predicted with PCS. The predictive performance of PCS will be contrasted with that of a generic neural network model. Possibilities and implications for the improvement of content models for choice behaviour using artificial intelligence are discussed.

This chapter combines a focus on the scenic trajectories of Antigone and Creon with analyses of the tragedy’s choral songs. It traces the ways in which the characters’ actions, speech and deliberations are conditioned by the extent to which they understand (or misunderstand) the play’s complex reality. It argues that beyond the ethical conflict between them and questions of law and justice, both characters are presented in their own way as paradigms of human vulnerability and the limits of reason. Although Antigone’s action is eventually vindicated, it is not explicitly acknowledged by the gods, at least in her lifetime; instead, by the end of the play, her sacrifice appears to have been mere collateral damage in the gods’ plan to seek compensation for the exposure of Polynices’ corpse. Creon, because of his error of judgement in forbidding Polynices’ burial, undergoes a violent reversal of fortune from powerful and authoritative ruler to a ghost of a man. In the background, a pattern of divine control is interwoven with human agency in ways that are difficult to disentangle, both for the characters and Chorus and for the audience.

The focus of this chapter is the debate in the House of Lords and the attack there on Attorney General Richard Hermer’s adoption of Lord Bingham’s ‘thick’ definition of the rule of law in place of their allegedly apolitical ‘thin’ definition. It argues that the main attackers can’t help but espouse a thick conception of the rule of law, which, although less thick than the Hermer/Bingham conception, still shows that the Rwanda Act violated the rule of law. It also shows that the common good lawyers rely on a legal positivist position, which excludes human rights and international law from the content of the rule of law, while Hermer and Bingham, following Dicey, adopt a common law methodology that includes human rights and international law in the content of the rule of law.

Misogynist attacks on women for a purportedly vain and frivolous preoccupation with fashion have proliferated for centuries. This chapter focuses on a feminist response to such rhetoric by a seventeenth century Italian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti. Forced to enter a convent as a teenager, Tarabotti defended women's free enjoyment of fashion and pointed out men’s obsession with adornment. As Eugenia Paulicelli shows, Tarabotti’s theory of fashion offers a feminist critique of masculinity and patriarchy, links women’s right to fashion to their right to education, and articulates the value of women’s work with texts and textiles. Through her engagement with fashion, Tarabotti recasts early modern ideas about gender, as well as distinctions between bodily and intellectual pursuits. She also cannily takes advantage of the ways that her own writing and nuns’ traditional needlework are able to circulate despite their authors’ physical confinement.

The most shocking changes in the near future will involve the sharp decline in the world’s linguistic diversity, as massive numbers of languages cease to be spoken. The focus of this chapter is endangered languages, why the problem is so serious, what has brought it about, and what can be done about it.

This chapter examines the ethical considerations shaping Behavioural Data Science prior to the implementation of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. While recent regulatory developments mark a significant shift in legal obligations, many of the ethical challenges addressed here remain foundational and continue to inform practice today. Artificial intelligence and data science offer powerful tools for accelerating discovery across disciplines by enabling large-scale data analysis, uncovering behavioural patterns and revealing societal trends previously inaccessible to researchers. Yet the increasing reliance on data-driven methodologies introduces complex ethical risks – to individuals, communities and the broader social fabric – especially when behavioural insights are extracted from sensitive or repurposed data. This chapter traces how research communities and policy-makers, prior to the AI Act, developed and operationalised ethical data governance principles through various mechanisms. Among these, data trusts emerge as a particularly promising model. Situated between open access and rigid institutional control, data trusts provide a flexible framework for balancing the imperative to share behavioural data with the need to protect rights and foster public trust. The chapter explores the conceptual grounding and practical deployment of data trusts, arguing that, while formulated pre-AI Act, they remain highly relevant for ensuring legitimacy, accountability and transparency in behavioural data governance today.