One of the outcomes of the recent demographic shift to cities was a concomitant insecurity about identity. This was exploited by fraudsters, including the notorious Shakespeare forger, John Payne Collier. News of his misdemeanours broke in the summer, when the country was also learning about George Eliot’s ‘real’ identity. Unlike her contemporaries, Eliot’s identity could not be secured by a group or network of friends and acquaintances, which made her vulnerable to the machinations of Joseph Liggins, who claimed to have written her fiction. The revelation of her identity was coldly received by some women writers, who might have feared for their own reputations, and The Athenaeum, which sought to pillory Eliot as a distraction whilst they championed Payne Collier. Eliot’s own take on the identity question may be seen in ‘The Lifted Veil’, which defends the necessity of the multiplicity of identity, and of a degree of mystery.

This chapter discusses the issue of Holocaust distortion and relativization, particularly in the context of far-left ideologies and antisemitism. It explores how certain groups have attempted to reframe the Holocaust narrative to support their political agendas, often in ways that trivialize or distort historical reality. The text delves into specific examples, such as the Norwegian far-left newspaper Klassekampen, which published articles in the late 1970s claiming collaboration between Zionists and Nazis during World War II. These articles distorted historical facts to paint Zionists as complicit in the Holocaust, using selective quotations and misrepresentations to support their narrative. The chapter also examines the role of Soviet propaganda in shaping anti-Zionist and antisemitic narratives, which were then adopted and spread by far-left groups in other countries. It highlights how these narratives often blurred the lines between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories. The chapter looks at the impact of the American TV series Holocaust on public discourse and how it sparked debates about historical memory and responsibility.

Chapter 4 discusses findings on early and lifelong attachment indicators in international adoptees. Attachment is the most extensively researched aspect of developmental pathways in IA children, both before and after adoption, and is reflected in hundreds of original studies as well as numerous meta-analyses and reviews. These works examine the typology and longitudinal dynamics of attachment and social-emotional development in international adoptees. The chapter briefly reviews this literature and explores the role of the early developmental environment in shaping attachment, along with its potential malleability within new supportive family contexts and through psychological interventions designed to optimize the child’s adjustment and long-term thriving.

The Reich leadership’s initial plan to remain in the background while chartered companies managed day-to-day operations in the colonies soon proved untenable. This chapter details how private companies failed to establish durable state organisations, forcing the Reich into an uneasy choice between abandoning its colonies or assuming direct control. The time-honoured model of the company-state promised a self-sustaining cycle of coercion and extraction, but in practice ventures from South West Africa to New Guinea proved fragile, underfunded, and dependent on Reich support. In East Africa, the German East African Society secured a coastal concession from the sultan of Zanzibar, only to provoke the Abushiri Revolt just as a more permanent consolidation seemed within reach. These failures exposed the fragility of an empire built on paper claims rather than effective occupation. Bismarck wavered between withdrawal and deeper involvement, until military interventions – most notably Wissmann’s campaign in East Africa – committed the Reich to a more direct role.

This chapter examines Plato's treatment of technē through an important arc of late dialogues: Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. This chapter advances the argument that philosophy is expected to be a technē in this series, but in fact multiple forms of it emerge: the technē of the Socratic elenchus and the technē of the method of division (which is termed Platonic/Eleatic dialectic). Midwifery, sophistry, and statesmanship are analyzed as examples that throw light on what it means for philosophy to be a technē. This chapter includes substantial discussions of second-order technai; good-directedness; and specialization.

In this chapter, I offer an account of the kind of freedom that alreadypertains to natural life. It begins by laying out how Hegel’s account of the freedom of life is related back to his critiques of Kant’s practical philosophy: his objections against the empty formalism of the moral law, the bad infinity of the ought, and the paradox of self-legislation. It reveals that all of these critiques are based on Hegel’s fundamental insight that self-determination has to be construed as a mode of living self-constitution. Hegel first develops this notion of self-constitution in his account of animal life, revealing both the freedom of natural life and why it still falls short of true spiritual freedom. Drawing on his Philosophy of Nature, the chapter reconstructs the ways in which animal life constitutes itself through the process of shape, the process of assimilation, and the genus-process. This reconstruction gives us a concrete understanding of self-constitution and reveals how self-determination can be a natural reality. At the same time, Hegel’s analysis of the inherent limitations of animal nature reveals the ways in which the freedom of spiritual self-constitution goes beyond animal self-constitution. The chapter argues that Hegel does not hold an additive view according to which our spiritual self-constitution is just tacked onto our animal self-constitution, but endorses a transformative view. It develops the way in which Hegel’s dialectical version of the transformative view is superior to contemporary Neo-Aristotelian varieties of the transformative view.

Thirteen scholars using original and thorough historical information have worked together to consider variability across thirteen cases of premodern economies representing a worldwide distribution, contrasting sociopolitical scale, and forms of organization. In Chapter 1, we defined economies as organized to extract resources, mobilize labor, and make things and distribute them for consumption. This consumption meets the ever-changing demand of human populations and their institutional formations that create the diversity of material life of human societies. With extended interactions, our comparative study probably represents the best available overall consideration of economic variability in premodern societies. We do not see our book as a final statement with evident conclusions of premodern economies, but as a substantial step forward.