This chapter examines the production, patronage, and original context of MS 410. Through stylistic analysis, it situates the manuscript within the flourishing tradition of Perugian book illumination in the early fourteenth century and attributes its execution to members of the city’s illuminators’ guild. The chapter identifies the partially erased coat of arms on the manuscript’s opening folio as belonging to the Baglioni family, one of Perugia’s most prominent noble lineages, and proposes that the manuscript was commissioned for a Poor Clare nun associated with the convent of Santa Maria di Monteluce. Drawing on archival evidence, the chapter situates Monteluce as a wealthy, learned community closely connected to the city’s elite families. It argues that MS 410 was produced for an educated female reader and should be understood within the social and artistic networks of early fourteenth-century Perugia.

Chapter 7 explores Egypt, a consolidated autocracy. Historically colonized by the French and British, Egypt also received substantial financial support from the United States. Egypt was initially less involved with Europe’s external migration approach throughout the 1990s and 2000s in comparison to neighboring countries, but in 2017 the EU and Egypt signed an agreement under the EUTF worth €60 million. The funding was divided among seven projects, ranging from institutional capacity building to job generation and entrepreneurship. The majority of EUTF funding went toward infrastructure improvement in line with the current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s domestic priorities. In this way, migration management aid reinforced Egypt’s authoritarian rule through substitution (pathway II) and by channeling funding through patronage networks (pathway III). The EUTF’s predominant spending on local infrastructure projects tied beneficiaries to government networks, and also allowed the government to redirect its funding toward mega infrastructure projects built through military contracts, thereby further capacitating the regime’s repressive apparatus.

In this chapter, I explore the virtues of capitalism. I begin by acknowledging that exploring the virtues of capitalism is not in vogue, politically or in the academy. I present evidence, however, illustrating the reduction in extreme poverty throughout the world since the proliferation of industrial capitalism. This reduction in poverty has been uneven, bringing inequalities in the reduction of poverty. In the last forty years, levels of extreme poverty have stagnated or even increased. Although much of the world has benefited from increased prosperity, many have not. I then present evidence illustrating correlations between the increase in global prosperity from capitalism and increases in educational achievement and life expectancy, and decreases in child mortality. I next discuss the process of creative destruction as a driver of capitalism and, ultimately, prosperity – and how this process allowed India and China to escape mass poverty and emerge as economic powerhouses. In contrast to dominant discourse, recent evidence from Branko Milanovic suggests that the economic rise of China and India has led to reduced global inequality.

Philosophical problems infuse the theory and practice of astronomy, including metaphysical foundations and influences, the limits of reasoning as in black holes and the multiverse, the problematic nature of observation and inference ranging from the canals of Mars to dark matter and dark energy, the role of technology and science policy in our present understanding of the universe, and the epistemological status of astronomy and its central concepts, including space and time, life and intelligence. The conceptual and methodological foundations and challenges of astronomy have not received systematic attention as they have in other fields such as philosophy of physics and biology. Here we argue for a unified history and philosophy of astronomy to include not only classical astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology but also space science and astrobiology. Examining such influences is an important step toward scientific advance. In this volume, fifteen historians of science, ten philosophers of science, and five scientists combine to analyze these influences. In addition to being useful for astronomers, historians, and philosophers of science, for the first time a book on the philosophy of astronomy is written for a broad audience.

This chapter examines Thursday’s meditation, which comprises fifteen short reflections on Christ’s preaching and miracles in Jerusalem and culminates in the Last Supper. The image program places particular emphasis on Christ’s opponents—figured as the leaders of the Jews, the Pharisees—against whom he disputes during his time in the city. Through the use of double-register compositions and carefully structured manuscript openings, the images stage associations and oppositions that construct these figures as embodiments of malice, pride, and avarice. These vices are set in contrast to the virtues expected of the manuscript’s reader-viewer, who is thereby called to moral reform and spiritual advancement.

Cosmology is different from all other sciences. The uniqueness of the Universe means we can’t do experiments on similar objects. The huge scale of the Universe means we see it from a single spacetime event. We deduce we are not at the centre of the Universe (the Copernican Principle), and there is no centre to the Universe (the Cosmological Principle). A major step forward has been finding ways of observationally proving the cosmological principle. The dynamical nature of the Universe leads to evolution of the matter in the Universe, and of spacetime itself: we live in an Evolving Block Universe. The part we interact with is limited by particle horizons; the part we can see is limited by visual horizons. A key issue is if the Universe is spatially closed; if it is so, the spatial sections might have a wide range of topologies. Currently, cosmology is faced with a set of major unknowns: we don’t know the nature of the inflationary field in the early universe, of dark matter that has dominated structure formation, and dark energy that has caused a recent acceleration in the expansion rate. There are also actual tensions that remain unresolved.

This chapter focuses on electrostatic discharge (ESD) reliability challenges in allium-nitride-on-silicon high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), particularly under harsh-stress conditions. It discusses ESD stress mechanisms across various testing standards such as human body model (HBM), machine model (MM), charged device model (CDM),, highlighting their relevance to real-world circuit environments. The chapter emphasizes the role of device geometry and parasitic elements in influencing ESD robustness, with particular attention to gate, drain, and source degradation. Furthermore, it presents time–domain transient analysis to elucidate failure mechanisms such as gate leakage, thermal breakdown, and dynamic on-resistance degradation. A comparative study of different GaN HEMT technologies, including enhancement-mode and depletion-mode variants, provides insights into design-for-reliability strategies. Techniques such as integrating ESD protection structures and circuit-level mitigation are also explored to improve survivability. This work serves as a critical resource for advancing reliable GaN-based power and radio frequency (RF) electronic systems.

I present the second master narrative of economic development. I show how capitalism has created wealth and prosperity for many. I present evidence from Our World in Data showing the distribution of this wealth and prosperity, how it has varied over time, and how it is unequally distributed between various global regions. I situate this unequal global rise in inequality within discussions of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, whose ideas about capitalism and communism are put in dialogue and placed in historical context. I discuss some of the processes behind this unequal rise in global prosperity, and some of the ways in which poorer countries are poor and how they might escape poverty.

Chapter 8 addresses the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, and examines Swift’s definition of humans as animals merely capable of reason, not inherently rational. This definition is influenced by, and influences, international politics and thought. The parable of angelic horses and bestial humans remains the interpretive crux of Gulliver and Swift’s entire body of work. The international dimension contradicts the scholarly consensus that Swift’s Hobbesian view of human nature led him to seek refuge in a political ideology of absolutism and authoritarianism. Swift insists on the indispensable role of liberty and reason even in nature, thus differentiating the state of nature from the state of war. While he deflates revolutionary idealism and utopianism, and implicitly undermines schemes of “perpetual peace” and world government, he also hints at the benefits of social institutions that promote peace, good governance, and productivity.

Using Susan Stryker’s references to the ‘suturing’ of the gender binary onto all individuals as a launching point, the chapter begins by investigating the discussions of ‘suturing’ and ‘seamlessness’ in phenomenological analyses of racism in Martín Alcoff, Yancy, and Al-Saji. It then turns to Husserl’s ‘levels of constitution’ as a means to provide further insights into the experiences of emotions and vulnerabilities in racist encounters. Finally, after a critical assessment of Al-Saji’s notion of ‘hesitation’, the chapter reviews Yancy’s ‘ambush’ and ‘tarrying’, as well as Martín Alcoff’s ‘crisis’ and ‘bracketing’ as indicating the important moments of interruption and pause that can begin an anti-racist project.

This chapter examines how IOs can contribute to the development of representative practices that strengthen global institutional legitimacy. More specifically, it argues that global representative practice can contribute to democratic legitimacy through a distinct set of constitutive representative activities, which function to cultivate – within socially and institutionally emergent groups holding democratic representative claims – those ties of political recognition, integration, and commitment required to constitute them as active and legitimizing democratic constituencies. IOs can engage in this constitutive representation through the orchestration of represented constituencies: intervening in relationships among representatives and their emergent constituents in ways that cultivate their collective legitimating qualities of political recognition, integration, and commitment. These claims are illustrated through an examination of the roles of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as orchestrators of a transnational represented constituency of refugees, via their work in supporting a range of democratic commitments within the Global Compact on Refugees. Overall, this analysis shows how concepts of representation can be brought into closer alignment with the functional demands of democratic legitimation in the complex and dynamic political circumstances of contemporary global politics.

This chapter is a cheat sheet describing the important R functions in the ggm, piecewiseSEM, pwSEM, and lavaan packages of R.

The chapter wishes to make a socio-historical and comparative contribution to the controversy arousing around business participation and the democratization of global governance through a comparison between the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Organization of Employers (IOE) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While these two organizations have claimed to represent business and private enterprises at the global level, and have benefited from the legitimization of intergovernmental organizations themselves (the ILO and the UN) for more than a century now, they have done so in a quite differentiated way, both in their external relationships with intergovernmental organizations as in the definition of their internal representativeness. This chapter first delves into the process of institutionalization of the representation of the ICC and IOE. It then reveals the logic of their internal organization, particularly in their relations with their members, employers’ associations and multinational corporations. It insists on their selection process and the way they have built a collective entity now referred to as ‘business’. By doing so, the chapter distinguishes the representation of the ICC and the IOE within international organizations from the representation of business within and by the ICC and the IOE, insisting on the need for a more differentiated and historically grounded perspective on business actors within global governance institutions.

This chapter examines the early nineteenth-century debate over the conceptualizations of newly discovered celestial bodies Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta as planets or asteroids, respectively, situating this case within broader discussions about scientific classification. Drawing on the contrasting approaches of William Herschel, who emphasized morphological characteristics, and German astronomers, who prioritized orbital properties, the study reveals how observational focus and research practice shaped divergent definitions. This episode illustrates the epistemic interplay between practical astronomy and developing a classification scheme, advocating for a historically informed, practice-grounded conception of classification in astronomy. By tracing the shifting definitions and contested boundaries between planets and asteroids, it further highlights the persistent complexity of categorizing solar system bodies and the enduring relevance of historical reflection in scientific taxonomy.