The models posited in Chapter 2 are applied to the problem set out in Chapter 1. Sources in Greek, Elamite, and Old Persian, taken together, give every reason to believe that mass nonnative acquisition of Persian was underway from the reign of Darius I onward. The cooperation of multiethnic groups of armed forces, work forces, and especially domestic staff, such as concubines and eunuchs, with their Persian-speaking masters evidently played a large role in the formation of Middle Persian. Contrary to a widespread assumption, Aramaic turns out not to be a lingua franca of the Achaemenian Empire, except at the level of provincial administration, but rather Persian was probably the best candidate for such a role. Middle Persian arose from Old Persian through a process of semicreolization as the term was defined carefully in Chapter 2.

Appendix A.1 Hindu College Cash Book (1830), The Hindu/ Presidency College Archive

Part III consists of three chapters, each extending the basic model of non-cooperative coalition formation in Part II in three directions: renegotiations, participation, and incomplete information. Chapter 8 presents a coalitional bargaining model with renegotiations and explores whether and how renegotiations can enhance the efficiency of coalition formation. Chapter 9 considers a new participation rule called an open access rule, under which players are free to participate in coalitions without invitations from proposers. Participation needs the approval of incumbent members of coalitions. The new model is motivated for the study of international environmental negotiations. Chapter 10 presents the core theory of n-person cooperative games with incomplete information. Coalition formation becomes a complicated process when players have private information. The incomplete informational core considers endogenous information leakage during negotiations. We extend a non-cooperative bargaining model in Chapter 5 to the case of incomplete information.

Male infertility is a multifactorial condition, often associated with subtle sperm dysfunction that is not detected by routine semen analysis. Advanced sperm function testing provides deeper insights into key physiological and molecular mechanisms contributing to male reproductive failure. Elevated seminal oxidative stress (OS) is a major contributor to sperm dysfunction and DNA damage. Quantifying OS levels can help individualize treatment intervention. Evaluation of acrosomal enzyme activity offers diagnostic value in cases of unexplained infertility, as these enzymes are essential for oocyte penetration. Sperm chromatin integrity reflects DNA packaging and stability, which are critical for fertilization and early embryogenesis. Lastly, precise regulation of sperm ion channels governs sperm motility and responsiveness to environmental cues; their dysregulation is implicated in male infertility and represents a novel target for contraceptive development. Comprehensive assessment of sperm functions, beyond conventional semen parameters, is valuable in diagnosing and treating male infertility and holds promise for improving diagnostic precision and guiding targeted therapeutic strategies.

Linguistic history requires reliable models that correlate varieties of grammatical change with social factors. The composite model presented here considers scenarios of intergenerational monolingualism leading to stable language transmission, intergenerational multilingualism leading to areal features, and mass nonnative acquisition leading to grammatical reduction. It considers the agency of the individual in the transfer of features from one language to another according to patterns of linguistic dominance. These factors allow the linguistic historian to diagnose social changes from specific kinds of grammatical change and, vice versa, to predict some kinds of grammatical change within known historical upheavals of population. Terms from contact linguistics, such as pidgin, creole, and semicreole, are adopted after thorough explanation and contextualization.

This chapter charts the evolving role of the League of Red Cross Societies in blood transfusion, one of the most significant medical therapies of the twentieth century. Blood transfusion programmes became a major focus of many Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies in the post-1945 period, and the League emerged as a leading authority in the field. It did so by becoming a hub of expertise and assistance for its member National Societies as well as leveraging its growing global network of National Societies and partnerships with international organisations such as the WHO. The chapter explores the 1974 World Red Cross Day which focused on the promotion of voluntary, unpaid blood donation. It examines how the World Red Cross Day fed into a longer-term campaign to combat the commercialisation of blood donation, curtail the foreign trade in blood and blood products, and establish voluntary donation as the norm for quality blood transfusion services.

Chapter 4 reads the fiction of Thomas Hardy alongside biblical illustration and iconographic tradition to reveal both Hardy’s Miltonic way of seeing and his literary idiosyncrasy. The chapter begins by analysing Hardy’s use of Miltonic shifts in perspective and scale – described by critics as proto-cinematic – to shape Wessex as a post-lapsarian, sublime landscape. In The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy’s characters re-enact the Fall, situating themselves within a cyclical Miltonic genealogy. The chapter then turns to Hardy’s allusions to Milton through his focus on hands, in ‘handed moments’ that recall Milton’s haptic imagery to recreate an unstable Eden in Wessex. Finally, the chapter compares biblical and Miltonic illustrations that are brought together in nineteenth-century extra-illustrated Bibles such as the Kitto Bible: this comparison reveals how Milton’s text and its focus on hands reshaped biblical illustration, and supports a reading of Hardy as a writer attuned to the differences between Milton’s Eden and that of Genesis.

The computer metaphor is a central component of the narrative in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience since the 1960s, although the interpretations of the metaphor are not homogeneous, and many of them are not even compatible. However, the general take is that the brain processes inputs to deliver appropriate outputs using a roughly computational strategy. Namely, the brain somehow encodes inputs, manipulates them following some algorithms, stores some information extracted from those inputs, recombines some bits of that information, delivers the proper commands for accurate outputs, and so on. The computer metaphor has offered decades of theoretical progress and many computational methods and models within the cognitive sciences. However, it similarly faces longstanding problems that cyclically bring into question the usefulness of the metaphor to guide the scientific approach to fundamental (and not-so-fundamental) issues in the sciences of the mind. Here, I defend an alternative metaphor inspired by the use of the notion of resonance in cognitive science and neuroscience and more concretely based on the notion of ecological resonance developed in the literature of ecological psychology.

In this article, I argue that the recognition of vulnerability as a common and shared condition of existence is a prerequisite for the establishment of egalitarian relations, as understood by theorists of relational equality. Having clarified the dual meaning of vulnerability, I turn to the concept of relational equality, that I propose to understand via Axel Honneth’s notion of mutual recognition. I argue, however, that mutual recognition as Honneth sees it is based on a prior form of recognition, that I define as the acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability understood as a shared vulnerability. To show that this acknowledgement is a condition of mutual recognition, I then proceed negatively, analysing the effects of its denial in the production and reproduction of inequalities. This leads me to identify some of the factors behind this denial, and to suggest possible ethical and institutional ways to overcome it.

Relationships involving asymmetric vulnerability have an ambiguous normative status. On the one hand, such relationships often strike us as problematic because they involve asymmetric vulnerability. On the other hand, asymmetric vulnerability is a condition of many relationships that we value. This generates a dilemma: it seems that relational egalitarians must either claim that we should eliminate asymmetric vulnerability – but this would be to foreclose valuable social relationships – or maintain that relating as equals is possible despite asymmetric vulnerability – but this threatens to undermine relational egalitarianism’s political bite. This paper explores how relational egalitarians should address the tension between vulnerability and equality. While the tension might not be fully resolvable, I argue that egalitarians have a range of strategies to reduce it and grappling with the ambiguous status of human vulnerability may help us to better understand the nature of relational egalitarianism.

This chapter examines the ambitions of the League of Red Cross Societies to co-ordinate the global fight against venereal diseases (VD) from 1919 to the early 1930s. VD had preoccupied the agendas of both national and international organisations for decades prior to the explosion of infections during the First World War. As an international body formed to engage in public health, the League took on VD as a central area of its work in the interwar period. The chapter explores the programmes of work identified by the League as it attempted to consolidate existing activities to limit the effects and spread of VD, and how it worked with National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world and other institutions and governments to prevent its spread. This included the organisation of multiple conferences, the dissemination of propaganda literature to educate people about VD, and the exchange of films across the Red Cross movement. The chapter demonstrates that the global fight against venereal diseases was one in which the efforts of the League were largely successful.

This chapter asks how and when people living precariously put down roots in a Roman empire characterized by high degrees of movement and connectivity. Considering cases of forced displacement (of mining communities and towns), forced immobilization (of the enslaved), and migrant labour, it concludes that precarity was marked not by either staying or moving, but by dissonant relations to place, whether staying in a place but not truly living there, trying to remain at home in a place despite radical change wrought by a conqueror, or refusing to take root in a place that was inescapable in practice.