The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

This chapter explores two subfields of nineteenth-century horticultural practice – plant miniaturization and plant assimilation – to demonstrate indirect approaches to addressing botanical agency. Given differences of lifespan, size, cognition, and communication, as well as the distance of time, Victorian writing requires this indirect approach. In the case of plant miniaturization (bonsai), described admiringly in British travel narratives but bemoaned by champions of native plant life from William Wordsworth to H. Rider Haggard, writerly attention or disregard to plant suffering illuminates broader concerns of plant emotion and subjectivity. In the case of plant assimilation or its amplified parallel, plant invasiveness, human framings of plant reproduction point out the cultural constraints on plant life. When named plants reproduce across the page as well as through the garden bed, their taxonomic and vernacular incursions into nineteenth-century poetry and prose show a further assertion of expanded plant influence on the Victorian reading mind.

This chapter revisits the construction of the Bethe wave function for the Lieb–Liniger model with spin degrees of freedom, which has traditionally followed a two-step approach: independent determination of coordinate and spin wave functions, later combined to enforce correct particle statistics. While this procedure is effective under the assumption that the hamiltonian is spin-independent, it becomes inadequate when spin-dependent interactions are present. Two key challenges arise: the need for a complete wave function without splitting it into separate coordinate and spin components, and the treatment of integrable systems with spin-dependent hamiltonians. To address these, the chapter introduces an efficient algebraic method based on the Faddeev–Zamolodchikov algebra, which provides a unified framework for handling coordinate and spin variables in integrable models with factorized scattering. This algebraic approach enables direct construction of the full wave function, offering a natural extension to systems involving both bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom. The resulting spin chain representation of the transfer matrix not only simplifies the analysis but also yields a deeper understanding of the underlying algebraic structure governing these quantum systems.

The verses of the Quran that enjoin pardah are translated as follows:

Maconchy made one of the most significant contributions to the string quartet by a British twentieth-century composer and always regarded her thirteen quartets as being the pulsing heart of her ‘impassioned argument’ artistry. Why was Maconchy so drawn to the string quartet, and in what ways did she stretch the medium to new heights?

Rhiannon Mathias reveals how Maconchy’s early encounters with the music of Vaughan Williams, Bartók and Janáček helped her to forge her own original and distinctive compositional voice and examines the new frontiers that she explored in her string quartets.

The current chapter describes the history and development of English in (what is today) Kenya and Tanzania from the earliest linguistic influences of colonial powers to the latest nation-specific developments in language policy and lexicon. Colonial history and national language policy in Tanzania and Kenya have resulted in Kiswahili becoming the national lingua franca, though to different degrees, and have so far impeded the development of a national variety of English in the general triglossic ecology of local languages, Kiswahili, and English. The African language substratum, almost completely Bantu in Tanzania but one-third Nilo-Saharan in Kenya, influences forms of English. In general, regional, national and subnational usage features can be distinguished, i.e. many (sub-)national features in pronunciation, some national and cultural features in the lexicon, and mainly regional (or universal L2 features) in grammar. Recent developments can be illustrated by examples from digital sources, especially online newspapers and social media.

The city-state of Singapore is officially quadrilingual (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English) and home to a diverse population. Colonised by Britain in 1819, English has since had a special place on the island. Initially confined to the elite, it soon became a desired commodity, learnt and acquired by different groups at different times, always in conjunction with the other languages with which it co-exists. As Singapore embarked on its path towards independence, English became a compulsory subject in education, and, in 1987, was made the sole medium of instruction. These developments resulted in large-scale language shift, with English now the majority language in Singaporean homes (2020 census). The local vernacular Singlish has its origin in this high-contact situation. It features influences primarily from Malay and southern Chinese. While it is regarded by policy-makers as undesirable, Singlish enjoys some acceptance in the population, not least as a marker of local identity.

English has become an important part of the linguistic repertoire of black South Africans. Education was important to nineteenth and twentieth century access to the language, first in mission schools and later under the apartheid government. In the post-apartheid phase, extensive diversification in experience yields native, cross-over and traditional Black South African English (BSAE) varieties of South African English (SAE). The phonology of traditional BSAE is characterised by the neutralisation of the tense/lax vowel contrast, the rarity of vowel reduction to schwa in unstressed syllables, a tendency towards syllable-timing, stress shifts to the penult and weight sensitivity to the final syllable, as well as the more extensive use of tone contrasts. Distinctive grammatical patterns include the use of the progressive aspect in an extended range of contexts to mean ongoing duration without a temporal limit, copy pronouns, the higher frequency of modal adverbials and some innovative collocations like can be able to. Lexical and semantic innovation occurs through loanwords reflecting ongoing social change in especially culture and politics, on top of older geographical borrowings, alongside semantic extension to capture locally relevant meanings beyond the conventional range of the same expressions in other varieties.

It is claimed that the fundamental rights [English term in text; Urdu bunyādī hūqūq] declared in the Karachi Congress will be sufficient to guard the interests of Muslims in this national, democratic, areligious state. But is this true?

This is a collection of essays and speeches that was published in English by Maududi’s associate, Khurshid Ahmed. The volume is particularly useful in laying out Maududi’s overall vision of the place of sharia in a modern state. I have included an influential essay based on his 1948 speech that sought to demonstrate the possibility of approaching sharia as laws compatible with modern governance.

In this chapter, we will analyse the objectives of war and the laws regulating it current in modern civilization. Our goal is to observe the status of these laws with the criterion of morality and humanity. A reader who has followed the previous discussion can claim that ‘there is no doubt that Islam introduced great reform in the wars of that time. It guided man to objectives and paths of war with which the people of that time, religion and culture were acquainted. However, today, as a result of centuries of progress, human thought has become mature on the question of war. This progress has caused the emergence of such civilized laws of war that are beyond comparison with the laws and thoughts of a time when human thinking faculties were in relative infancy.’ Therefore, we need to make another comparative analysis in which we contrast Islam and modern civilization and see whose objectives and methods are sounder, more beneficial and firmer.