When its armies were finally defeated in May 1945, the vaunted Third Reich lay in waste and smoldering ruin. The air was foul, the cities ablaze, the countryside blighted; forests, fields, and rivers were blasted and defiled. Adolf Hitler, the messianic Führer or leader of the nation, had promised his people a thousand years of prosperity and peace. Instead his 12-year reign left nothing but desolation. Across Europe, the trail of German forces stank with the wreckage of shattered communities, ravaged landscapes, and exterminated lives. The destruction that Nazi Germany inflicted on the continent was unparalleled in human as well as environmental terms.

The bibliography on ancient Greek democracy is vast, although recent trends suggest it may have peaked, at least for now. What follows is necessarily selective. When it comes to overviews of ancient Greek politics and society, for scope, ambition, vivacity, and theoretical sophistication, it is difficult to top de Ste. Croix 1981, a towering life’s work. Everyone should read it, even if only to disagree with it. In a similar vein is Cartledge 2018, focused on democracy specifically. It reaches different conclusions from the ones offered here, in particular regarding the Hellenistic period, but is forceful and engaging. Meier 1990 remains excellent on Greek politics in general. Davies 1993 and O’Neil 1995 are overviews of ancient Greek democracy concentrating on the Classical period. Ma 2024 appeared only after the present manuscript was completed. While I have not been able to incorporate references to this impressive achievement throughout the text, the reader should be aware that it is one of the strongest arguments yet for seeing genuinely democratic practices down through the period of the high Empire (second century ce and beyond).

The Introduction justifies a new history of ancient Greek democracies based on the proliferation of new archaeological discoveries, advances in scholarship, and the need for an up-to-date synthesis. Democracy was not limited to Classical Athens (480–323 BCE) but spread throughout the Greek world over the fourth through second centuries BCE. Ancient Greek democracies represent a phenomenon specific to the historical and cultural context of the ancient Mediterranean, but they still have much to teach us today.

Over the last 30 years, a number of possible definitions of Sobolev and BV spaces in the metric setting have been proposed by various authors, and a priori it is not known whether they are equivalent. In this monograph, we decided to work with the definition of Newtonian spaces proposed by Shanmugalingam. In this appendix, we present several other approaches present in the literature and comment on their relationship and dependence on the exponent. The first general result concerning the equivalence of the most common definitions of Sobolev spaces was proved by Ambrosio, Gigli, and Savaré in the case p > 1; similar results were subsequently shown for the BV spaces and for the Sobolev space with exponent equal to one. To give a complete historical overview, we present here several variants of definitions and several equivalence results. We also discuss the dependence of the minimal p-weak upper gradient on the exponent. Throughout this appendix, as in the whole monograph, we assume that the metric space is complete, separable, and equipped with a non-negative Borel measure which is finite on bounded subsets.

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

This chapter introduces the supposed problem of ethnicity: that it undermines national cohesion, or is a colonial hangover with no appropriate place in political life. In contrast, I argue that ethnicity is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable; its political effects depend on how it is known and used, and our understanding of how it is known remains underdeveloped. I establish that there is no definitive list of Kenya’s ethnic groups, and we must stop taking for granted what we think we know about ethnicity. I offer the concept of cultivated vagueness – a widespread aversion to resolving the ambiguity of lists of Kenya’s ethnic groups – to understand how ethnic knowledge works and to contrast it with legibility and governmentality. Cultivated vagueness is the response from bureaucrats, civil society, citizens and the state to the conundrum that ethnic knowledge is both common sense and impossible to settle. It also explains how ethnic classifications serve both projects of division and of pluralism. I suggest that attention to the benefits of cultivated vagueness may facilitate the advancement of the latter over the former. The chapter outlines the book’s methodology and chapters.

Difficult lessons from the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths remind us that thorough clinical assessment, detailed mental state examination and an appreciation of the dynamic nature of risk and its management are central to the effective treatment of women with perinatal mental illness. This is underpinned by the establishment of a trusting, respectful and honest relationship with the woman, which sees her as a partner in decision-making, and a detailed knowledge of the distinctive presentations and risks associated with illness in pregnancy and after childbirth, and its consequences for the woman and her infant.

What can a premodern narrative of legal change teach us? This brief epilogue raises the more complex question of the totalizing ambitions of states that operate from the assumption that law is a specialized practice, rather than something that emerges from daily life. The existence of a black-letter law urges states towards legislation as legal utopianism: the attempt to remake subjects in an optimal fashion and to exclude those they find problematic. This tendency towards utopianism - a form of state magic - is present in both late antique and modern contexts. Understanding the roots of it urges us towards humility with respect to our own projects of legal transformation.