The image of the Persian Gulf prior to 1820 was one of temporal inertia, in which the inherence of piracy had existed from ‘time immemorial’. This was, the argument ran, determined by the harsh geography of the region—its extreme climate, poor soil and so on. Scarcity had impoverished the region as well as the Arab character, and only by coming into the fold of Britain’s empire could there ever be a lasting peace. As the Marathas were being defeated and dismantled, and the Company’s territories in India consolidated, Bombay was looking westwards across the Arabian Sea. A strategic partnership with Oman drew the British into an intractable geopolitical struggle in the Gulf; caught between Persia and Oman, disaffected Arab tribes united in confederacy, challenging British interests in the region while loosely aligning with the fledgling power of the First Saudi State. Bringing Crown and Company forces together, the two major expeditions that pacified the so-called ‘pirate coast’ by 1821 together bookend a pivotal decade in Gulf history, in which the Arab states were incorporated into an informal empire that effectively abolished the right to exercise sovereign violence at sea.

This chapter draws on recent work in transnational feminist studies and critical beauty and fashion studies to examine South Asian American chick lit. It attends to how the transnationalization of Indian fashion and beauty industries produce new definitions of cosmopolitanism through economic citizenship, or the “right to work” in a global economy. The chapter focuses on Kavita Daswani’s chick lit novel Salaam, Paris (2006) and the Indian Muslim protagonist Tanaya Shah’s entry into the world of fashion modeling. It argues that Tanaya’s Muslimness contributes to the construction of fashion as a failed moral economy, in addition to operating as a racialized identity that facilitates the multicultural brand expansion of a global clothing retailer in a post-9/11 world. The chapter reads the sexual management of Tanaya's identities as a post-9/11 Muslim subject and an Indian model as allowing the fashion industry to produce convivial relations between Muslim identities, fashionability, and cosmopolitanism.

Human–machine teaming (HMT) represents a critical frontier in Behavioural Data Science, where cognitive, social, cultural and algorithmic factors converge within complex systems. While traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) research has explored usability and task efficiency, human–machine teaming introduces new imperatives: mutual predictability, adaptive trust calibration, shared mental models and contextually sensitive collaboration. These imperatives are increasingly important in sectors such as defence, healthcare, manufacturing and disaster response, where human and machine agents co-perform roles that require high-stakes coordination. This chapter integrates systems thinking and cross-cultural theory to provide a framework for understanding HMT through the lens of Behavioural Data Science. It examines how systemic factors – ranging from team topology to environmental volatility – influence teaming outcomes, and how cultural variation impacts expectations, acceptance and performance of AI teammates. Drawing on empirical case studies and simulation-based experiments, we identify design principles for effective teaming and highlight methodological challenges in measuring team efficacy and behavioural alignment. We also interrogate ethical and philosophical issues in the automation of team roles and decision-making authority. Ultimately, we argue that human–machine teaming is not merely a technological phenomenon, but a socio-technical system embedded within organisational, institutional and cultural structures. Behavioural Data Science is uniquely positioned to illuminate these interdependencies and guide the development of trustworthy, transparent and inclusive teaming frameworks.

The 1800s was a decade of exceptionally high agricultural prices. The cost of food spiked because of deficient harvests and wartime disruption, against a background of rapid population growth. In the eyes of many contemporary observers, profiteers and monopolists were also to blame. This essay examines three poems that responded to the emergency: Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Bread; or, The Poor (1801), William Holloway’s The Peasant’s Fate (1802), and Thomas Bachelor’s The Progress of Agriculture (1804). It locates those poems in a larger tradition of rural verse exemplified by Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Bloomfield, and George Crabbe. As the new century dawned, the poets of country life confronted the social tensions implicit in England’s capitalistic farming system. They denounced what they saw as a contradiction between rising agricultural output on the one hand and, on the other, the dispossession of the ‘helpless myriads’ of the rural poor.

The first decade of the nineteenth century was a time of British cultural reinvention, highlighted by the rise of Orientalism and comparative studies. Robert Southey emerged as a key figure during this period with his Orientalist poems that bookend the decade, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). In this chapter, I analyze how Southey’s works reflect and advance Orientalist themes and forms, particularly through a deracinated Romantic subject. Southey creates this subject, free from cultural, religious, and political bounds, through an Orientalist licence for non-representation. This non-representation is seen in Southey’s flattening of time, space, characters, and objects. With the publication of Kehama by the end of the decade, I argue that Southey’s Orientalist licence intertwines with imperial logics of racial, ethnic, and religious othering. This othering reinforces a divide between British subjects and the Indian ‘other’, highlighting an individualism steeped in white Western dominance.

What did contemporary critics mean when they celebrated the usefulness of Maria Edgeworth’s fictions? And how did such praise affect her writing? Arguing for the significance of the tale mode in Edgeworth’s writing well into the first decade of the nineteenth-century, this chapter tracks the meanings of morality across a range of her writing, paying particular attention to its imperial contours. Close attention to her tale ‘To-Morrow’ (from Popular Tales, 1804) points to an experimental mode of imperial morality, characterized by adjustments, disruptions, and displacements, highly characteristic of Edgeworth’s writing up to about 1810. The chapter concludes by considering the longer legacy of this early inscription of the imperial and racialized geographies of use.

Deductive languages afford many advantages in theory development. They ensure that different people with different biases can understand the logic; they ensure that the logic can be repeated, and they ensure that we can reason from empirical tests to the support or nonsupport for the theory. However, the deductive form also requires that the concepts used are precisely specified. A defining characteristic of such deductive arguments is that the premises enable us to reason to a conclusion that does not add any information beyond the premises. This can be compared to inductive arguments in which the conclusion amplifies or adds information to the premises and because of this does not provide the advantages of deduction.

For centuries the western coasts of India had been the focus of Europe’s seaborne empires in the Indian Ocean, where port-cities such as Calicut and Surat dominated regional trade, attracting merchants, explorers, and statesmen from all corners of Eurasia’s trading world. From the late eighteenth century, the East India Company’s growing port at Bombay emerged ascendant over its rivals in western India, aspiring to become a mercantile and naval hub to complement and compete with the agrarian empire being built from Bengal. This chapter considers the Bombay Presidency’s efforts to erode and ultimately subordinate local practices of sovereignty and dominion along the politically fragmented littoral spaces of western India. In a war fought as much on paper between statesmen as on the seas between seafarers, debts for alleged acts of piracy were compounded on behalf of a growing body of mercantile subjects, and ultimately settled through the exchange of forts, ports, and territory.

Recent advances in data-driven behavioural science and, particularly, in Behavioural Data Science, saw the rise of applying natural language processing techniques to understanding and modelling human behaviour, algorithmic behaviour, as well as behaviour of complex human–machine systems. From associative modelling in the standard psychological experiments to understanding emotional arcs in novels and movies through the way humans, algorithms and complex systems use language, this chapter demonstrates how computational linguistics methods allow behavioural methodology to go beyond the ‘sterile’ laboratory environments into the field using data, test hypotheses at scale and have scalable practical impact. This chapter also shows how language-based modelling can shed light on cognition, decision-making, judgements and cultural evolution. Using empirical example of a large-scale Behavioural Data Science study, this chapter also demonstrates how language analysis can be used as a ‘truth serum’, helping to obtain underlying human preferences from subjective judgements usually provided in surveys.