Allen Ginsberg visited China in 1984, first as part of an American delegation of writers and then as a private traveler. He visited many cities over a period of several months and spent time lecturing on American poetry. He found China oppressive and, in many ways, disappointing, and also he suffered many health problems owing to the pollution there; but nonetheless his time in China was a creatively fertile period for him, resulting in a number of important poems. This chapter details his travels around China, focusing on a sense of paranoia that plagued him because he was in a totalitarian state where he was constantly observed. It also looks at the poems that emerged from his trip, examining the various influences his inquiries into Chinese poetry had on his own work.

This chapter tackles relationships between Allen Ginsberg and the New York School poets as more than biographical. It considers how Ginsberg and the New York School poets reinterpreted qualities of heightened emotion and supple linguistic powers that are featured and valued in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Ironically, this influence counters the impersonal poetic qualities for which Eliot’s influence is more commonly known and which helped to impersonalize much post-World War II poetry to which New York School, Beat, and Confessional Poetry mutinied. However, Ginsberg and the New York School poets led this vanguard earlier and to more effect than Robert Lowell and others described in or influenced by M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 Nation article, “Poetry as Confession.” Like Eliot, Ginsberg and the New York School poets emphasize the role of the second person addressee, particularly in the works of Frank O’Hara and his “Personism.”

This broad survey of select Aegean islands and the Greek-speaking coast of western Anatolia reviews the revival of settlements in these areas, after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Opening and closing with the imagined vision of this world in Homeric epic, the survey traces the evolution of regional styles in art and architecture, linked to independent polities that developed patterns in self-government that became the Greek polis. Early Iron Age sites, tombs, and artifacts from Euboea, the Cyclades, East Greek islands, the Dodecanese and the mainland areas of Aeolis, Ionia, and Caria are examined against the mythological paradigms of migration and Greek colonization; these regions demonstrate widespread continuity behind the later legends of a wave of Hellenism, and enjoyed close and fertile contacts with neighboring Anatolian cultures such as Phrygia and Lydia. Such relationships fostered innovations in the Archaic period such as the first monumental temples and sculptures in marble, and the evolution of poetic genres, among island and coastal entrepreneurs in collaboration (as well as conflict) with a succession of inland empires, until the Ionian revolt against Achaemenid Persia.

Chapter 5 examines the demise of urban collectivization after 1961. While the production side of urban communes had its problems, it remained economically profitable; it was communal welfare services (canteens, childcare, etc.) that were deemed to be wasteful and dysfunctional and were eventually disbanded, and this could not but have disastrous consequences for female labor and the project of female liberation. Many workers, newly subjected to the double disciplining of industrial labor and family chores, protested these closures, and archival sources convey their dismay and their vocal criticism, which highlighted the continued devaluation of female workers and of their labor, both in the home and in the factory.

The chapter provides an overview of the multifaceted cultural significance of Allen Ginsberg. While Ginsberg appeared in numerous works, performances, and actions from the late 1950s until his death in 1997 (and continues to enjoy an afterlife in popular and literary culture), in every case these appearances mean something. Hypersensitive Beatnik misfit, spokesman for the Summer of Love, conduit for Eastern mysticism, drug advocate, punk rocker, itinerant scholar, and gay-rights champion (to name only the most prominent of Ginsberg’s manifestations), Ginsberg’s lasting representation – that of the gifted and innovative poet – is the one that will linger.

I examine the complexities of maritime connections between China and South Asia created by the entry of multiple states and non-state actors in the Indian Ocean between the thirteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Divided into three chronological sections, the chapter first focuses on private traders, shippers, coastal polities, and European colonial enterprises in shaping and regulating commercial activity, diplomatic encounters, and their involvement in cross-regional interaction, exchange and conflict. The networks of traders that criss-crossed the ocean is highlighted. The next section analyses the impact of the seven voyages of Zheng He in the early fifteenth century on restructuring maritime interactions between China and South Asia. The final section centres on two entrepreneurs, one Chinese and one Indian, who utilised British colonial networks to advance their ventures and contributed to the expansion of maritime exchange. The chapter provides new insights into the nature of interactions between China and South Asia when there were no norms or regulations beyond specific coastal polities and regions.

This chapter examines the legal framework of contingent protection measures in international trade, focusing on anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, and safeguards. It outlines the relevant WTO rules, including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and explores the justifications for these measures. These trade remedies, while protectionist, address concerns of unfair trade practices and market disruption. The chapter also addresses the challenges posed by non-market economies and the evolving role of subsidies. Finally, it discusses the economic, political, and geopolitical rationales for contingent protection, highlighting the tension between fairness and efficiency in international trade.

Health financing is a key component of any health system, but its role is more complex than simply raising and spending money on health. It is a crucial determinant of the overall performance of the health system, defining, among other things, how much money is available to be spent on health and who pays for it, who gets to benefit fromthose financial resources, what services that money can purchase and who ultimately receives resources from the health system as income. Without careful attention to the way health financing systems are designed, incentives for providers or patients can bemisaligned with policy goals, leading to poor health outcomes, financial hardship for users of health care, wasted resources, failure to address inequalities and disruption of countries’ progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) (Box 0.2.1).

This chapter examines the role of tariffs and quotas in international trade law, focusing on their regulation within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization. While often associated with free trade, these legal frameworks primarily discipline rather than prohibit protectionism, favouring tariffs as the more acceptable instrument. The chapter traces the evolution of tariffs as the preferred trade barrier, contrasting them with the general prohibition on quotas. It also discusses the complexities of tariff application, including classification, valuation, and origin determination. Finally, it considers the future of tariffs and quotas, and the challenges of achieving full trade liberalisation without regulatory harmonisation to prevent regulatory arbitrage.

This chapter recasts empire and its constitution and evolution to recover the most expansive of premodern interpolity systems and its charter. It outlines the evolution of the Mongol system, and provides a view of the empire and its dynastic imperium. It re-establishes the framework of the four Chinggisid Uluses as the main interstate system of the pre-modern world. While the Chinggisid törö governed inter-ruler relations, the Chinggisid jasaq formed the most potent laws that ensured the durability, uniformity and consistency of Chinggisid institutions and practices across the imperium. The 1640 Great Code presents an interpolity system, akin to and surpassing Westphalia and its charter, created within the Chinggisid political tradition and törö. Finally, the chapter uncovers one of the most consequential legacies of Chinggisid statecraft that formed the foundation of the modern state system and modern international order – the Chinggisid concept of ejen – the archetype of the concept that Bodin developed as sovereignty.

For his 1920s ballet librettos, Alejo Carpentier drew inspiration from the groundbreaking spectacles that ensembles such as Les Ballets Russes produced in Europe during the avant-garde era, even though he had not witnessed those theatrical productions. Rather, he experienced them from afar – as a vicarious spectator – in the act of reading texts about them. Carpentier approached the ballet libretto as an eclectic and experimental literary genre in which to explore his wide-ranging intellectual interests: in various styles of avant-garde art, music and theatre (from Futurism to Jean Cocteau’s poetics of the commonplace), as well as in politics, Afro-Cuban culture and ethnography. Although he held no direct contact with the artists creating experimental ballets in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America, he saw them and himself as forming an international community – which illustrates the extent to which the transatlantic and hemispheric networks of the avant-garde operated as imagined communities.

This essay reflects on the challenges and intentions behind translating Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. He examines the delicate balance between fidelity to the original and fluency in English, striving to preserve Carpentier’s baroque style and powerful themes of colonialism, slavery and racism. The chapter delves into the cultural and historical layers of the novel, especially its foundation in lo real maravilloso – a Latin American lens where the marvelous and real coexist. Through personal insight, the author portrays translation as both an impossible and an essential act that revitalizes meaning for contemporary readers.

This chapter explores the role and construction of race in Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy. Focusing especially on Plato’s noble lie and Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, I argue that both philosophers appeal to racial difference in order to reinforce and justify the differential access of the members of the societies they consider to political power and even freedom. While Plato introduces race into the kallipolis in order to persuade the farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers to accept their political disenfranchisement, Aristotle draws on and racializes existing Greek stereotypes about non-Greeks in support of his theory of natural slavery. Despite the significant differences between their respective accounts of and attitudes towards race, I argue that Plato and Aristotle’s accounts cumulatively show that the classical philosophical tradition was already quite interested not only in existing racial stereotypes and classifications but also in the mechanics of racecraft and the political uses of race.

This chapter reviews what is known about the paleogenomics of fossil humans with a focus on Neandertals. It argues that the mode and tempo of the evolution of differences between humans today and Neandertals was roughly equivalent to that of the evolution of differences among humans today. Rates of evolution of cranial morphology are fast and accord well with a neutral model of evolution by mutation and random genetic drift. The chapter then reviews the state of the art in the genetics of complex traits demonstrating that simple Mendelian traits are vanishingly rare and that most genetic variation in morphological traits arises from many loci with small effects. It concludes by discussing ways in which paleogenomics and complex trait genetics can be merged into a more cohesive body of thought that will allow scholars of human evolution to build a holistic account of the evolution of the whole human organism.