This chapter considers how Australian theatre responds to, represents and stages floods, and how those representations have changed over the last half-century and more. Beginning with Eunice Hanger’s Flood and Mona Brand’s Flood Tide from the 1950s, the chapter traces how dramatic characters are fashioned in response to increasingly extreme climates. Alana Valentine’s (2008) Watermark, a work of community/verbatim theatre, draws on the oral testimony of survivors of a fast-moving flood that in 1998 swept through the town and surrounding areas of Katherine in the Northern Territory. In Jackie Smith’s (2009) The Flood, rising flood waters have a materiality and agential capacity to provoke fear and anger in the three characters of three dramatic characters trapped inside a run-down farmhouse. Between Two Waves by Ian Meadows (2012) is a politically engaged climate change drama that represents the increasing hysteria of a climate scientist’s warnings as they this to these are distorted and denied by conservative politicians and media.

An important role is played in the most recent developments on gaps between primes by suitable sets of prime k-tuples. Thus before proceeding with this chapter the reader would be well advised to review the contents of §18.5. The principal idea is to use artefacts from sieve theory, especially the Selberg sieve, not directly in the form of a sieve but as a means to increase the likelihood that certain constellations of 𝑘-tuples have relatively few prime factors.

The land now called Australia was settled by humans between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and the lands and waterways sustained balanced life until 1788 when a fleet of British soldiers, settlers and convicts landed on the central east coast. This chapter traces the ways theatrical works stage ‘land’ that has been transformed and depleted by the interrelated actions of colonialism, deforestation and pastoralism. It features the ecological content and staging of three works: Yanagai! Yanagai! by Yorta Yorta and Gunaikurnai woman Andrea James (2003), Louis Nowra’s (1985) The Golden Age and The White Earth by Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles (2009). These depict violent land-grabs violent land-grabs, massacres, stubborn farming practices and ignorance of the environment as an ecosystem with a long history of human habitation. This chapter looks at the problem of ongoing ecological damage and struggles to develop sustainable land practices.

Chapter 3 turns to one of the best known but most controversial instances of ecological practice under Nazi auspices. It centers on the coterie of “advocates for the landscape” responsible for environmental planning on a series of major Nazi public works projects, most famously the building of the Autobahn system. The group was led by Alwin Seifert, whose title was Reich Advocate for the Landscape. Seifert was a pivotal figure in the development of the post-war environmental movement in Germany, and the work of his landscape advocates on the Autobahn has been the subject of several important previous studies. The focus of the chapter extends far beyond the Autobahn project to include many other fields in which the landscape advocates took an active part, styling themselves “the conscience of the German countryside.” The chapter shows that Seifert and the landscape advocates consistently applied ecological techniques even in the face of concerted resistance from other branches of the Nazi bureaucracy, with the support of a surprising range of high-level party and state functionaries. Though their achievements were limited in significant ways, through a modernized version of blood and soil ideology they conjoined Nazi ideals with environmentally sustainable policies.

This chapter discusses relative clauses in some theoretical detail. It begins by establishing a working definition of relative clauses appropriate for the purposes of the book, providing an overview of the different semantic and syntactic types. It then moves on to the way in which these clauses are analysed within Minimalist linguistic theory, weighing up the Head-External, Head-Raising and Matching analyses; this is followed by a more detailed look at the left periphery as a vital part of this structure. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which these formal approaches have been applied to ancient Indo-European languages, isolating the points of identity and divergence between them. These establish the relevant points of comparison, which inform the reconstructive program pursued in subsequent chapters.

Quadratic fields are the simplest examples of number fields, yet they already exhibit the full richness of the theory of class groups and class numbers. Their study originated with Gauss’s binary quadratic forms, later linked to quadratic fields via Dedekind’s correspondence between narrow ideal classes and proper equivalence classes of forms.

A significant portion of this chapter is devoted to the reduction theory of binary quadratic forms, which, among other applications, enables the algorithmic computation of class numbers via Dedekind’s correspondence.

For definite forms, reduction yields unique representatives for proper equivalence classes. The modular group acts via linear substitution, inducing Möbius transformations on principal roots in the upper half-plane. Each orbit intersects the fundamental domain at a unique point, corresponding to a canonical reduced form.

Indefinite forms are more intricate. Though the modular group similarly acts on principal roots, no natural fundamental domain exists to select unique orbit representatives. Instead, Zagier’s notion of reduction – distinct from Gauss’s – establishes a bijection between reduced indefinite forms and purely periodic negative regular continued fractions. Remarkably, cyclic permutations of the period generate all reduced forms within a proper equivalence class.

Chapter 5 analyzes the symbolic and political meanings ascribed to the birth of Spain’s first Bourbon crown prince, Luis I, and the broader theme of dynastic succession. It explores how pro-Bourbon orators and visual artists celebrated the royal birth as a miraculous sign of divine favor, emphasizing fertility, continuity, and providence. Sermons of thanksgiving and ceremonial oaths of allegiance to Luis I presented him as a flower blooming from sacred roots, a living promise of future abundance. This chapter further examines the role of Queen María Luisa Gabriela de Saboya, who emerged as a symbol of both fecundity and pious maternity. Using floral imagery, Marian symbolism, and genealogical metaphors, propagandists portrayed the Bourbon line as physically vigorous and spiritually blessed. In doing so, they addressed lingering anxieties about Habsburg infertility and cast the Bourbons as restorers of imperial health and sacred monarchy.

Chapter 2 uses official data and primary documents to examine land as a factor of production and the legal status of land in China’s political economy. It highlights how insecure property rights and incomplete markets for land diverge from the liberal economic model. As codified in law, the state generates rents through its ability to take land from the rural sector at below-market prices to sell into the urban real estate and industrial sectors at higher and lower prices, respectively. This pattern is reminiscent of the planned economy and enacts urban bias. Local governments rely on land for revenue, as a tool of industry policy, and for capital mobilization through local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Informality persists in the form of illegal land conversion and “small property rights” in urban villages and elsewhere. Beyond the analysis of land law at the rural-urban interface, the chapter also analyzes land rights within the rural and urban sectors, respectively. Within the agricultural sector, reforms have improved the property rights of rural households to arable land, but limits on rights and sources of insecurity remain. Urban households have been the beneficiaries of housing reforms, giving them a vested interest in resisting property taxes.

The relevance of ecological ideals in lands occupied by Nazi forces would seem to be completely overshadowed by the ruinous impact of war. The book’s final chapter challenges this view through a thoroughly documented alternative analysis. Hitler’s vision of creating “a garden of Eden in the east” imbued longstanding racial myths with an ecological dimension, a call to restore harmony to the natural world, which in turn provided a crucial opening for environmentalists. The landscape advocates worked closely with German military authorities throughout occupied Europe on “green” programs that combined martial and environmental values. After the 1941 dissolution of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, leading biodynamic figures found a new institutional home in Himmler’s SS, working on settlement activities in the East and designing idealized rural communities founded on blood and soil precepts. The large biodynamic plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, growing organic products for the SS, served as a training center for environmental renewal as an integral part of occupation policy. Far from being consigned to insignificance, the full panoply of ecological aspirations came into their own in the midst of war. Their realization was prevented not by internal obstruction but by Germany’s defeat.

Vicente Rocafuerte (1783–1847) was born in Guayaquil, in today’s Ecuador. Educated in Spain and France, he entered politics early, serving first in his native land as a local magistrate. While in Europe (since 1812) he was elected as one of the Spanish American representatives to the Spanish Cortes. In Madrid in 1814 he witnessed the demise of the parliament after the restoration of Ferdinand VII, devoting himself from then on to the service of some of the emerging nations of Spanish America. As an advocate of republicanism, he opposed the Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide and served as Mexico’s representative in Great Britain and Europe. Back in Guayaquil in 1833, he opposed the regime of Juan José Flores, becoming president of Ecuador between 1835 and 1839, and serving later as president of the Senate. He died in Lima in 1847, while on a diplomatic mission to Peru. The current selection was written while in Mexico in 1830 and represents one of the earliest Spanish American arguments for religious toleration. Rocafuerte was by no means an atheist but opposed the establishment of an official religion for the emerging states.

Valentín Letelier (1852–1929) was a Chilean educator, philosopher, and jurist who, after an assignment in Prussia in the early 1880s, contributed to the reform of the Chilean educational system, particularly through the creation of the teacher-training institute, the Instituto Pedagógico attached to the University of Chile. A committed positivist and leader of the Radical Party, Letelier was a chaired professor of law who became rector of the University of Chile for two periods beginning in 1906. His principal works include Filosofía de la educación (1892), La evolución de la historia (1900), Génesis del Estado (1917), and Génesis del derecho (1919). As a member of Congress, he joined the opposition to the government of José Manuel Balmaceda, signing the articles of impeachment that led to his arrest and exile in 1891, the year of the Civil War that ended with the victory of the congressional forces. The current selection provides Letelier’s rationale for the opposition to Balmaceda and advances a passionate defense of the role of organized political parties in a democracy, the rule of law, and the meritocratic selection of public officials.

This chapter describes the rapid spread of democracy in the later fifth and earlier fourth centuries BCE. The reader imagines the life cycle of a democratic citizen in Classical Athens, from birth in the deme to political participation in mid-life to arbitration work in old age, with detours into the court system, festivals, the Athenian Funeral Oration, and ostracism. Comparative evidence is introduced from fourth-century BCE Argos. The Athenian monumental building projects of the period of the high empire (Parthenon, Propylaea, Erectheion, etc.) receive their own subsection, with a focus on democratic art. The reader is introduced properly to oligarchic institutions and ideology, which almost managed to reverse democratic gains for good in this period. The chapter ends with a discussion of the stasis or civil strife that broke out between democrats and oligarchs in so many Greek poleis.