This introduction to The Cambridge Companion to World Trade Law introduces the book’s purpose and structure. The volume is intended to be an authoritative and accessible guide to the field, appealing to both legal specialists and those with no specialist knowledge of trade law. It is written by experts and provides a compact discussion of the perspectives, enduring issues, and emergent challenges in the field. The introduction also discusses the current context of world trade, highlighting the divisions in the world following decades of growth and the challenges posed by globalisation. It sets the stage for the chapters that follow.

Carpentier was an expert on architecture: his father was a French architect and as a student the future novelist attended the University of Havana’s School of Architecture. Though he wrote extensively about Cuban architecture – most notably in The City of Columns – he barely discussed the Modern movement which was so influential in Havana’s building boom during the 1950s. This blind spot is puzzling, especially when we consider that the novelist lived in Paris, read L’esprit nouveau, and was familiar with the writings of Le Corbusier. This chapter explores why Carpentier deliberately avoided writing about the modern architecture that transformed the Vedado district of Havana in the decade before the Cuban Revolution by examining the built environments that appear in The City of Columns and The Chase.

Through a close analysis of the diction used by medieval translators of the biblical narrative in which Adam names the non-human animals, this introduction presents the book’s scope and argument. The first human seems to have had no difficulty giving the other animals their names, his success implicitly communicating his dominance as a rational, speaking creature; exegetes like Augustine pressed this point, citing the naming narrative as evidence for humanity’s status as the only rational animal. However, the medieval translators who rendered the naming scene in words of their own seemed notably less confident than Adam, their texts differing from one another in ways that suggest the discovery of uncertainty and confusion, rather than intuitive transparency, where speech and species intersect. The difficulty reflects fundamental features of the medieval lexicon employed to articulate the relationship between speech, reason, and species identity: Crucial terms such as animal and beste were ambiguous and inconsistent in meaning, leaving the precise place of the rational-discursive faculty in a state of suspense.

Allen Ginsberg’s entrance into Columbia University in 1943, through to his graduation in 1948, constitute a key phase in his evolution as poet and inerasable presence in the Beat Movement. The classes he takes there with key teachers such as Lionel Trilling become essential even as he develops familiarity with the Manhattan of Greenwich Village, East Harlem, the galleries, jazz, café culture, and the darker reaches of Times Square and 42nd Street. While at Columbia he experiences his celebrated Blake vision and meets Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, David Kammerer, Henri Cru, and, essentially, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Briefly expelled from Columbia, with a brief stint in the maritime service which takes him to West Africa, he returns to the university and embarks even more fully on the career which will lead to “Howl” and his standing as Beat legendary name.

The seven decades of Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetic work coincided with major changes in societies’ approaches to the mentally ill. Mid century, near rock-bottom in this difficult evolution, Allen burst onto the scene with “Howl” and then “Kaddish”. Allen’s shocking and monumental works said we need to face mental illness and madness, stop seeing them as apart from ourselves, find spiritual meaning, take risks, and make major changes to humanize our approaches. With the approval of Allen and later his estate, I could conduct new research to bring us closer to Allen and Naomi’s lifelong involvement with madness and mental illness and why it matters in relation to his poetry. The result was Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (2023). Allen’s radical acceptance of madness as a basic and potentially beneficial human capacity was far ahead of his time in inviting readers to change how we understand and engage with madness and mental illness.

The chapter offers a contextualization of Ginsberg’s interest and models in French, identifying the key influential figures whose overt (for Rimbaud) or more subtle (for Perse) influences as role and poetic models are traceable in Ginsberg’s early Columbia year journals and the search for his own voice and poetic form. French intertexts in Ginsberg’s early journals then contextualize the emergence of Rimbaud and Perse as role models for both lifestyle and poetics, while intertextual echoes provide some hypotheses as to these poets’ influence. As Ginsberg carefully recorded his life as a poet, lectured, or signaled his influences, method, and technique, peritexts are useful lenses to observe both the construction of Ginsberg’s claimed, asserted, or archived French poetry influences. This chapter will address the reshaping, interpreting, and molding of this material into a language and graft of his own, a personal cosmology, of epic dimension, that would imprint most of his long poems.

Some people are taught that Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poem “Howl” was written spontaneously in a form inspired by Walt Whitman, was read in its entirety for the first time at a well-documented performance at the 6 Gallery, and that Ginsberg was brought to trial because of the ideas in his poem relating to homosexuality. This essay argues that “Howl” was heavily crafted after being simultaneously influenced by the form of Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” and the language of Jack Kerouac’s mind-thought prose, that probably only a draft of Part I of “Howl” was first read at the 6 Gallery, and that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was tried in court for publishing specific “filthy” words – some represented by dots – in Howl and Other Poems. What we can learn about all the discrepancies and myths is that Beat Studies scholars need to be open to questioning what we have previously accepted as facts.

This chapter examines a rarely discussed novel published by the Cuban writer in 1933. It focuses on his representation of black ñáñigos or abakuás, a brotherhood created by enslaved people in the early nineteenth century in Cuba, and which has survived to this day. It analyzes the novel within the context of anthropological and criminological paradigms that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that Carpentier deliberately eroticizes Afro-Cubans, especially their religious practitioners, to emphasize their perceived sexual freedom in the face of Western/North American/bourgeois modernization. To support this view, the article relies on insights gleaned from Carpentier’s letters to his mother, his reception of Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille’s ideas on non-Western societies and a little-known chronicle that he published in France.

The Conclusion synthesizes and expands on the findings of preceding chapters by comparing the fates of two different non-human animal characters who pledge their word of honor: a bat in a twelfth-century fable by Marie de France and a grasshopper in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine. It argues that that despite sharing the ostensibly similar narrative premise of a non-human animal who offers her foi in a fable, these texts highlight a change at the intersection between authorial speech and species identity that took place between the Middle Ages and early modernity. For Marie’s bat, the problem revolves around the inability of her society’s species lexicon to express or “contain” her nature. By the time La Fontaine’s grasshopper offers her pledge, the problem is precisely that the grasshopper has become pigeonholed into a Cartesian term – animal – that she cannot hope to transcend.

This chapter explores how labour issues are addressed in international trade agreements. It examines the reasons for including labour provisions, the history of their inclusion in trade agreements, and their effects on workers. Labour provisions are often included in trade agreements in response to the disruptions caused by international trade, to address the effects of trade agreements on workers, and to strengthen weak domestic labour protections. Despite the proliferation of labour provisions in trade agreements, their effects on workers’ lives are limited. The chapter concludes that labour provisions that directly target sites of production may be more effective in improving working conditions.

Over the course of his career, Ginsberg became known as much for his political activism as for his poetry. In fact, Ginsberg didn’t necessarily see a strong distinction between his poetry and his political activism, and this chapter traces how his political consciousness emerged in the early 1960s at the same time he was developing new kinds of poetics to articulate this political consciousness. During the 1960s, Ginsberg became a central figure in the growing and increasingly visible counterculture. The war in Vietnam was a major catalyst for his embrace of countercultural political activism, and as the 1960s unfolded, he came to see language, the corruption of language, and its bad faith use by politicians and others in power as symptom of a callous, violent American culture that seemed to revel in oppression, self-repression, and in escalating the war. He turned to poetry as a counter to this “black magic language,” notably in poems such as “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and this chapter shows how Ginsberg saw his socially and politically engaged poems of the era as doing the crucially important work of raising or changing consciousness about the war and a host of other social and political issues.

Interstate diplomacy in early modern Asia involved a framework of a common set of practices shared among Islamic, South East Asian and East Asian polities. This chapter outlines this common framework and then explores the unique articulations of it to be found in the Manchu Qing imperial formation. Qing diplomatic ritual drew from the rich tradition of imperial China, the practices of the Mongol Muslim and Buddhist Chinggisid khanates, the Buddhist notion of chakravartin kingship, and the diplomatic practices of the dominant sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Ritual diplomacy not only presented claims of supremacy among a multitude of Asian rulers, but negotiated military and marriage alliances, established the rules and practices of commercial exchange, moved the unique human and animal products of one kingdom to another, and addressed competing declarations over territory and resources.

By early 1959, faced with the famine taking hold of the countryside, the CCP leadership reined in the more radical aspects of the Great Leap. Yet, despite that, urban collectivization continued. This chapter explores urban experiments in Beijing between 1959 and 1960, when, in a moment of political uncertainty, workers, activists, and cadres in various neighborhoods strove to define the confines of what was possible. In particular, they tried to figure out what the promised transformation from “housewives” to (female) “workers” meant, both practically and politically, and what kind of activities should be considered under the category of “productive labor.” This search is set in a wider context by showing how it echoes the debates and discussions in Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory.

Chapter 2.4 gives an overview of user charges. User charges are out of pocket (OOP) payments made at the point of use for health services. Nearly all countries have some user charges, most commonly for medicines. They are intended to raise revenue and also to reduce the use of unnecessary health care services and products. Key learning includes that

• User charges can generate revenues but have many unintended negative consequences – creating barriers to access, contributing to inequities and increasing the risk of financial hardship for households.

• Health systems can reduce unnecessary or wasteful use of care without user charges by

• – Strengthening prescribing and referral systems to make sure care is appropriate

• – Offering more information to steer patients and providers towards more cost-effective care.

• Supply-side mechanisms that guide providers’ behaviour are more equitable and effective than demand-side mechanisms like user charges and have fewer negative impacts on patients – especially those with chronic or severe conditions or the economically disadvantaged.

• User charges are a suboptimal policy but – if they are to be used – health systems can mitigate the harm they cause and protect health care users through mechanisms such as exemptions, reduced copayments, income-related copayment caps, and to a lesser extent, price control and regulation.