This chapter examines the various ways in which ancient tragic and comic playwrights constructed race on their stages. Inspired by Geraldine Heng’s articulation of race in the premodern past as an ‘essentialised difference’, I explore essentialised conceptions of ethnicity and descent featured in various plays and how these intersected with broader cultural and political discourses around identity in fifth-century Athens. I trace the discourses of alterity and inferiority that feature in various tragic plots centred on interactions between Greeks and barbarians from Aeschylus’ Suppliants to Euripides’ Medea, as well as notions of superiority that foreground the various myths of Athenian autochthony staged across the fifth-century BCE, most prominently in Euripides’ Erechtheus and Ion.

This chapter studies the history of translations of Alejo Carpentier’s novels into German. As Reisinger shows, novels by Carpentier were translated starting in the 1950s, but it took several translators and several changes of publishers to make Carpentier’s novels successful in German translation. In establishing Carpentier in the 1970s as one of the great Latin American writers, a crucial role was played by literary scout Michi Strausfeld and publishing house Suhrkamp. Relations between East and West Germany were relatively fluid, but Carpentier’s greatest success was in the West.

This chapter explores how from the nineteenth century onwards in particular anti-Semitism played a key role in the definition and practices of Classics as a discipline. It traces the roots of such prejudice to virulent Christian rhetoric and violent behaviour starting in late antiquity, and continuing through to modernity. It considers how such expressions have affected the historiography of ancient Israel. It also exposes the racial basis of philology itself, and the disavowal of racism by philologists. Finally, it outlines the role anti-Semitism played in the institutional formation of the subject of Classics in the universities of Europe.

This chapter looks at the relationship between papyrology and race from a historical and disciplinary perspective. European imperialism, from Napoleon’s expedition onwards, enabled the legal and illegal transfer of a hundred thousand papyrus fragments from Egypt to Europe and North America. The process was sustained by White race supremacy ideas, which most scholars embraced, according to which Egyptians and their Ottoman ruling elite were incapable of appreciating the real meaning of antiquities, including manuscripts, putting at risk their preservation. The accumulation and archival of papyri in European and North American collections went hand in hand with a programmatic exclusion of Egyptians from studying the material and was functional to the creation of a new academic field, papyrology, controlled by White classicists. The chapter’s conclusion opens question about future directions, regarding both colonial collections and institutional inequality.

This chapter is in two parts. The first offers a general overview of twentieth-century African adaptations of Greek tragedy. It discusses the selection and treatment of age-old cultural practice of the Yoruba in adaptations by playwrights such as Wole Soyinka (Bacchae) and Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are Not to Blame), and how these exemplify an engagement with and representation of other peoples and cultures. The second segment examines the complexities of culture and race in Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, An African Antigone and MEDAAYE: A Re-reading of Euripides’ Medea, utilising the concept of ‘symbolic violence’, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept is pertinent here for penetrating the means by which dominant groups assign identities and roles to the dominated, and also for identifying how the latter may then accept or reject the dominant construction depending on the resources of resistance that they command and can deploy. I argue that a similar struggle revolving around symbolic violence is visible in racial and gender constructions in Graeco-Roman culture, and that these two plays of Osofisan not only serve as intercultural dialogues for navigating these issues but also provide a thread for tracing the processes of these constructions.

This chapter examines the legal and political economy issues surrounding trade in services, focusing on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It contextualises the GATS’s origins, structure, and key obligations, including market access, national treatment, and MFN. The chapter also analyses the complexities of scheduling commitments, exceptions, and the evolving landscape of services trade. It concludes with a critical reflection on the challenges and future prospects of regulating services trade in the context of digital transformation and geopolitical tensions.

Leveraging the late José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, this contribution proposes Brownness as a structuring concept for the study of racial affect in the Roman Mediterranean. Scholarship on race in the Roman Mediterranean has privileged somatic and/or phenotypic paradigms; approaches to race and racial formation that do not accord primacy to the inscription of race on the body are generally rare in the secondary literature, which has not systematically engaged with explorations of racialisation and affect in Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Queer studies. Moving in step with recent efforts to bring critical race theory to bear on the figuration of Blackness in ancient Greek texts, this chapter maps several interpretative strategies for tracking and evaluating Brownness in Roman texts – as a matrix of shame, anxiety, and melancholic subjection.

The urban and rural collectivization campaign of the Great Leap coincided with a nation-wide debate on the law of value, bourgeois right, and the socialist economy. This chapter demonstrates how what appeared to be an abstract discussion among economists, social scientists, and party theoreticians was in fact intimately connected with and relevant to the praxis of urban collectivization. This was neither the case of a theoretical position or an ideological argument at the top fueling a policy change at the bottom, nor that of a political experiment at the street level which needed to be justified and rearticulated at the level of Marxist theory. Rather, the two aspects – as it often is for Marxist politics – were interdependent, co-determined, and yet always in a state of profound tension. Understanding the Great Leap Forward requires insights into both theoretical abstraction and the world of quotidian praxis.

This chapter argues that the Alexander Romance mounts a subversive critique of rhetorical education in the Roman world. Though long dismissed as ahistorical fantasy, the novel draws extensively on the declamatory school tradition, only to parody its constraints and elevate Alexander as a master rhetorician beyond the reach of paideia. Through close readings of episodes involving Aristotle, the Attic orators, Darius, and the Theban flautist Ismenias, the chapter shows how the Romance reframes Alexander not as a pupil of canonical figures but as their superior and eventual replacement. By satirizing epistolary fiction, impersonation exercises, and the “travel advisories” suasoriae from chapter 4, the novel rewrites Classical history to suit Alexander’s anti-sophistic persona. His distinctive voice – described as “divinely inspired” – becomes the true marker of kingship and character, in contrast to the pedantry of rhetorical mimesis. Ultimately, the Romance envisions an alternative model of fiction mastery and learning that dethrones classical exempla and reconfigures the boundaries of elite education.

Chapter 1.3 considers voluntary health insurance (VHI). VHI is paid for privately by or on behalf of individuals and normally covers care in addition to the publicly financed benefits package. Premiums are not typically based on the policyholder’s income but may well vary depending on their risk of ill health. Key learning includes that

• Despite prepayment and risk pooling, VHI has limitations and does not align well with progress towards universal health coverage because:

• – Risk pools in VHI schemes are typically much smaller than pools established through statutory schemes which means there are fewer people to share risk

• – Inequities are created because of the cost of premiums, which may not be affordable or accessible to everyone including those most in need.

• VHI has wider equity implications because it offers those who can afford to pay faster access or greater choice of services (supplementary insurance) or coverage of excluded services or user charges for statutory care (complementary insurance)

• Governments seeking to use VHI to expand coverage typically have to make significant interventions, including through tax subsidies to make premiums more affordable, but this creates market distortions and is inefficient.

• Policy-makers can secure better value for money by improving access to publicly financed health care than by promoting VHI.