This chapter examines the concept of territory. While administrative space was no novelty in East Asia, notions related to space transformed in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk marked the borderlines between the the Qing and Russian empires. Similar treaties in the early eighteenth century solidified them. Kangxi initiated a geographical survey spanning the country. This significantly impacted Korea, which made efforts to secure its border, altering perceptions of the state. Russian expansion along the Pacific coast raised concerns in Japan. From the late eighteenth century, Japanese intellectuals explored the Ezo region – areas that had held little interest. These developments introduced fresh concepts like territory, borders, and exclusive ownership (often considered European inventions) into traditional notions of imperial land. The new ideas didn’t supplant existing understandings, or engender a new interpolity system in East Asia.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

During the Geometric period (ca. 900–700 BCE), the sociopolitical structure of Big Men became collaborative aristocratic rule. Most Geometric buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and pitched thatch roofs, or, in the Cyclades and Crete, fieldstone walls and flat roofs. Larger dwellings were usually apsidal or rectangular, smaller dwellings often oval. In the eighth century, a large household could include separate buildings and areas inside an enclosure (Oropos, Eretria). By 700, multi-room rectangular houses with a courtyard appear (Zagora). Sanctuaries in settlements were usually open-air. Sanctuaries outside settlements proliferated in Late Geometric as sites of elite display and competition; rituals included animal sacrifice, communal feasting, and votive offerings. Monumental temples were built 725–700 at Eretria, Amarynthos, Naxos, Samos, Kalapodi, and Ano Mazaraki, all extra-urban except Eretria. Geometric burials were generally inhumations, though cremation was common in Athens/Attica. On pottery, angular geometric motifs replaced Protogeometric circular designs. Figured scenes (funerals, battles) appear in the mid-eighth century and possibly mythological scenes in the late eighth century. Greeks, probably Euboeans, borrowed the Phoenician alphabet ca. 800 BCE; early inscriptions were scratched on pottery, some in poetic meter. By ca. 700, many settlements had developed into the politically organized community called a polis.

This chapter considers the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. The chapter uses this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. It argues that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?

Chapter 3.2 covers the way hospitals are paid. Methods for paying hospitals vary across countries and include fee-for-service, block contracts, line-item budgeting (where purchasers specify exactly what funds are used for), and activity-based funding (with a fixed rate for each episode of care independent of the hospital’s costs of care). Increasingly, pay-for-performance elements are also used. Key learning includes that

• Third-party purchasers: government agencies, social health insurance funds, or insurance companies provide the bulk of hospital revenue giving them levers to shape provision.

• Purchasers and hospitals have distinct objectives that are not always aligned — purchasers will pursue the best quality of care at the lowest price for their covered population while hospitals seek stable revenue streams to cover their costs.

• Information asymmetries give hospitals advantages over purchasers.

• Purchasers use payment methods and financial rewards to incentivize the volume and quality of care, patient-mix and management effort they want. There are complex challenges around

• – Specifying the details

• – Negotiating effective contracts, and

• – Managing payment systems.

• Monitoring outputs and safeguarding quality requires structures and systems which are costly.

• Reforming funding or transitioning from one payment model to another is often a long process that demands sophisticated design and careful implementation.

This chapter historicises the current moment of transformation in international trade governance by examining the evolving boundaries of trade expertise and the shifting techniques of trade governance. It adopts a periodisation of post-Second World War international economic governance, starting with the ‘embedded liberal’ period, continuing with the ‘neoliberal period’, and concluding with the contemporary period of liberalism ‘in motion’ or kineo-liberalism. The chapter demonstrates how the boundaries of the expert field and the available governance techniques are deeply connected to the broader politics of trade governance, reflecting and sustaining larger shifts in convictions concerning the purposes and rationales of international trade governance. The current moment is characterised by instability, uncertainty, and contestation, leading to a denaturalisation of the boundaries of trade governance and a reinterpretation of its fundamental aspects.

This chapter examines the relationship between trade and sustainable development, including its developmental dimension. It argues that trade policy and international trade institutions must be integrated into broader international efforts to promote sustainable development. This requires an end to the siloed treatment of trade and other policy areas. It also requires a more holistic approach to international law-making, including greater cooperation among international organisations and a willingness to make trade-offs between competing goals. Finally, it requires a recognition of the different preferences of rich and poor countries and a willingness to address the power imbalances that exist in the global trading system.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

Studies of imperial Chinese and Byzantine diplomacy conventionally assume that their diplomatic norms had indigenous origins that became models for neighbouring polities. This chapter questions this assumption by comparing the diplomatic traditions of empires of Sui and Tang China (581–907), Byzantium (395–1453), Sasanian Iran (224–651), Turkic polities, and smaller Eurasian states. Eurasia shared diplomatic protocols incorporating pageantry, status ranking, displays of obeisance to the ruler, gift exchange, and feasting. Visiting envoys enjoyed rights to safe passage that sometimes were violated during periods of interpolity tension. Peaceful relations were normally signalled when a greater power invested a lesser one as a vassal, and sometimes when two great powers negotiated and ratified written treaties. Diplomatic agreements were reinforced via marriage or fictive kinship relations between rulers, trade accords, and/or direct payments from one polity to another. This customary diplomatic tradition provided rulers with shared standards to negotiate agreements that protected their perceived strategic, political, economic and symbolic interests.

This essay interprets Carpentier’s American cycle of novels from the perspective of the environmental humanities. It defines Carpentier’s “ecological marvelous realism” as a literary motif in which organisms interact with their environments in ways that are ordinary yet marvelous. Most important, Carpentier’s ecological marvelous real features surprising shape-shifting capacities of peoples, plants, animals, and insects in the New World that destabilize boundaries and hierarchies between humans and nonhumans.This new ecocritical reading of the Cuban author’s most famous works aims to reassess his status in the canonical Latin American literary tradition and question a central tenet of the field of multispecies studies.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.