National security concerns have long shaped international relations, with economic interdependence traditionally seen as fostering stability. However, recent geopolitical shifts have challenged this assumption. The strategic rivalry, particularly between the US and China, has raised the stakes of international competition and new forms of economic warfare. Historically committed to multilateralism, the EU faces pressures to reassess its approach due to an increasing use of economic coercion by other states. Emerging powers, particularly BRICS, are also redefining their roles in the global order, employing economic tools to counter Western hegemony. As unilateralism rises and the effectiveness of multilateral institutions like the WTO is questioned, a “new geo-economic order” appears to be emerging. This Chapter creates the basis for the normative and evaluative questions of this book by exploring how major economic players navigate national security concerns in an increasingly fragmented trade landscape.

In this chapter, I highlight specific challenges the continuo players face when performing Strozzi’s music. I argue that only by understanding Strozzi’s music as well as its poetry and harmonic language that the harpsichordist can truly partner with the singer to deliver a dynamic performance. First, most of Strozzi’s music is sparsely notated, so the continuo player must figure out the harmonies and notate figured bass according to their own analysis. Second, Strozzi—like composers of her time—does not provide performance instruction on how long the realized chords should be held or how they should be arpeggiated. To that end, I examine the cases of long-held notes and provide concrete suggestions on how one might approach the realization and timing based on text and rhetoric. In addition, I discuss how figured bass can be utilized to flesh out the melodies in written-out ritornello when no treble part is provided.

Part I of the book provides the framework and contexts for appreciating the significance of local history-writing. Chapter 1 deals with the different professional and elite groups who were the principal producers of history in the early Islamic world. Many works were produced by those loosely known as religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ, sing. ʿālim), but other professional groups such as government chancery officials and administrators (kuttāb, sing. kātib) are considered as well, as are those who can be very loosely labelled litterateurs (udabāʾ, sing. adīb). The chapter investigates how these groups thought about themselves as communities and how they derived social authority as elites. It is frequently assumed that these groups used history-writing as one way of underpinning their authority, but it is less frequently examined explicitly how such authority operated. Since this book absolutely agrees with the now well-established principal that history-writing supported the position and authority of relevant groups, it is important to establish in what precise ways this worked and what the opportunities to exercise authority were to those groups whose members produced local histories.

This chapter will chart the early turbulent years after the Treaty of Managua, which gave Nicaragua sovereignty over an autonomous Mosquito Reserve. As Nicaragua attempted to consolidate and control the transit route, it pushed for greater incorporation of Greytown and the Reserve within the Republic. This chapter will follow the tense standoff between Nicaragua and the Mosquito Kingdom, which would ultimately be brought to international arbitration through British initiative. In this context, the opening of the Suez Canal sparked off renewed American interest leading to the Lull survey of 1872–1873, which underscored the paradoxical reality that as the struggle over the canal route and Mosquito Reserve threatened to become an international issue, the local conditions of Greytown were slowly making the entry point of the proposed canal route unnavigable. Ironically, Nicaragua’s efforts to leverage U.S. interests in the canal led to conflict with Guatemala’s aggressive unionism, undermining ideals of regional unity.

Pablo Neruda lived in the crossroads of the cultural Cold War and its influence in Latin America. At once an ardent defender of the Soviet Union and the policies dictated from the Politburo, but also falling prey to the tensions that those directions generated in Latin America, the Chilean poet made the attempt (and ultimately failed to bring it to completion) to reconcile his views on democracy with the more radical members of Salvador Allende’s government. After the coup, amid the raids against all members of the political left, Neruda became a thorn in the side of the junta, and a potential menace that needed to be neutralized. The ensuing controversy regarding the judicial process to find the real cause of his death, not complete in its totality as of yet, contextualizes the rest of this essay.

Part II of the book turns to the field of history-writing more specifically and includes three chapters that approach the categorisation of history as universal or local in three different ways. Chapter 4 introduces early Islamic universal history-writing and the key concerns and interests of authors and compilers of such works down to the end of the fifth/eleventh century. It begins with a discussion of what a universal history was in the early Islamic world and moves on to look at the contexts and purposes of universal history-writing. The chapter ends with some consideration of whether universal histories are really any less parochial than local histories in their concerns.

1927 was a critical period in Pablo Neruda’s life. At the time, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Rangoon. He was a promising poet and a young diplomat hungry to see the world. Southeast Asia represented a season of solitude that he alleviated with his marriage to Maruca, with whom he would have his only daughter. The girl would die at an early age. In this region, he envisaged Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933). Through the letters to his friend Héctor Eandi and his travel chronicles, we learn the inner landscapes that occupied Neruda’s creative mind. A memorable poem written in this period is “El tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), which describes his tempestuous relationship with Josie Bliss. This period has been revisited lately due to the confession of a sexual assault of a young Tamil woman under his service expressed in his memoirs.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

This chapter focuses on the decisive moment that led to the creation of the Panama Canal and the waning of Nicaragua as the site of a potential transisthmian canal. The apparent abruptness of the decision to build the canal in Panama in 1902 belied the steady buildup of a new American way of looking at the world – emerging in the context of the Spanish–American War – that was heavily informed by the American press. The final turn towards Panama profoundly altered the course of Nicaraguan history and effectively stymied dreams of regional unity.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.