This chapter explores how considerations of private international law affected marriage and gender relations during the Mongol occupation of China, in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368). I first address matters of jurisdiction and choice of law that arose in Yuan China and border areas when lawsuits involved non-Chinese. It demonstrates the willingness of Mongol Yuan officials to consider non-Chinese law in adjudication and how this process could be complicated by facts on the ground. The section reveals under Mongol rule a form of ‘transnational everyday life’, as other scholars have termed it, and the disadvantages that often accrued to women in these circumstances. Then I demonstrate how the Chinese encounter with Mongol rule and the resulting ‘foreign’ elements introduced into legal practice brought about changes in traditional, codified, Chinese marriage law. Finally, I address the Mongol use of strategic marriages in their interpolity relations both during the united world empire and in the Yuan dynasty. These interpolity marriage relations were crucial to Mongol successes during their conquests and in their efforts to maintain sovereignty over conquered peoples.

From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, the Qing dynasty was the dominant power in East Asia. It waged numerous wars with its neighbours, both within the orbit of its tributary system and without. Coming from Manchuria and with their past tribal war tradition, the Manchus did not have an inherent expansion agenda when they conquered China. Use of force by the Qing dynasty in dealing with frontier crises was often case-specific. The Qing state constantly adjusted and revised its underpinning in justifying its decision to wage war or keep peace on or beyond its borders. In chronological order, this chapter delineates the evolution of Qing China’s normative system. It starts with the Manchus’ formative era in Manchuria, then focuses on the Qing dynasty’s empire-building endeavours and subsequent retreat from frontier activism in the early nineteenth century, and ends with a brief discussion of its last decades, during which the Qing dynasty’s doctrine and practice in managing its international affairs changed radically owing to intensified interactions with Western countries and the introduction of the Western international law.

This chapter reviews the fossil evidence for Neandertal pelvic morphology. Although the sample available is fairly small, it suggests that Neandertals share a set of features that differentiate them somewhat on average from modern humans. As noted by the first describers of the pelvis in Neandertals, this includes a long and thin superior pubic ramus, a broad overall breadth of the pelvis, and a general robusticity of the pelvis. The overall breadth of the pelvis and probably the length of the superior pubic ramus appear to reflect the primitive condition for hominins rather than derived features of Neandertals. It is likely that Neandertals gave birth with a similar degree of difficulty and a birth mechanism as is generally the case for modern humans. Obstetrics, locomotor constraints, and climatic adaptation are all important factors that need to be considered in an understanding of the pelvis in Neandertals.

The discovery and analysis of immature Neandertal remains have yielded significant insights into Neandertal growth and development, despite numerous historical challenges in the curation and study of these fossils. The relatively large number of immature Neandertal remains, attributed in part to their practice of intentional burial, has allowed for extensive ontogenetic studies. Early research focused on the timing of Neandertal trait emergence, and recent studies have expanded to include aspects such as birth, gestation, and growth rates. Notable differences between Neandertals and modern humans have been observed, particularly in craniofacial growth, brain development, and dental formation. Despite some evidence suggesting accelerated dental development in Neandertals, there is still considerable debate. Postcranial studies have highlighted distinctive features that emerge early in Neandertal growth, although discrepancies between dental and skeletal maturity remain. Future research is poised to benefit from integrated approaches that combine cranial, dental, and postcranial data and consider a wide range of comparative samples. Understanding Neandertal growth within a developmental context not only enhances our knowledge of Neandertals but also provides broader insights into human evolutionary biology.

This introductory chapter contextualizes the inquiry and delimits the theoretical, historical, and practical concerns that motivate the study. After discussing key concepts informing the analysis, including the terms ‘religion’ and ‘recognition’, it summarizes the book’s main arguments and contributions and locates them in current International Relations (IR) scholarship as well as in the disciplines of religious studies and colonial history. It introduces the empirical case studies and illustrates how the quest for statehood, the contested question of minorities, political representation, and international border-making shaped and were shaped by the concepts, agents, and identities associated with ‘religion’ that broke through the threshold of political recognition to establish themselves as taken-for-granted political entities on the global stage. The chapter argues that religion is a space, concept, and realm of social and political life rather than separate from it. Consequently, struggles over authority, power, and political order shape the contours and meanings that ‘religion’ can take on. By the same token, analysing changes in such meanings and understandings help us understand the political structures and orders that characterize that particular place and time.

This chapter analyses how trade law conceptualises data and AI. It shows that trade law applies long-established concepts to these novel phenomena while experimenting with new categories in preferential agreements. For data, these categories include data as a good, as a service, as a digital product, intellectual property, electronic transmissions, and as a regulatory object. For AI, the chapter distinguishes between the trade regulation of AI components, AI products, and AI governance. It concludes by suggesting that trade law can be understood as a form of AI/data law, which may help in recognising and addressing the challenges that the digital economy poses for trade law.

This chapter starts by providing an overview of the radical social and spatial shifts which seem to have occurred within Cretan societies between the period of state collapse ca. 1200 and the early Archaic period from ca. 700 BC onward, including changes in settlement, subsistence, and ritual practice. It then presents three case study regions, possessing contrasts and similarities in patterns of change apparent from substantial detailed research data – the north Lasithi mountains in north central Crete, the Kavousi–Azoria region of east Crete, and the Phaistos–west Mesara region in the south of the island – in order to illustrate the points argued.

A substantial portion of Alejo Carpentier’s writings, nonfictional and fictional, can be classified as Neobaroque, making their author one of the key representatives of this transhistorical, transnational, cross-cultural and interartistic contemporary movement. This chapter focuses on images and expressions of deformed chronology that abound in Carpentier’s fiction, and which are associated with the Baroque, an aesthetics of excess and transgression that sets established forms into variation. It argues that what can be classified as baroque futurisms – eccentric because it deforms linear chronology – is the gist of Carpentier’s concept of the New World Baroque. The chapter briefly outlines Carpentier’s Baroque theory before exploring instances of baroque futurism in representative works of Carpentier’s fiction.

As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

Chapter 2.2 investigates the design and implementation of health benefits packages in different contexts. A benefits package is the range of health care goods and services that people covered by a system or scheme are entitled to or should be able to access. Key learning includes that

• All health systems have budgetary constraints and set some limits to entitlement, and therefore have some kind of benefits package.

• Benefits packages may be explicitly defined or implicit only, with the latter more common in high income countries and the former more common in low and middle income countries.

• What is included or excluded, and the ways these decisions are made, vary widely but well-designed benefit packages should address population health needs and ensure the efficient use of health system resources

• Defining a package of care is complex and often highly sensitive – using evidence and economic evaluation to determine what to include (or exclude) supports efficiency and equity and allows policy-makers to explain and defend their choices.

• There are a range of evidence-led instruments that can support policy choices such as health technology assessment (HTA), which incorporates economic evaluation.

• Any decision-making process should

• – Gain agreement and buy-in from key stakeholders on the ultimate goals of the benefits package and the level of explicitness.

• – Take into account the specific characteristics of the setting where the benefits package will be implemented including its cultural values, market configuration, political system and wealth.

As a field, Classics relies heavily on translation. Many classicists believe that their translations are objective and neutral. However, translations, whether of ancient or modern texts, reflect the positionality of the translator. Therefore, translations cannot be neutral or objective. The translator must be transparent about their social location and positionality. If not, the epistemic injustice of colonialist, imperialistic discourse remains intact. Case studies drawn from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Pliny illustrate this.