This chapter analyses the WTO’s institutional features, focusing on rule-making and dispute settlement. It describes the creation of the GATT and the shift to the WTO, analysing salient aspects of the WTO’s structure. It reviews how WTO institutions have operated, highlighting problematic features and identifying potential reforms. The WTO is widely viewed as a seriously flawed institution. Despite its goal of promoting liberalised trade, members have found it virtually impossible to conclude new agreements. The dispute settlement system, once viewed as its crown jewel, now lies in tatters. While many factors have contributed to the current situation, the multilateral trading system’s institutional architecture is deeply implicated.

Chapter 3.4 explores how pharmaceutical care is financed. Paying for medicines includes how the end-purchase of existing medicines is managed but also the way investment in research and development (R&D) is handled. Key learning includes that

• Pharmaceutical innovation draws on substantial public and private resources.

• – The public sector primarily supports early-stage research, regulates the industry and incentivizes development.

• – The private sector is typically central to development, commercialization, manufacture and marketing. It seeks high profit margins and is not always transparent or responsive to policy priorities.

• Novel and specialized therapeutics as well as population ageing are likely to accelerate medicines expenditures. This requires careful management of pricing and reimbursement.

• Policy-makers can leverage a mix of push and pull strategies to align industry efforts with societal need including through

• – Clear communication of health system priorities

• – Transparent incentive and pricing systems and measures to enhance R&D efficiency

• – Payment mechanisms that foster equity and sustainability

• – Cross-country collaboration including on preparedness, procurement and pricing transparency.

Chapter 3.10 evaluates innovative financing for neglected diseases. Neglected diseases (NDs) account for about a fifth of the global burden of disease and affect over a billion people. They are neglected because the pharmaceutical sector does not consider it profitable to develop treatments for them. This reflects that fact that NDs are most prevalent in low- and middle-income countries with relatively low purchasing potential. Key learning includes that

• Global pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) invests a disproportionate share of innovation, activity and resources in low burden diseases and fosters significant inequities.

• A range of push and pull incentive mechanisms have been developed to delink the cost of research from market profitability and promote innovation in areas of need.

• – Reduce the upfront costs by subsidizing R&D pre-discovery (push incentives) and

• – Offer a reward post-discovery (pull incentives)

• The evidence on the effectiveness and reach of incentive schemes is scant and more needs to be done to understand the relative cost-effectiveness of the different incentive mechanisms and the extent to which they mitigate inequalities in innovation and access to new medicines.

• A global, unified governance framework for needs assessment and resource allocation could usefully

• – Carry out systematic comparison of the relative needs associated with NDs globally

• – Assess the costs and benefits of addressing these

• – Set priorities for the coordinated global allocation of funding and targeted incentive mechanisms, and

• – Consider payment mechanisms that will translate research into market launches.

This chapter examines the Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre as a revisionist shipwreck fiction that repurposes epic paradigms. The chapter reads the Cyrenean episode (chs. 11–24) as a sustained imitation – and critique – of Homer’s Phaeacia and Vergil’s Carthage. Unlike Odysseus or Aeneas, Apollonius resists narrative concealment and erotic distraction, instead reasserting his identity through skill, performance, and pedagogy. His learned character transforms a Phaeacian paradise into a classroom and converts a Didonian princess into a regina docta. The chapter argues that the novel appropriates the tropes of “bad” fiction to redefine the genre as morally and intellectually edifying. The text enacts a metaliterary defense of fiction, presenting Apollonius as an alternative heroic model who surpasses canonical predecessors in virtue and wisdom. The novel thereby mounts a serious challenge to the status of canonical epic, reimagining prose narrative as a vehicle for paideia. In this reading, the Story of Apollonius emerges not as an escapist tale but as a learned fiction that invites its readers to decode, critique, and ultimately embrace the educative potential of prose romance.

This chapter foregrounds recent studies on race and religion as analytic categories in the study of the ancient world. Conventional scholarly analysis of the late-antique Mediterranean world often assumes that uses of the terms race and racism are anachronistic in studies of premodern societies. By contrast, religion is often taken for granted as an unproblematic category of analysis across both modern and premodern social contexts. More recently, critical studies of race and religion have illustrated the shortcomings in the basic assumptions that undergird the uses and disuses of terms like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity in studies of premodernity. Drawing on these recent works, this chapter demonstrates the entanglements between religious and racialised conceptions of group identities and hierarchies. Race and religion are conceptually intertwined to the extent that religious ideas have been instrumental in processes of racialisation and religious groups have been targets of racialisation. The chapter concludes with examples of how theories of environmental determinism and anti-Semitism manifest in Christian ideologies and imperial policies in late antiquity.

This chapter examines the political economy of international trade policy, exploring the evolution of the international trading system from the GATT to the WTO. It analyses the fault lines between free trade and fair trade and winners and losers, and the role of labour market policies in addressing transition costs. It also discusses the challenges facing the WTO, including institutional dysfunction and an expanding mandate. It proposes potential solutions, such as plurilateral agreements and improved institutional arrangements, while emphasising the need for collaboration with other international agencies. The chapter concludes by stressing the urgency of recovering the aspirations of the post-war international order to address current global challenges.

The distinctiveness of Neandertals’ leg bones results from a complex set of environmental, evolutionary, and anatomical factors. Their lower limb morphology includes robust bones with hypertrophied muscle attachments and thick cortices, anteriorly curved femoral diaphyses, absence of pilaster, low femoral neck-shaft angle, large joints, and low crural indices. Although some of these features reflect their massive bodies and high activity levels, few aspects of Neandertal lower limb morphology can be considered separately from their cold-adapted body proportions. However, although cold adaptation can explain European Neandertal intralimb proportions, it fails to account for the same limb proportions in West Asian Neandertals, suggesting additional factors shaped their limb proportions. Their lower limb anatomy may represent a model of morphological integration, a balance between elevated activity levels and adaptation to the rigorous demands of an ice age climate, all superimposed on the expression of more canalized traits controlling rates of bone remodeling.

Neandertal hands are adapted primarily for forceful gripping during manipulation, yet there are no indications that Neandertals lacked precision movements. As more Pleistocene remains are analyzed, the Neandertal hand morphological pattern continues to lose its distinctiveness. Features related to the transmission of high levels of forces, the maintenance of hypertrophied musculature, and high levels of mechanical advantage are variably shared between Neandertals and the Sima de los Huesos, the H. naledi, and to a lesser extent, the H. floresiensis hand remains. The Middle Paleolithic early modern human hands, however, resemble Upper Paleolithic hands in their overall pattern. Accompanying the transition to the Upper Paleolithic are increased stabilization of the capitate-metacarpal 2/3 region, enhancement of first finger precision movements, and reductions in mechanical advantage in Upper Paleolithic hand remains that are characteristic of Holocene human hands. Thus, the Neandertal hand should be conceptualized as an archetypal tool-using archaic human hand.

This chapter surveys how contemporary White nationalist publications use ancient evidence to promote pseudoscientific theories of race that justify violence and oppression. Such interpretations do not distort ancient sources; challenging them requires challenging the modern assumption of the biological and genetic reality of race. In fact, the ancient evidence that White nationalist intellectuals cite reveals the pervasiveness in antiquity of attitudes towards human difference that can productively be understood as racial even after the pseudoscientific assumptions these interpreters impose on that evidence have been rejected. Furthermore, they prompt us to recognise the persistence of pseudoscientific understandings of race in many popular translations of ancient works and standard reference lexica, understandings that remain unchallenged and even unrecognised as long as the relevance of the categories of race and racism to the study of antiquity is denied.

The end of the Mycenaean palatial system around 1200 BC marked a turning point in the history of the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age, which brought about a fundamental transformation of the economic and social structures. The twelfth and the first half of the eleventh centuries BCE, i.e., the postpalatial period of LH IIIC and the Submycenaean period, were characterized by continuity and change. Life during this epoch was determined by rivalry and interaction between small-scale social groups, sometimes across long distances. The specialized arts and crafts controlled by the palaces had died out, while other sectors of the craft industry such as bronze-working and shipbuilding survived at a remarkably high level. Burial rites and ritual practices also continued in the tradition of the palatial era for three to four generations, while new trends emerged in other areas. The developments on the Greek mainland are illustrated by a regional survey. It shows that this transformative era also marks the transition to the Early Iron Age when Greek identities began to emerge.

This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.

Thes chapter argues that both Britons and South Asians made use of instruments such as treaties and a broader world of diplomatic paperwork to construct a framework for interstate legality in the eighteenth century. South Asian efforts to make and remake arrangements with British traders and government agencies constituted a source of inter-imperial legal forms. Inter-imperial treaties were not blunt instruments of European imperialism, but legal documents co-produced by South Asian bureaucrats. By emphasising the activism and political thought of South Asian actors in their pursuit of a new inter-imperial order, this chapter rethinks the focus on European actors as the architects of international law. Of course, multilingual and multipolar claim making did not impose a stable legal order in South Asia. Treaties were regularly abrogated and renegotiated. Nevertheless, such efforts to negotiate relationships among states and enshrine them punctuated and shaped the upheavals of the eighteenth century as well as the explosion of new projects of state building. Inter-imperial lawmaking emerged as a vital site for politics in the eighteenth century.

Indian history from 500 BC to AD 1000 is characterized by kingdoms and confederacies consolidating and expanding. This political landscape was theorized by ancient scholars as mandala, or ‘circles’ of kingdoms. Two areas brought these polities into contact: diplomacy and war. Indian legal tradition made rules of engagement for these areas. Diplomacy also required rules whereby diplomats were protected as they travelled to different kingdoms as representatives of their rulers. Economic imperatives necessitated long-distance trade not only between Indian polities, but also between India and other regions. Such trade required safe routes and a set of agreed laws governing such trade and traders. Early examples are set forth both in Kauṭilya’s treatise on governance called Arthaśāstra and in Indian treatises of the Dharmaśāstra genre. We set these normative works alongside some literary sources as well as documents preserved in inscriptional form. Beginning with a discussion of Dharmaśāstra as a form of transpolity legal ordering, the chapter proceeds to treat diplomacy, war, and trade as three areas of international law addressed in ancient India.