The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

This chapter provides a description of two language varieties spoken in Hawai‘i: Pidgin, an English-based creole, known exonymically as Hawai‘i Creole, and Hawai‘i English, the regional variety of English spoken in Hawai‘i. While Pidgin and Hawai‘i English are treated here as separate entities, we also acknowledge the continuum between them. Our description of linguistic variation in both varieties is based on analysis of speech from informal interviews. We present findings from work that examines variation in linguistic forms, including postvocalic /r/, and we focus especially on variation among vowels. The acoustic analysis of over 8,000 tokens of monophthongs has allowed us to examine and discuss how the vowels of Hawai‘i English and Pidgin have changed over time.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.

This chapter presents an overview of various issues related to English in Pakistan. A timeline of the language and education policy for English highlights notable events from the day of independence to the twenty-first century. Pakistani English is mostly used in the written medium though spoken and spoken-like written mediums on the internet are also emerging. The review of attitudinal research shows that generally students and other concerned groups of the society have a pragmatic view of accepting English. In terms of language features, Pakistani English has developed many distinctive features at various linguistic levels. There is also extensive language contact happening between English and regional languages, where both sides borrow from each other. Lastly, the review of various aspects of English in Pakistan presented in this paper shows that English might be in a stable state in Pakistan, at least for now.

Chapter 6, “Envisioning a Pluriversal Governance: Scientific and Indigenous Ontologies in the Amazon”, examines the prospects for including scientific and indigenous ontologies in the international governance of the Amazon. The Chapter assesses the different governance models for enlarging ecological democracy and having nature’s interests represented in political spaces. For this aim, it analyzes the most prominent scientific bodies dealing with the climate emergency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), compared to the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the first scientist platform dedicated to the largest rainforest in the world. The Chapter proposes enlarging ecological democracy under a pluriversal governance in which nation-states, scientists, and Indigenous peoples would share the political stage to negotiate their different worldviews and the authority to represent their own natural worlds. This might trigger ontological clashes, but also the possibility of creating ontological coalitions around indigenous rights, the protection of nature, and the appropriate means to deal with the climate crisis in the basin.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s commissioned works were instrumental in establishing her career in the decades following the Second World War, providing financial stability and garnering artistic recognition in what had been a scant landscape. Following a period of limited performances due to wartime disruptions, illness, and family responsibilities, commissions from organizations such as the BBC, the Feeney Trust, and various arts councils enabled Maconchy to compose across multiple genres, including orchestral, choral, chamber, and operatic works. These commissions, which cemented her as an influential figure in British music, highlight her artistic adaptability: Celebrated works such as The Sofa and Héloïse and Abelard indicate her mastery of diverse dramatic genres, while her string quartets (the final four being commissioned) and Music for Strings highlight her command of instrumental textures. These works, which revitalized her public presence, also demonstrate the enduring importance of arts patronage in fostering creative excellence and sustaining musical innovation.

There are similarities in the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, two countries that share many socio-cultural and linguistic traits; yet at the same time, differences in the educational policies that have been adopted have seen English promoted more consistently in Brunei, while support for English-medium education in Malaysia has fluctuated in recent decades, and this has resulted in a substantial divergence in the current status of English in the two countries. This chapter describes the historical development of English in Brunei and Malaysia, traces changes in educational policy over the past few decades, discusses the current status of English, provides an overview of some of the features of Brunei English and Malaysian English, gives a snapshot of local literature in English, and finally offers a brief prognosis for the future of English in the two countries.

The interwar era was a formative period in Elizabeth Maconchy’s development as a composer, and much can be gleaned through a cross section of British musical circles between the First and Second World Wars. The endemic misogyny of the time, which affected the prospects of both earlier and contemporaneous female composers, had a profound impact on what opportunities were available to her as well as how her works were received. Many of the connections she made at this time – such as those forged with her professors and fellow students at the Royal College of Music – would endure for the rest of her career. Maconchy was interested in both continental modernism and Irish and Welsh nationalism, involved in the Macnaghten and Lemare concert series – which provided much-needed performance opportunities for young composers – as well as the pageant Music for the People, which furthered left-wing political causes such as anti-fascism, anti-racism, and class consciousness.

This chapter presents a selection of foundational topics from classical mechanics relevant to integrable systems. It includes a concise overview of the Arnold–Liouville theorem and its implications for integrability, along with a discussion of the Lax representation and its role in the formulation of classical scattering theory. Special attention is given to the Calogero–Moser–Sutherland models as illustrative examples. We explore how the rich structure of conserved quantities in classical integrable systems constrains the dynamics of scattering, leading to non-diffractive behavior. In particular, we demonstrate how the classical S-matrix factorizes into a sum of elementary two-body phase shifts, reflecting the underlying integrability of the system.

Now we have to dwell on the question of how we can achieve those objectives of Islamic qawmiyyat [nationhood; selfhood] in India which we defined in the previous publications. As far as we know, no ‘Muslim’ individual or group disagrees with this objective. The difference, if there be any, lies in determining the correct path to achieve this objective. Now, we need to critically analyse the various paths before us. The correct path will become evident after such an analysis.

Namibia has long been a stepchild of World Englishes research despite an increasing influence of English in the country. The current chapter is one of the first to introduce Namibian English (NamE) to a wider collection of World Englishes. It outlines its unprecedented emergence and development and offers an overview of the latest research findings on language attitudes and use, identity conceptions related to the English language, as well as local characteristics of NamE. Most importantly, the chapter highlights two aspects of NamE. First of all, it outlines NamE’s heterogeneous character, i.e. the existence of a number of subvarieties of NamE. Second, the chapter emphasizes its independent character and claims that it should be treated as a variety of English in its own right and not just an offshoot of South African English. Even though the last ten years have produced an impressive surge of interest into the variety and thus important research findings, research on NamE is still in its infancy. The current contribution is, hopefully, the starting point for a more thorough integration into the World Englishes paradigm.