Chapter 6 explores the craft industries for both prestige items (silk, lacquerware, bronze) and mundane commodities goods (iron and ceramics) in peripheries. This chapter suggests that the circulation of Han-style commodities constituted a new commercial network of intertwined state- and privately run workshops. A “biography of objects” approach employed in this chapter also illustrates how interpersonal relationships and social lives of imperial subjects were shaped by participation as consumers.

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

It is well known that every finite simple group has a generating pair. Moreover, Guralnick and Kantor proved that every finite simple group has the stronger property, known as $\frac{3}{2}$-generation, that every nontrivial element is contained in a generating pair. More recently, this result has been generalised in three different directions, which form the basis of this survey article. First, we look at some stronger forms of $\frac{3}{2}$-generation that the finite simple groups satisfy, which are described in terms of spread and uniform domination. Next, we discuss the recent classification of the finite $\frac{3}{2}$-generated groups. Finally, we turn our attention to infinite groups, and we focus on the recent discovery that the finitely presented simple groups of Thompson are also $\frac{3}{2}$-generated, as are many of their generalisations. Throughout the article we pose open questions in this area, and we highlight connections with other areas of group theory.

Contemporary Performance Translation concludes on a practical, forward-thinking note about how we engage pedagogically and artistically with translation. To demonstrate how a theory of translationality might function within the rehearsal space and the academic classroom, the author describes her commitment to what Delia Poey calls “coyote-scholarship,” whereby scholars must “accept a certain degree of responsibility in how and to what ends we transport texts across borders and boundaries.” Reflections are offered regarding challenges faced when teaching Latin American theatre and performance to English-speaking students, and strategies are recounted for pedagogical and curricular approaches. The rehearsal room, too, is what Kate Eaton calls a translational laboratory. The book concludes with a return to the author’s experience of translating what Ricardo Monti calls his “broader realism” for and with US-trained actors and supports the currently circulating proposition that translations should be thought of as “new plays.” Such an approach is collaboratively driven but also operates on multiple translational levels, “in-between” language, culture, actor training, and directorial casting and approach. Translationality encompasses much more than the translator’s participation; it captures the vital collaborative process of artistic creation across and within cultures, languages, and performance practices.

Chapter 5 is devoted to Brian Walton and the London Polyglot Bible. It shows how Walton’s work was not simply an erudite accumulation of information from print and manuscript sources, but rather took a precise stand in the debates concerning the Old Testament that swirled around the Protestant world of the early 1650s. It examines how this created problems for would-be collaborators elsewhere in Europe, how Walton justified his approach by presenting a novel synthesis in the work’s ‘Prolegomena’, and how the vernacular dispute between Walton and his most prominent opponent, John Owen, turned on how they justified their work in terms of contemporary Reformed scholarship.

Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.

This chapter presents an analysis of the distinctive features of constitutional transitions that took place in Eastern Europe, Latin America and parts of Africa, gaining impetus in the 1980s. It explains that these transitions were historically unique as they marked the first moment in which many states converted to constitutional democracy without general experience of warfare. However, it shows how security policies framed the transitions, especially in Europe. It also examines how in Latin America new constitutions were again stabilized using elements of international law. It contains a case study of Colombia to illustrate this.

Americans in the twenty-first century find themselves searching for new understandings of their history. They seek explanations for chronic political polarization, acute pandemic polarization, social media addiction, heightened concern over global warming and armed global conflict, widening cultural and economic gaps between city and countryside, persistent racial tensions, gender divides, tensions over abortion rights and the public school curriculum, and a forty-year pattern of increasing economic inequality in the United States. Americans are looking for a past that can help them understand the divided and fractious present, a past that enlightens and inspires. In this collection of original essays, Lacy K. Ford uses the past to inform the present, as he provides a deeper, more nuanced understanding of American history and the American South�s complicated relationship with it.

If political independence provided Africans more latitude in how to pursue economic sovereignty, it hardly settled the matter of how it should be institutionalized. Debates about currency, for instance, persisted in East Africa after formal decolonization, and only in 1965-66 was the colonial money replaced by money issued by the independent states. This chapter traces the unexpected trajectory of decolonization, including the persistence of the imperial East African Currency Board. Decisions about the postcolonial monetary regimes were delayed, in part, by the machinations of British officials who tried to protect the racial capitalism of East Africa from the challenge of African independence. Yet, the establishment of national currencies and central banks was also delayed by Africans’ own commitment to supranational linkages, including an East African common market and currency. This chapter shows that the fortunes of a proposed East African Federation rose and fell on the dynamics of uneven and combined development in the region. And, finally, it examines how the central banking model adopted by postcolonial leaders reinforced the dependence of their nations on the accumulation of foreign currencies. The “moneychanger state,” in which postcolonial governments intermediated between domestic and foreign currencies, was critical to their own survival and ideas about development. Ultimately, though, it was the rural cultivators who would bear the burden of maintaining national solvency, a material reality that spurred a productivist ideology in which merit was revealed through earning export value.

Since India had been controlled by the British, it regressed to a lower stage. Poverty had been a lived reality for Indians, including for some of the Indian economists, since the late seventeenth century. International trade networks were disrupted by economic crisis and wars. Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent was experiencing some of the most severe famines in its history. The Indian economists felt these crises sweeping their cities and villages. In particular, Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt would spend most of their adult lives examining the regress that they saw in India. They would explore how it could be measured, how it varied from region to region, and its causes.

This chapter begins an analysis of why some constitutional systems have begun again to show militaristic emphases. It argues that in some cases this is to due to the fact that, since the 1980s, one part of the system of world law constructed after 1945 – namely the internal welfare dimension – has been weakened. This is assessed as part of the global background in constitution-making processes that commenced in the 1980s. The chapter considers a range of cases where constitutions have begun to malfunction with military consequences. It divides these cases into constitutions marked by vertical militarization (Russia, Brazil) and constitutions marked by lateral militarization. It links these developments to weakness in social integration processes under different constitutions.