The standard model of the historical formation of South African English posits that anglophone SAfE is an early-to-mid nineteenth-century overseas variety of English. In this chapter an alternative, three-stage koinéisation model is advanced which places emphasis on the role played by a koinéisation process in the greater-Johannesburg area spanning the first half of the twentieth century. As such, the first half of the current chapter will be focused on outlining the history of the development of this variety, with a particular focus on the Johannesburg period. The second half is focused on providing evidence from sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-six (26) L1-Broad WSAE speakers born in the first half of the twentieth century, one-half of whom are first-generation speakers from Johannesburg, one-half of whom are (non-first-generation) speakers born in the Eastern Cape. More specifically, the degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability in relation to two sociolinguistic variables (the quality of BATH and (-in/-ing)) is investigated. The results indicate that while there is no clear difference between the two regions in terms of BATH, the presence of substantial -ing/-in variation in the speech of Johannesburg-born speakers points to koinéisation in this area, thus providing support for the three-stage model.

While Elizabeth Maconchy was not keen on the term ‘woman composer’ her career was nonetheless affected by the fact of her gender. Against a backdrop of long-standing, widespread and seemingly intractable sexism, Maconchy found support and validation from other women composers, notably Grace Williams. This chapter explores the phenomenon of such ‘Supportive Sisterhoods’ over generations and across many different milieus, both artistic and otherwise, from the Amazons to the wives and sisters of the Lake Poets, to the CIA, to the group of women who formed the Macnaghten–Lemare concert series in the 1930s. We find that women have consistently and instinctively banded together to not only form creative partnerships but to stand against the extraordinarily persistent, if ill-founded, view that creativity is something best left to men.

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the most well-researched varieties of English in the world. This is largely due to the existence of several high-quality spoken corpora, including the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) corpus. This corpus has provided the foundation for work on new dialect formation, sociolinguistic variation and sound change. However, published descriptions of the emergence of NZ English are based on data from only a sub-set of speakers from the ONZE corpus. More recent work has begun to utilise data from the full ONZE corpus, and other spoken and written corpora of NZ English. This chapter will first provide an overview of the existing received wisdom on the development of New Zealand English, before focussing on several recent studies showing how much further we have now come in our understanding of the history and development of this variety.

English in Liberia consists of two distinct but overlapping varieties, Kolokwa and Liberian Settler English (LSE), with a third, Standard Liberian English, superposed upon them. Kolokwa (< colloquial) is widely spoken. The Liberian descendant of a more general West African Pidgin English, it has been heavily influenced by LSE. The latter is the language of the descendants of the 16,000 African Americans who immigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. This study first presents a political history of English-lexifier varieties in Liberia. Drawing on data collected in the late 1980s, just prior to the outbreak of civil war, it then considers aspects first of LSE and then Kolokwa grammar. It examines LSE vis-à-vis African American English. It frames Kolokwa within the continuum model. A distinctive aspect of LSE and, especially, Kolokwa is the extent of coda consonant deletion; its impact on inflectional morphology is also addressed.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

In assessing international law governing submarine warfare, we consider how peacetime rules from the law of the sea apply in an armed conflict and focus on the law of neutrality and the law of armed conflict (international humanitarian law). The allocation of rights and duties within different maritime zones continues, albeit with some modifications, during an armed conflict. Most notably, the law of neutrality establishes how those rights and duties change depending on a State’s status as a belligerent or neutral. The use of submarines during armed conflict is also governed by the law of naval warfare and they are largely subject to the same rules that restrict surface warships in relation to targeting, as well as the means and methods of warfare. While submarines are predominantly governed as warships, we note how operational limitations of submarines may affect the interpretation of some rules.

Chapter 4, “The Amazon as a Place for Global Conservation”, unpacks the tensions and conflicts of conceiving the Amazon as a field of global conservation and examines the prospects to scale indigenous politics of conservation and reimagine conservation policies in the local and international spheres. For this aim, this Chapter discusses the theories for decolonizing conservation, how they help to explain environmental conflicts in the Amazon, and their strengths and gaps. Then, it provides an overview of the conservation architecture and associated conflicts in the Peruvian Amazon through three cases that show the international and local interactions around conservation politics and policies. Ultimately, the Chapter provides insights to revisit critical theories on conservation and the importance of international governance for reinventing conservation practices and policies in the Amazon and beyond.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

Our starting point in this book is that across the globe, race – and its articulations with other forms of identification, ideology, and practice – remains one of the key conceptual tools to secure sociopolitical dominance, develop cultural politics of resistance, and engage in self-identification. Yet race opens up a major field of contradiction and misunderstanding. On the one hand, the ideas and practices of race that emerged with European expansion and colonization have impacted all modern societies – even as we should be sensitive to the particularity of histories and experiences in different places. On the other hand, the general accepted view is that there is no such thing as biological race; race is socially constructed, and its meanings are created for sociopolitical ends. Along with many others, we take the view that, while biological race is not “real,” “folk” ideas about it continue to proliferate as if race were natural, shaping sociopolitical relations and cultural practices.

Few areas in social history have been studied as much as the ‘old poor law’, that sophisticated welfare system which developed in England from the reign of Elizabeth I. But on 19 May 1662 – as this book has shown – that system entered a new phase. A formal provision for parish ‘settlement’ had been enacted by parliament, which defined the capacity of poor people to claim relief or to face removal, and which continued to develop, affecting law, society, and state formation, and the lives of millions for centuries to come.

However important this ‘settlement’ law proved to be it was hardly the outcome of a well-considered legislative process. On the contrary. In the course of four days, from 15 to 19 May 1662, many of the act’s most important innovations were agreed. They included a property threshold for gaining parish settlement, which prevented most labouring migrants from acquiring parish belonging outright; a removal procedure; tasks and roles for the parish officers and the magistracy; an administrative overhaul for the northern counties; and even a new facility for penal transportation to ‘plantations’ overseas. The bill thus received the royal assent with many of its innovations rewritten, erased, inserted above the line, or literally stitched in, inscribed in different hands, on detached pieces of parchment, sewn to the main body of the roll with needle and thread.

Driven originally by colonization and more recently by globalization, for more than four centuries the English language has been spreading to all corners of the globe, producing distinct and stable young varieties as well as the young discipline of ‘World Englishes’ to describe and analyze them. The present paper surveys and discusses several models that have been developed to explain the bewildering variety of forms and contexts which characterize these varieties. Early classifying approaches include categorizations and visualizations of varieties and variety types based on some of their properties, most importantly Kachru’s ‘Three Circles’ model. An evolutionary perspective is at the center of the ‘Dynamic Model’ of postcolonial Englishes. More recent trends at theorizing capture the ongoing dynamism and diversification of English by highlighting ‘forces’ which drive this process; in general, boundaries between nations are seen as diminishing also through the unbounded spread of linguistic forms in cyberspace. A few more suggestions at and reflections on modelling, most importantly Hundt’s comparison of theoretical and statistical modelling, are summarized and assessed.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.