The past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa reveals how the price revolution was a genuinely global phenomenon, with increasing imports of locally-used currencies that created inflation in line with the inflation of gold and silver in Europe and Asia. The article argues that the coexistence of exchangeable value and other social uses of currencies also contributed to a relative depreciation in Africa's global economic strength. Also related to this phenomenon were the rise of an export slave trade and changes in the production and distribution of West and West-Central African cloth industries.

We introduce a ‘reason-based’ framework for explaining and predicting individual choices. The key idea is that a decision-maker focuses on some but not all properties of the options and chooses an option whose ‘motivationally salient’ properties he/she most prefers. Reason-based explanations can capture two kinds of context-dependent choice: (i) the motivationally salient properties may vary across choice contexts, and (ii) they may include ‘context-related’ properties, not just ‘intrinsic’ properties of the options. Our framework allows us to explain boundedly rational and sophisticated choice behaviour. Since properties can be recombined in new ways, it also offers resources for predicting choices in unobserved contexts.

Romans 13:1–7 has been the most important text in scripture for Christian reflection on political authority, yet what it does not say has left Christian social ethicists and political/legal theorists with many lingering questions, especially about the proper response to unjust magistrates. To what resources should Christian thinkers look to illumine the gaps left by the Pauline silence, and just how absolute or relative did Paul intend his remarks in Romans 13:1–7 to be? This article presents a twofold thesis in response to this twofold question. First, it argues that the Noahic covenant, Genesis 8:21–9:17, is an important, although overlooked, background resource for interpreting Romans 13:1–7. Second, this article illustrates the practical benefit of reading Romans 13 in light of the Noahic covenant by offering a new argument for why Christians should not interpret Paul's unqualified command to submit to civil authorities as absolutely forbidding resistance to unjust magistrates. Paul's words about magistrates in Romans 13 have not superseded the obligation to pursue justice that God gave to the human community as a whole in the Noahic covenant. Thus the primal obligation resting in the people implicitly qualifies Paul's instructions.

In September 2014, a healthy male child was born in Sweden following a successful uterine transplantation (UTx). The event brought hope to many women without functional uteruses around the world. Having a child with a transplanted uterus is now possible, and as knowledge of the procedure proliferates and interest in UTx grows, it is important to begin thinking about how a scarce supply of uteruses will be allocated. This article represents a first discussion of the range of factors that must be considered in answering the allocation question. The primary issues addressed are (1) the motivation to seek treatment, (2) allocation by age, (3) child-rearing capacity, and (4) the amount of infertility treatment required. A set of eligibility and ranking criteria are presented. These criteria are not exhaustive but are intended to spark discussion about how uteruses can be allocated in a just manner.

The relationship between the semantic function of noun phrases and the way(s) in which they are realized morphosyntactically in a clause has been a topic of intensive research in the typological literature as well as for theories concerned with the syntax–semantics interface. Considering just noun phrases that function as direct objects, it has been shown for language after language that that there is a systematic relationship between the semantic function of an object (e.g. whether it is pronominal, definite, indefinite, etc.) and its morphosyntax (e.g. whether it requires special case marking, whether it triggers agreement, whether it exhibits special distribution in terms of word order, etc.). This paper aims to contribute to the already large body of evidence documenting the relationships between form and semantic function by providing a comprehensive survey of the morphosyntax of transitive constructions in Tagalog, focussing, specifically, on the relationship between the semantic function of the theme argument and the morphosyntactic strategies by which theme arguments are realized. Contrary to what previous studies have claimed, I show that specific noun phrases are attested as direct objects of active clause in Tagalog. An exception to this is pronoun and proper name themes, which must either be oblique marked to function as a direct object or be realized as a subject. Developing and expanding upon analyses in Rackowski (2002), I propose that the differential behavior of specific themes (pronoun/proper names on the one hand versus non-pronoun/proper name specific themes on the other) follows from a clausal architecture in which there are at least two VP-external positions to which specific themes must raise – a relatively high position for pronoun and proper name themes, and a position intermediate between vP and VP for all other specific themes. The distribution of syntactic positions available for the theme argument is claimed to follow from a proposal in Merchant (2006), pre-figured in Jelinek & Carnie (2003) and related work, that relational hierarchies of the type familiar from typological research – in particular, the definiteness hierarchy – are directly encoded in the phrase structure.

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.