After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

The plays of Sean O’Casey are filled with aches and pains, debilitating diseases, and traumatic wounds. He was himself a disabled writer. Furthermore, his presentation of disease and disability is inseparable from his critique of class, militarism, and masculinist ideology. This chapter shows how O’Casey’s depictions of disability are more nuanced than they may at first appear. He does demonstrate an essentialist tendency to see female resilience as a triumph over the failures of male impairment, yet, in plays such as Juno and the Paycock and The Silver Tassie, O’Casey allows space for contrary readings that speak with relevance to contemporary understandings of disability.

Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) was written during an exceptionally difficult period in Beckett’s life during which he suffered two bereavements in rapid succession, resulting in the deterioration of his health. The collection, which has its antecedents in poetry ranging from Ovid to Joyce, focuses on the successive metamorphoses of the embodied self, including birth, illness, ageing, death, and decay. Through close readings of a number of the poems, the chapter analyses the ways in which Beckett’s early poetry can be understood as a type of anti-poetry that resists traditional conceptions of the aesthetic as beautiful, as conceptual, and as combining the sensory with the spiritual. The language and imagery of Echo’s Bones, with its refusal of metaphor and its lexical and syntactical resistance to interpretation, also resists the metaphysical consolations of poetry.

The barefoot-doctor scheme in rural China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 was a synonym for social medicine in the People’s Republic of China. This chapter examines how sociopolitical, disease, and economic factors contributed to the development of the barefoot-doctor program and shaped the unique path of social medicine in China. It analyzes how the government clarified and addressed the dilemma between ideological equity and structural inequity. Furthermore, it discusses how disease models both facilitated and challenged the barefoot-doctor program and impacted on social medicine, and investigates how the changing roles and function of barefoot doctors has impacted social medicine in the evolution of community medicine. The barefoot doctors echoed the themes of social medicine in developing and developed countries and left its inspirations and legacies. By revisiting the state’s role in the barefoot-doctor program, the chapter provides a new understanding of the global history of social medicine in the twentieth century and beyond.

Christopher Columbus was not the first European to set foot in the Americas, but he was the most consequential. Sanctioned by God and hungry for gold, conquistadors ransacked the Americas’ Indigenous populations. In 1607, England established its first permanent American colony at Jamestown. England’s relationship with the local tribes ultimately devolved into war. Both Spain and England devised legal theories to justify their acquisitions of Indian land.

Epidemiology is the study of patterns and determinants of disease and other health states in populations. It primarily uses quantitative methods (those methods dealing with counting, measuring and comparing things) that definitely use statistics and include statistical methods, but in this book we will not be talking about performing any statistical acrobatics more complicated than completing a sudoku puzzle.

This chapter looks at the most recent climate science and starkly sets out the severity of the problems ahead. It gives the reader all the knowledge needed to broadly understand the critical issues of our day from a technical perspective, including systems of production and consumption for energy and food, biodiversity loss, pollution (including plastics), disease threats and population levels. It then looks at ways in which we can technically transfer to a sustainable way of living.

A new wave of scholarship has put the environment at the center of an array of questions about the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the Ottoman world. This chapter argues that Ottomanists have only begun to harness environmental methodologies, which should be part of every historian’s toolkit. Using examples from this new scholarship, it examines the two-pronged methodology of environmental history as both material and conceptual history. It points to ways in which the Ottoman Empire contributes uniquely to the broader historiography of the environment, and how ecological frameworks can inform questions concerning the construction of space and nature of power in Ottoman society. Above all, it emphasizes that although the subfield of Ottoman environmental history is now well cultivated, there is still fertile ground for inquiry that may help us fundamentally rethink the history of the Ottoman world and challenge the Eurocentric tendencies of environmental history as a whole.

Module 6 presents various ways in which cultures understand, describe, and explain illness. These conceptualizations are based in cultural ontologies and epistemologies, affecting how people communicate about illnesses and their expectations for treatment and outcomes. Indigenous and shamanic traditions are presented.

Provides a brief introduction to bacterial disease highlighting capsules and biofilms.

This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.

This chapter examines the law of nullity of marriage to consider how deception has affected the existence or validity of consent. It articulates important differences between void and voidable marriages, arguing that these speak to the public and private sides of marriage, respectively. It also showcases the range of deceptions that have been considered legally significant, situating these within the cultural framework outlined in Chapter 1. On top of this, the chapter argues that the range of qualifying deceptions has often been justified with reference to public policy or convention on the basis that the relevant information would typically be important to an intimate partner or that its disclosure would serve a collective interest or value. The chapter concludes by suggesting that changes in the law of nullity, and a small number of related areas of law, demonstrate that there is still a desire for legal recognition of the wrongs and harms associated with inducing intimate relationships, even as these have shifted over time.