After introducing the twentieth-century academic skepticism about civics and any component of patriotism in it, and the significant educational deficit and civic harm this approach has caused, this chapter turns to two sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Praise of America’s Reflective Patriotism patriotism – including the six components he sketches in a reflective patriotism, with the role of Christianity balanced against self-interest; and (b) American Civic Exemplars of Patriotism and Reform – featuring questions raised by the study of Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King.

This chapter examines how artificial intelligence (AI) can address inefficiencies in India’s judicial system, focusing on Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) cases. Analysis of 220,000 cases reveals significant regional disparities in processing and outcomes, reflecting broader systemic challenges. Despite digital infrastructure investments, we identify a disconnect between data collection and data- driven decision-making. We propose an AI-powered dashboard to provide real-time case tracking, identify bottlenecks, and improve resource allocation. While implementation faces challenges related to data quality and privacy, successful deployment could serve as a model for judicial reform in India and globally.

Signs of Safety is a ‘strengths-based’ practice framework for child protection, devised to help with maximising child welfare and minimising dangers. In developing this case study about its implementation, we were able to draw upon extant work on challenges in implementing Signs of Safety practice which has highlighted features such as the extent of proceduralisation, oversight reporting mechanisms, the culture around managing uncertainty and organisational leadership as significant in achieving or limiting implementation. Preventing deaths is important but this task should be understood in light of the rarity of, and difficulties with predicting, such tragedies. Extant UK practice has emphasised procedures and oversight as the method for improving practice but this has failed to achieve its goal. It is debated what natures of character and expertise best facilitate child protection work.

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

Chapter 6 analyzes the role of miraculous images in Borromeo’s own posthumous cult, which culminated in his rapid canonization in 1610. Portraits and their alleged miracles had long played an important role in promoting a candidate for sainthood. However, as the first modern individual to achieve sainthood during this era of Catholic reform, Borromeo’s miraculous portraits were subject to many of the Roman Curia’s strict new regulations regarding the veneration of not-yet-saints. Despite these reforms, portraits of the late Borromeo and their miracles were treated as trusted evidence of his sanctity in the Curia’s own canonization trials, even as they sometimes broke the rules. The skills of contemporary portraitists became increasingly central to the saint-making process, revealing once again that the pressures of reform only increased the powerful claims of the image. Borromeo’s images were sacred things that could deliver truths and work miracles, functions that played a major role in the development of artistic practice in Italy.

Chapter 1 opens the book’s section on “Catholic antiquities,” which addresses Borromeo’s interactions with the diverse images he encountered in the churches of the Milanese diocese. It examines archival records of Borromeo’s church inspections, or visitations, to show that his reform of the church interior focused on the physical integrity of the images he encountered, sacred by virtue of their objecthood as well as their representational value. His emphasis on the sacred objecthood of images had implications for their perceived historicity. Borromeo folded Renaissance Raphaels, miraculous medieval mosaics, and contemporary artworks into the same long arc of ancient custom. If Giorgio Vasari wrote in his 1568 Lives of the Artists that antiquity ended with the fourth-century reign of Constantine, Borromeo’s definition of antiquity was far more flexible in its parameters. Borromeo’s views on the history of sacred images coalesced in a time of intense confessional debate, offering a decidedly Catholic understanding of the image’s antique authority.

This chapter examines four common immediate causes of wrongful convictions as confirmed by recent data from registries. They are mistaken eyewitness identification, incentivized and lying witnesses, false confessions and faulty forensics. Commonly used remedies designed to prevent these immediate causes are examined from a legal process perspective, which stresses the different remedies that can be implemented by courts, legislatures and through executive measures. The latter includes reforms that police and forensic science providers can take themselves to decrease the risk of causing wrongful convictions. The most effective strategies often involve all three branches of government. At the same time, many jurisdictions are reluctant to adopt optimal reform measures because of concerns about preventing the use of evidence that is frequently used to achieve convictions. For example, the use of jailhouse informants has not been banned despite their frequent role in wrongful convictions. This insight suggests that reforms to prevent wrongful conviction cannot ignore their perceived or likely impact on conviction rates.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan announced that the ‘question…by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing…came in’ was one of ‘much importance’. In this he echoed Hugo Grotius who, while differing from Hobbes in the answer he provided, had written in 1625’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], that the ‘Origine and Nature’ of punishment had been ‘misunderstood…[giving] Occasion to Many Mistakes.’ This right to punish was seen by early modern political thinkers as needing justification. This was particularly true in the context of voluntarist models of legitimacy according to which individuals chose to become members of the political community and the right to enforce obedience wielded by the governors of these communities had its roots in the equal and natural rights of subjects themselves.

The Epilogue discusses how the narrative and arguments of the book can help us revisit the debates in Ottoman intellectual historiography over the concept of order (nizam), underlining how labor history and class perspectives can expand the scope of questions and offer new agendas for Ottoman and global histories of the modern era. It offers a conceptual discussion of reform, and highlights the distinctive characteristics of Ottoman Reform in the long nineteenth century, by focusing on its connections with modern capitalism. It emphasizes the capitalist characteristic of the order which the reformist elites struggled to institute throughout the nineteenth century. It underlines how focusing on a specific worksite, and, in particular, studying relations of production within an Ottoman military-industrial site, could help us to reveal these capitalist patterns and class dynamics in Ottoman reform processes. It points to the necessity of the dialogue between labor/social history and intellectual history to better understand how these capitalist practices shaped or were shaped by the mentalities and ideas of Ottoman state elites during this period.

The final chapter looks at how Sino-North Korean relations changed after the Cold War. Both sides continued to find the idea of Sino-North Korean friendship useful even as they went in very different political and cultural directions during the 1970s and 1980s.

How were England’s wetland margins imagined at a new scale, as a site of reform and profit at the heart of a thriving polity? This chapter traces the iterative rewriting of wetlands in histories, geographies, agricultural books, and pro-drainage pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth century. Driven by desires to unify England and amplify national wealth, these improving authors reconceived the meanings and management of wetlands and common lands. Scholars have often identified this period as a hinge between long-standing beliefs that topography and climate shaped human bodies and societies and a new conviction that soil, water, and air could and should be altered through human intervention. This chapter suggests that environmental determinism and environmental reform were not antithetical impulses but instead two sides of the same coin. Improving authors interlaced older humoral theories with new ideas about political economy to articulate fen futures. In recasting wetlands as unruly, unhealthy, and unproductive, ambitious wetland projects became a ‘cure’ for the nation’s most pressing maladies, promising to produce productive land and industrious subjects.

Chapter 11 compares incentive bargaining of law-making in the three countries, focusing on corporate law and securities regulations. Section 11.1 describes major lawmakers and law-making procedures by categorizing corporate law and securities regulations into statutory law, case law, and soft law. The distinct characteristic of US corporate law is the existence of competition among states. In Japan, drafters of statutory corporate law and securities regulations are bureaucrats of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), the Ministry of Economic, Trade, and Industries (METI), and the Financial Service Agency (FSA). In China, although the National People’s Congress (NPC) is the supreme legislative body, it delegates law-making at several levels to many agencies. Section 11.2 introduces several examples of incentive bargaining in law-making in the three countries. In the United States, legislative lobbying also took place at both the Federal and state levels. In Japan, the incentive bargaining on corporate law-making had taken place almost exclusively in the Committee of Legal Reform. Legislation of corporate law in China includes several steps of procedure and inter-agency incentive bargaining.

Moving between absolutist Prussia, urban bourgeois Leipzig, and late Hanoverian/early Victorian Britain, Felix Mendelssohn experienced and actively engaged with the (cultural) politics of pre-1848 Europe. His correspondence reveals him to have been distinctly inclined towards a reformist, liberal standpoint, yet increasingly sceptical of the political difference he or art could make. Despite remaining in Berlin, Fanny Hensel (as well as their younger sister Rebecka) appears to have greater radical sympathies – this in marked contrast to the conservative politics of her husband Wilhelm Hensel.