This chapter is devoted to global competition for monetary dominance. Correspondent banking, the backbone of international transactions, largely uses Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the main messaging system for cross-border payments. Correspondent banks play a role akin to a “central bank” in international transactions. They are trusted intermediaries of transactions on behalf of others. One problem is that correspondent banking leads to dominant positions of some banks in that essential service. There are economies of scale and network externalities here, hence the tendency for concentration and monopoly of power. Can digitalization help solve these problems? In principle, a network of interoperable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could be the solution. This would be a very different CBDC from the “retail version” described earlier. Its design would be different, along with the risks involved. We then discuss the geopolitics of money and the advantages and drawbacks of having an international currency that serves as reserve asset or invoicing instrument. At present, the dominance of the US dollar is unchallenged; neither the euro nor the Chinese yuan are plausible contenders. CBDCs are unlikely to change this status quo: The international role of currencies is determined by other factors, such as economic size, the stability of the currency itself, and the breadth of the underlying financial markets.

This chapter makes sense of the emergence of alternative financial messaging systems and payment systems in China and Russia, using an infrastructural geoeconomics lens. It links the emergence of alternatives to SWIFT to the discussion on financial infrastructures and argues that the emergence of alternative infrastructures can be seen as a backlash against overt political use of the dominant infrastructure by Western powers in the context of the Iran and Ukraine conflicts. It then provides some background information on the cross-border payment process, including the elements of signaling, clearing, and settlement, based on institutions such as SWIFT, CHIPS, and correspondence banking. At the center of this chapter is an account of the geoeconomic conflict surrounding SWIFT and the emergence of Russian (SPFS) and Chinese (CIPS) alternatives in response to this conflict.

Money and finance make up a socioeconomic infrastructure in which trust is integral. The account form of money consists of distinct value and information components. The separate transmission of transaction information has enabled the expansion of trust in money across space. While most financial infrastructures store and transfer value, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a critical infrastructure for infrastructures that transfers information about value as financial messages between banks and infrastructures internationally. The SWIFT financial messaging infrastructure is embedded in the organization of the same name, which is a cooperative, co-owned by member banks. SWIFT’s role as a community of practice, and features of shared infrastructure ownership, exclusivity, and cooperative governance, make it a club for banks. This club is a powerful means of engendering trust among competitor banks, allowing them to exercise joint strategic agency to maintain oligopolistic dominance. SWIFT’s predominance is tested by geopolitical and technological forces. This chapter analyses changes in response to mainly techno-organizational challenges.

This chapter theorizes payment infrastructures as crucial material sites of hegemonic power in three different regards. First, the material form of payment technologies and the uneven routes of circulation produced by them are an integral part of the ways in which modern money and finance exercise power. Payment technology is not a neutral infrastructure, but a carrier of hegemonic power and potential site of hegemonic contestation. Second, payment infrastructure is inextricably connected to state security and sovereignty. State security and sovereignty were enabled and made durable with and through the payment infrastructure. Third, infrastructures are historically durable, though they may be rerouted or reinscribed. This chapter distills three elements that typify the hegemonic power of infrastructure and that can be used when taking “infrastructure” as the starting point for analysis. These elements are (1) sedimentation, (2) reach, and (3) disposition. The arguments are illustrated empirically by reference to the so-called financial war on terror, where financial infrastructures became a major but highly depoliticized site of security power. Empirically, this chapter focuses on the way in which the payment technology SWIFT and financial transactions are being appropriated for security purposes.

In the early 2010s, banks in the Global North began ending or denying correspondent banking relationships with banks in the Global South, a trend known as “de-risking.” Banks culling these relationships blamed overzealous anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regulation in the Global North and insufficient AML/CFT systems in the Global South. De-risking resulted in some developing countries and territories seeing their access to the global financial infrastructure severely restricted, slowing the movement of money and raising costs, including for remittances. This is an undesirable outcome for the targeted jurisdictions, but also for policymakers in the Global North who, for a variety of reasons, want North–South banking relationships to continue. Despite patchy evidence that de-banking was linked to AML, the banking industry leveraged the threat of de-risking and the claim of its tie to AML in order to successfully push back against AML regulation, a first for the AML regime. The case shows the infrastructural power of banks in global financial governance and highlights how state power can be challenged where financial flows are concerned. Local reactions to the episode provide hints about strategies that might loosen the colonial ties that still bind the global financial infrastructure together.

This chapter explores how the Indian state asserts its digital sovereignty through digital public goods, including the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), which is overseen by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an entity governed by the Reserve Bank of India. This chapter demonstrates how, as part of the “India Stack,” indigenous digital payment design, architecture, and governance mechanisms allow for accessible, secure, and interoperable transactions in a mobile-first, open API-based payment network. This significantly reduces India’s dependence on foreign financial systems and protects it from shocks that could result from foreign sanctions (e.g., US economic sanctions of Russia in 2014 impacting MasterCard and Visa users in Russia). However, such a system is not without potential drawbacks, some of which include the dominance of foreign entities (e.g., Google Pay) on UPI as well as state-sanctioned monopolies that may minimize civil society participation and market competition. Besides interoperability and risk mitigation, the authors also advocate a multi-stakeholder governance model for the national digital payment system to bolster public ownership and institutional checks and balances.

This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This chapter provides an in-depth look at how the sanctions regulations have affected finance and currency flows around the world. It examines SWIFT, the inter-bank worldwide messaging system, and how certain Russian banks were eventually banned from the platform. The chapter discusses correspondent banking, in which banks hold accounts for each other, and payment systems, which serve a variety of functions including facilitating the conversion of currencies. It examines how the sanctions disrupted the ability of Russian banks to carry out business using these tools.

This chapter explores David Ferry’s poetical recreations of Johnsonian prose under the aspect of “compassion.” Attention is initially focussed on Ferry’s poetical re-working of a passage from the “Life of Pope” on Pope’s physical disablements. The poem “Johnson on Pope – from the Lives of the Poets” (1960) is compelling. The chapter highlights how Johnson’s critical prose can be closely associated with the language of poetry. With each reading his language sinks deeper into our consciousnesses and eludes paraphrase. Also discussed are lines from Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner” and use of a passage from Johnson’s review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry (1757). Through the language of his modern poem Ferry brings out the poignancy of suffering in the closing stages of life. This discussion is reinforced by a close analysis of Johnson on the final years of Jonathan Swift from the “Life of Swift.” Ferry’s formula – that of “unsentimental pity” – is then the basis for a closing examination of the final decline of the poet William Collins, one of the poets from the Lives of the Poets Johnson had known in person.

Dublin’s origins as a city are Viking, and the buried remains of this era can be found near the site of Christchurch Cathedral, where the now covered-over River Poddle ran down to the Liffey. It was here that the original medieval city grew up around the administrative centre of Dublin Castle, adjacent to which the city’s first theatres in the seventeenth century – notably Smock Alley – would be built. This chapter takes as its keynote the idea of a buried past making itself felt in the present in literature.This extends from contemporary crime fiction by Tanya French and classic nineteenth-century gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, to poetry and theatre about the Northern Ireland conflict by Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel that finds a metaphor in the Viking past. This part of the city is also dominated by the figure of Jonathan Swift, whose response to the poverty he saw around him is echoed in later writers. It is also the part of the city most closely associated with the poet James Clarence Mangan, who in turn haunts James Joyce’s classic short story, ‘The Dead’, which is set in this part of the city.

Chapter 7 explains the importance of the offshore RMB market. Historically, an international currency had to be fully convertible in the capital account. However, China wants the RMB to be convertible only in a controlled manner, as its institutions are still immature. Thus, making use of offshore RMB centers is a crucial part of the RMB internationalization strategy. Through this strategy, China sets up a firewall between the onshore and offshore markets, allowing full convertibility of RMB in the offshore market but partial convertibility in the onshore market. I study the operation of the offshore RMB centers, in particular that of Hong Kong, which is by far the largest offshore center. I describe in detail the difference between the onshore and offshore FX markets. I discuss the settlement and clearing of offshore RMB payments. Importantly, I describe in detail the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and compare it with the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) of the United States. I explain the economics behind the operation of the Hong Kong offshore market—in particular, the determination of the interest rates and exchange rate in the offshore market. Finally, I compare the offshore USD market and the offshore RMB market.

Mental illness is not strictly divisible from physical for much of the long eighteenth century: many mental disorders were thought to originate from physical causes and were treated by similar methods. But this category of disease had an enormous influence on literary productions throughout the period. In the early years, in Swift, for example, and in Pope and in adaptations of Shakespeare, being mad, or eccentric, tended to figure largely, while after the rise of the novel, and of sensibility in particular, the figure of the madman, and especially madwoman, featured prominently as a means of arousing fine feelings, as in Richardson, Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie. Similar currents developed within medicine and psychiatry, not least the movement towards ‘moral management’, taking the mad more seriously, and identifying them as a specialist branch of scientific understanding and treatment. These tendencies reached their height within the Romantic period, with madness being seen by Wordsworth, for example, as one danger of the heightened imagination, but also being valorised, as by Blake, as an exceptionally sensitive and privileged condition. This chapter analyses the major types of mental illness that dominated during the period and the ways in which they were discussed and represented.

This chapter reassesses the role of the novel in producing an economy of scale within which to picture the eighteenth-century body, under colonial conditions. It suggests that the novel of the period is driven by two imperatives, at once to produce an expanded picture of the body at a remove from itself and to produce an opposite image of a bound, organically complete body, which is proof against the alienating effects of colonial distance. The chapter then goes on to explore the first of these two drives, as it is expressed in the novel from from Aphra Behn to Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift and Sarah Scott.

This chapter argues that Jonathan Swift’s satires depict godless worlds dominated by atheists. First, I provide brief readings of the “Ode to the Athenian Society” (1692), The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man (1708), the “Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders” (1720), and Swift’s published sermons. Then, I demonstrate how Swift’s major satires oppose atheism not by arguing against it but by paradoxically taking its premises for granted. A Tale of a Tub (1704), the Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), for instance, all present counterfactual, dystopian worlds in which all reality is reducible to matter alone. I conclude the chapter by arguing that, when atheism is Swift’s satiric target, his satires demonstrate a considerable amount of compassion and understanding for groups he typically presents as detestable. From the Turks of An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, to the Irish Catholics of A Modest Proposal, to the Jews, Turks, and “Bonzes in China” of Mr C-Ns’s Discourse, atheism incites Swift to abandon his animosity against various religious groups and social classes.