After the Jurchen conquest of northern China in 1127, Lin’an became the capital of the Southern Song. This period marked a pivotal transition in urban history: commercialization expanded beyond city walls, water management became essential for urban operations, and religion became more integrated into urban life. Businesses relocated from the old capital, while new resources from South China enriched city life. The exchange of goods and movement across the city blended suburban commerce and natural landscapes with city life. Commercial development and the public space offered by West Lake encouraged intense interactions in markets, teahouses, and gardens. Using capital journals, fiction, biji, and gazetteer maps, this chapter explores Lin’an’s environment, layout, commercial development, water management, and secular and religious life. The city’s blend of natural beauty and rapid commercial development marked a significant transition in Chinese urban history. The Southern Song’s influence elevated Hangzhou from a regional hub to a national political, religious, and aesthetic center, with impacts resonating across East Asia and beyond.

This chapter approaches fashion as a technology of transition that modifies bodies and generates gender and sex – in the early modern period and today. It offers a broad and exploratory examination of trans fashion and fashioning in the early modern period as it intersects with premodern trans studies, suggesting “trans fashioning” as one method of understanding not only trans genders but also the construction and maintenance (in part through fashion) of all genders, especially the artifice and impossibility of stable cisgender sex. Read in a trans way, histories of fashion show the patterns and seams and stitches of styling sex and normalizing the fashioning of cis or binary gender. At once superficial and significant, changeable and permanent, the gendering technologies of early modern fashion undercut false modern binaries between “social” and “medical” transition, between what we call sex and gender or cis and trans, and between private and public bodies.

This chapter covers the period between the triumph of the rebel army in the Spanish Civil War and 2020 and therefore goes through three decisive stages in the history of contemporary Spain: the successive inner stages of the Francoism (1938−1975), the transition (1976−1982), and the consolidation of a decentralised democratic regime in Spain (1982–present). Four main axes structure the approach provided by the text, namely the evolution of the circumstances of use, propaganda, control, and institutional politics of musical events; the dynamics of continuity, renewal, and reform of the procedures and instances of institutional and private promotion and dissemination of music in the country; the development of the main compositional trends and their progressive internationalisation; and, finally, the historiographic and critical treatment of the period under study.

Over the last fifty years, research into the development of second or other grammatical systems has been largely concerned with the stages through which language might evolve in the individual learner or in groups of learners. Explaining exactly how learner grammars undergo transition from one stage to the next has a much shorter history. However, there has in recent years been a rise in interest in the mechanisms that drive grammatical transition, particularly in online processing. Different theoretical approaches to the transition problem will be reviewed and exemplified here, including those in the few years that have elapsed since the first edition. Issues covered will also include (a) alternative definitions of grammar, (b) the acquisition of additional grammars after the second, (c) various other factors in the learner’s mind that help to shape the emergence of new grammatical structures. The chapter will close with an overview of the dominant questions still facing researchers embarking on investigations of grammatical transition.

In this chapter, the lives of a few older persons living in the Vineyard region are presented. After explaining how interviews were carried out and the life stories collected and analysed, and sketching the sociocultural environment of the Vineyard region, the chapter presents six short case studies, that of three women, two men and a married couple, that is, seven persons. For each person, I present their current situations and living arrangements and the transformation of their convoy of care during two and a half years. On this basis, I characterise their unique developmental trajectory: where do they come from, what did they live through? What ruptures and transitions did they experience, what resources did they find and what did they learn from them? What are their interest and engagements and how did they evolve with time? How much do they remember and imagine? What can we say about their domains of conduct and their reconfiguration over time? How, from there, can we see a unique life trajectory, a singular melody emerging from each of these lives, unfolding in the same region?

This essay assesses Bowen’s relationship to the English author D. H. Lawrence, and suggests that in view of the chronological overlap in their careers, the latter was effectively a contemporary as well as a forerunner. Bowen regarded Lawrence as a major author but also identified with him as an ‘outsider’ to cosmopolitan English literary circles. Both novelists are transitional figures, comfortable with the novelistic legacies of nineteenth-century fictional realism but moving towards formal experimentation, while tuning their work to modernist preoccupations with psychology and sexuality. Their interests aligned in the exploration of female subjectivity and the shifting gender politics of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s landmark novel Women in Love, with its programmatic positioning of two sisters caught between the inherited shapes of English Victorian romance and the pull of a modern European independence, provides a persuasive template for Bowen in her structured pairings of women across several works, including an unpublished story titled ‘Women in Love’. The two writers are linked, finally, by their respective responses to the world at war, with Bowen hailing Lawrence as a guide to her literary navigation of wartime London.

In this concluding chapter, we give community strategy its due place in sustainability governance and recapitulate key insights from the previous chapters. Narrative appears in a variety of roles yet is unlikely to do its work as a catalyst of community action if it does not take its place within strategy. Such institutionalization does come with risk, including ossification and the introduction of blind spots. We coin a new leadership function, tightly coupled with the role of strategist: The management of goal dependencies and reality effects associated with community strategy. Strategy appears appropriate as a topic to conclude our interpretive account of sustainability leadership as it is, in part, a narrative itself and as the building of strategic capacity in a community is the culminating point of leadership work, requiring other features of good sustainability to be in place.

Before the emergence of British imperial rule, India consisted of regions ruled by different states and frequently representing somewhat different ecologies and economic bases. The historiography of economic change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, therefore, has developed as a set of regional studies. It is a rapidly evolving literature. What are its key concerns? One shared theme is the need to have a credible prehistory of colonial expansion, which should help to better understand the pattern of change that came after. With two case studies, Gujarat and Bengal, and attention to livelihoods, connections and varieties of capitalism, the chapter offers tentative conclusions on what this historiography tells us.

China’s urban reforms commenced with a focus on micro incentives for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Over time the focus gradually shifted to the resource allocation and pricing mechanism from the single track of the planned economy, to a dual track, and ultimately to the single-track market economy. During the transition, non-state-owned businesses, including private businesses, joint ventures, and foreign-funded enterprises, were encouraged to enter the market. Their growth has facilitated the stability and rapid development of China’s economy in the course of the transition from a planned economy to a market economy. However, this transition has also brought about challenges such as corruption, widening regional disparities, and income gap, among others.

The concluding chapter of the book pulls together key strands of analysis and insights from the preceding chapters and suggests future potential for moving from a transition state (one that effectively manages key transitions in critical sectors of the economy without questioning dominant rationales and modes of statehood) to a state of transformation where sustainability is at the centre of state practice.

The first chapter of the book covers the context, aims and objectives of the book and situates these aims and the book’s approach in relation to both existing strands of academic scholarship and contemporary policy debates about the role of the state in sustainability transitions.

Epilogue reflects on the recent public discussions in Poland about ways to dismantle the legacy of rightwing authoritarian populist legalist rule and to “restore” democracy and the rule of law. These discussions raise critical questions about political strategy that has wide resonance beyond the national borders of Poland. In particular, they bring into focus the relationship between law, authoritarianism, democracy, and transitional justice, at the alleged ends of rightwing authoritarian rule from an international and historical perspective. In light of these discussions and the insights accumulated in this study, the epilogue suggests an alternative way of conceiving the means and ends relationship and formulating the question of social transformation and justice beyond the imaginary of “restoration” of democracy and the teleological vision of transition.

The American and allied military presence in Afghanistan peaked between late 2010 and mid 2011. For the next ten years, the major debate in Washington was how many troops to withdraw, how quickly. The announced unilateral American withdrawal was the defining fact of the war for its final decade. Policymakers treated the debate over troop numbers as a proxy for a debate over larger goals. But there are other aspects of strategy, like reconstruction and diplomacy, that simply cannot be subsumed within a debate about troop numbers, aspects that went unaddressed during the US’s gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan. Withdrawing troops without achieving the other objectives is how the United States gradually abandoned the rest of its war aims as slowly and expensively as possible.