In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

Chapter 7 investigates how mental models shape Americans’ attitudes toward globalization, focusing on trade and immigration against a backdrop of growing economic nationalism under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Using survey data and conjoint experiments, the chapter reveals that individuals who think like economists (i.e., high economic knowledge) view trade and immigration more favorably. To address the concentrated harms of globalization they prefer strategies such as unemployment benefits and retraining programs rather than protectionist measures. By contrast, those with Alternative Mental Models tend to support protectionist measures that promise immediate relief but undermine long-term welfare. Crucially, people aligned with the Economist Mental Model are more responsive to new economic information; when presented with evidence of net gains, they adjust their stance in favor of globalization, and vice versa. This responsiveness underscores that their support for free trade and immigration is not blind but rooted in systematic cost–benefit analysis.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

A d-dimensional (bar-and-joint) framework (G, p) consists of a graph G = (V, E) and a realisation p : V → Rd. It is rigid if every continuous motion of the vertices which preserves the lengths of the edges is induced by an isometry of Rd. The study of rigid frameworks has increased rapidly since the 1970’s, stimulated by numerous applications in areas such as civil and mechanical engineering, CAD, molecular conformation, sensor network localisation, and low rank matrix completion. We will describe some of the main results in combinatorial rigidity theory and their applications to other areas of combinatorics, putting an emphasis on links to matroid theory.

Paul Cullen’s final years saw the apparently inexorable rise of the Home Rule movement, his own reluctant accomodation to that movement, as well as his attempts to co-opt it, not least through high profile and contested events such as the 1875 centenary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell. These years also saw the final resolution of the Callan Schools Affair, which had plagued Cullen for a number of years, including through a high profile trial, as well as one final political victory at the unlikely hands of a Conservative government that proved willing to make significant education concessions not long before Cullen’s own death in late 1878.

‘All legislation needs clarification.’ The decrees on entry into marriage issued by Lateran IV (1215, canon 51) and by the Council of Trent (1545–1563, decree Tametsi) instantiate this dictum. The 1215 council failed to prevent clandestine marriages, and the more carefully framed decree Tametsi encountered unforeseen social complexities, which the Congregation of the Council was required to resolve.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.