Mostly, Greek historians treat going to war as something that Greek states do, without there needing to be much account of why they do it. Different were epic wars – the Trojan War and then the Persian War – and Thucydides’ long treatment of the causes of the Peloponnesian War is a direct product of his insistence that this was the greatest war. What his account shows us is what he thought needed explanation, and it is as much his identification of factors as the scale of his discussion of causation that makes Thucydides’ account stand out. His is an account peculiar for the failure to point the finger at individual political leaders, something that elsewhere in his History Thucydides is not reluctant to do. Thucydides never asks whether different action by Athens might have avoided war, avoiding discussing either Athenian policies or politics. The reasons for that are best sought not in Thucydides’ politics, but in his determination that this should be seen as an epic war.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

The chapter explains the process of building Meaning Networks and Systemic Networks, as described in chapter 6, for four semantic fields inspired by the concept of material process and a further two semantic fields inspired by the concept of relational process. The fields are: Change, Creation, Location_change, Possession_transfer, Equivalence, Logical_relation. For each semantic field, the constructions are described as they relate to one another. Their significant features are identified and expressed in Systemic Networks. The distinctions or choices between the constructions are modelled in taxonomies or Meaning Networks.

Paddy, or dhan, is the most important subsistence crop produced by farming households across Nepal's lowlands, regardless as to whether they are farming as tenants or as independent peasants (see Figure 5.1). Not only is it viewed as an essential food staple, but its production is central to the culture and way of life of the Tarai-Madhesh and the larger Eastern Gangetic Plains. This, it should be noted, is a food culture in which Morang's Adivasi peasantry has been integrated into since the clearing of the forest frontier and their transition from forest-based shifting cultivation to sedentary agriculture. It is planted in the monsoon month of Ashadh (June–July), and ropai, or transplantation, is a time of peak labour demand – a process which entails extensive exchange of labour between households, albeit usually in a monetised form. During the mid-monsoon months, labour is limited to periodic weeding and irrigating in the run-up to harvest as the rains subside in the autumn.

After the paddy harvest with the onset of the cooler, drier months of winter known as the rabi season, the farmers plant a crop of dhal, mustard or more often wheat (see Figure 5.2), the flour of which is used to make chapatti (unleavened bread), a secondary staple. Wheat is harvested prior to the pre-monsoon storms in April. The severe heat and thunderstorms of the pre-monsoon months, known as the pre-kharif, mark a quiet period in the agricultural calendar nowadays.

NDEs and OBEs reflect altered states of consciousness (ASCs) that can experimentally be studied via modern brain scanning and electroencephalographic methods. Scientific literature presents convincing evidence for brain-based explanations of NDEs and OBEs. The disturbance of normal multisensory integration in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of the cerebral cortex via over- or under-excitation or via misalignment of sensory inputs is the most plausible and experimentally confirmed origin of OBEs. NDE generation seems to be based on information exchange in various neural networks of the brain involving different sets of brain areas for different NDE themes. When NDE themes explicitly refer to a first-person perspective, the TPJ is an excellent candidate for a major contribution to NDE occurrence. When visual phenomena are part of the NDE theme, the occipital cortex can be assumed to be strongly involved. There is a clear connection of NDEs with ASCs and the TPJ as a brain center that significantly contributes via brain-wave activity to the regulation of states of consciousness.

The sub-Himalayan lowlands which make up the historic region of Morang have been shown to have a complex history, yet have emerged today with a clear geography of inequality. With waves of migration from the hills, the development of successful owner-cultivator communities to the north has been paralleled by the perpetuation of feudalism in the original Tarai- Madhesh settlements of the south – albeit with the rise of an absentee rather than local landlord class. However, even within the southern belt, which is the focus of this book, the peasantry is shown to be far from a unitary entity and is divided by land ownership status as well as a complex matrix of caste and ethnicity. These divisions are crucial to explore if one is to understand the contemporary interaction between the capitalist and pre-capitalist – and that is the focus of this chapter.

Before that, it is worth offering a bit more social and cultural context of the core field site and its diversity. The seven villages are located in the former Jhorahat, Bhaudaha and Thalaha VDCs, which in 2017 were merged into Gramthan and Katahari rural municipalities (see Figure 4.1). Travelling northeast from Biratnagar towards this cluster of villages on the recently widened road, the Singya Nadi river marks the northern boundaries of the built-up area. One passes some ribbon development, including new housing plots catering to urban dwellers, and a number of large agro-processing mills, and after 4 kilometres one reaches Jhorahat Bazaar (see Figure 4.2), the first settlement which is included in the study.

This chapter offers a survey of published and unpublished autobiographies by writers born in the period 1790–1901 that tell the story of the ‘sailor in the family’. It identifies a set of common narrative motifs within these ‘maritime memoirs’ that cluster around the figure of the family sailor – including tales of travel, separation, dispersal, orphanhood, vanishings, reinventions, and improbable returns. Interweaving readings of autobiographies and family myths, alongside the broader literary forms of the Bildungsroman, adventure fiction, fairy tale and waif stories, the chapter shows how global maritime experience shaped the composition of ordinary families and the stories they told about themselves. The maritime relations of this chapter also reveal alternative family structures, beyond the nuclear family order, that were flexibly adapted and shaped to the various realities of mobility, risk and opportunity.

Introduction

Bottom-up models provide the technology details for modelling the long-term pathways. These models have rich information on technology types and their characteristics. Usually, these are based on linear optimization framework. It is important to use such models while determining the feasibility of deep decarbonization scenarios because they capture the technology explicitness that is not captured by the top-down models that focus more on macroeconomic context.

This chapter provides details on setting up these kinds of models through the case of the Asia–Pacific Integrated Model (AIM), which is a collection of computer simulation models used to evaluate policy alternatives for sustainable development in the Asia–Pacific area. Within this collection, AIM/Enduse is a model for technology selection that is used to analyse national plans for reducing GHG emissions and reducing local air pollution. An analysis of energy policy can benefit from it as well.

AIM/Enduse model replicates energy and material flows in an economy, from basic energy and material supply through secondary energy and material conversion and supply to end-use service satisfaction. AIM/Enduse simulates these energy and material fluxes using precise representations of technology. It began as a tool for evaluating policy options for mitigating climate change and its consequences, but it has since expanded its scope to include analysis of other environmental issues such as controlling air pollution, managing water resource flows, controlling land use, and growing environmental field.

There are more than 20 models that have been built thus far, and they can be divided into emission-focused models, climate change models, and impact assessment models that provide implications for climate policy.

This chapter explores the ways in which the Athenian Empire influenced and was influenced by the Peloponnesian War. First, it investigates the ways in which the Athenians made use of allied military resources, arguing that there was no formal system which governed this practice. The Athenians drew on allied manpower when it was convenient to do so, perhaps for punitive reasons, and perhaps as a way of encouraging or allowing visible demonstrations of loyalty to the Empire. The impact of military service on allied communities is hard to reconstruct, but it is likely that it was very unevenly felt: some states might have had little or no active involvement in the war; some might have lost significant proportions of their (male, fighting-age) populations. The second part of the chapter explores Athenian representations of allied military service. For the most part, the Athenians consistently under-represent the contributions made by allied states, or by individual allies. However, some changes in this approach might be visible in the final phase of the war and should perhaps be connected with a wider shift in Athens’ style of imperial leadership, one which becomes based less on coercive force and more on cooperation and concession.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.

This chapter frames Thomas Mann’s engagement with physiognomic culture in his 1912 novella. The aesthetics of the face staged by Mann’s novella conjure a physiognomic hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy, one finds the character of Tadzio portrayed as a neoclassical Greek sculpture. The mechanism for this projection is ekphrasis. At the bottom of the hierarchy, Mann’s novella constructs a series of racialized minor characters identified as facial types. The text nonetheless destabilizes this hierarchy through the figure of the barber, who gives Aschenbach a consequential makeover – a version of Loy’s “auto-facial-construction,” in this case relying on makeup. The chapter places the discussion of Tadzio’s “perfect face” in relation to the recent reassessment of Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Mann’s novella in Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri’s documentary, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021). The conclusion: the veneration of youthful face comes at a cost.