This chapter examines the urban and architectural transformation of Carthage in Late Antiquity, focusing on how the city evolved under Roman, Vandal and Byzantine rule between the fourth and seventh centuries. It discusses Carthage’s role as a political, economic and religious hub in the Mediterranean, emphasising the continuity of its strategic and commercial significance, particularly as a centre for grain production and trade. The study details how Carthage’s harbours, warehouses and marketplaces adapted to shifting imperial priorities. It also explores urban planning, noting how the city’s grid layout, monumental basilicas and elite residences reflected both Roman traditions and late antique adaptations. Religious transformation is another central theme, with a focus on the growth of Christian architecture, including churches, martyr shrines and cemetery basilicas. The chapter reassesses the impact of Vandal rule (439–533 CE), challenging traditional narratives of decline by presenting evidence of continued economic activity and urban maintenance. Under Byzantine rule (533–698 CE), Carthage experienced renewed investment in fortifications, infrastructure and religious buildings, though signs of urban contraction emerged by the seventh century. Thus this chapter demonstrates that Carthage remained a dynamic and resilient city despite political upheavals and its eventual conquest by Islamic forces.

Chapter 2 explores the developmental psychology of metaphor and its significance for illness experience. While semiotics of medicine implies a simple link between physiological processes and symptom reports, illness experience is articulated through metaphors that are grounded in bodily experience, social interaction, discourse, and cultural practices. Bodily grounding of metaphor is based on sensorimotor equivalences, as seen early in development in synesthesia and cross-modal analogies. Social grounding resides in the pragmatics of language in which context and goals depend on social roles, norms, and cultural meaning. Despite this, metaphors allow for creative play by requiring only piecemeal correspondences to the world through ostension. The meaning of metaphors is then found not in representation but in presentation. Clinical examples illustrate a patient on dialysis refusing a blood transfusion and a woman with medically unexplained floating sensations, showing how a semantics of metaphor can clarify the tensions between the essential irrationality of illness experience and the biomedical presumption of rationality in normative accounts of illness cognition and behavior.

Unlike many other forms of ‘heresy’, Manichaeism is not a polemical construct but an independent and organised church within the Christian tradition originating in Mesopotamia and Iran in the third century CE. It had its own heresiology against other communities such as the western Catholic-Orthodox church, identifying key points of difference and deviance from the ‘faithful and true Christianity’ of Manichaean doctrine and practice.

This chapter explores the transformation of coinage in Late Antiquity, examining its economic, political and cultural significance between the third and eighth centuries. It analyses a wide range of numismatic materials, including Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic coinage, to trace how monetary systems evolved in response to imperial policies and economic shifts. The study emphasises the transition from the traditional Roman denarius system to the solidus-based economy introduced by Constantine, in which the solidus became the dominant currency across the Byzantine world. It also examines how coinage functioned as a tool of imperial propaganda. A central argument is that changes in coin iconography reflect broader cultural and religious transformations. The adoption of Christian symbols such as the Chi-Rho and crosses on Byzantine coinage marked a shift from classical motifs to explicitly religious imagery. The chapter also highlights how early Islamic rulers adapted Byzantine coin models, gradually replacing human portraits with inscriptions emphasising monotheism. By considering regional variations, the study examines the persistence of local minting traditions and the interaction between different monetary economies. Thus, it demonstrates that coinage in Late Antiquity was more than a medium of exchange – it was a powerful instrument of ideological messaging and state control.

This chapter brings together the book’s analysis and argues that crucial yet feasible reforms can be made to the operation of the global anti-financial crime regime. They include distinguishing between various categories of regulated services, such that certain essential services – for example, basic bank accounts – must be provided to everyone but attract reporting obligations, whereas highly specialised services with a significant potential to facilitate money laundering – for example, high-end investment banking activities – must be refused if a suspicion arises that proceeds of crime are involved. The chapter also argues that the FATF Recommendations should be revised to explicitly require countries to maximise intelligence-gathering opportunities that serve law enforcement purposes while minimising the risk of complicity in money laundering, terrorist financing or proliferation financing. In particular, this should entail the requirement for countries to ensure that the regulated businesses’ AML/CTF compliance efforts are aligned with the country’s law enforcement priorities, whether through public–private partnerships, ‘keep open’ laws or other appropriate means.

This chapter excavates a conception of autonomy from Olympiodorus’ (495–570) commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. For Olympiodorus, the subject of the dialogue is the ethical principles that lead to constitutional happiness, i.e., the well-being of one who exhibits a proper interior ‘constitution’, psychic arrangement or order. Such a person knows himself insofar as he identifies himself with the rational soul and rules himself accordingly. The principal interlocutors in the dialogue falter and stumble primarily because they do not know themselves, and this self-ignorance renders them heteronomic. The present essay therefore detects in Olympiodorus’ commentary an insistence on self-knowledge as the archaeological ground upon which an autonomous human life is based. By reading the pages of the Gorgias, Olympiodorus aspires to draw forth for his students a notion of freedom that is truly human. This chapter attends to Olympiodorus’ commentary with the hope of accomplishing a similar outcome.

This chapter studies civilian grain management agencies and the logistical branch of Nationalist China’s armed forces, the Supply and Baggage troops. It highlights two key policy shifts: provisioning armies in kind, and centralizing and collecting land tax in kind. While these changes shielded army consumers from inflation to some degree, overlapping mandates among multiple agencies produced confusion throughout the war zones, and the Supply and Baggage troops were plagued by both inadequate training and a historical disdain for logistics. However, blanket accusations of ineptitude obscure the fact that, despite large variations in climate, infrastructure and politics across Free China, these institutions fulfilled their basic task: collecting and circulating enough grain to keep the Nationalists in the war. The chapter also uncovers details about the everyday endeavors of low-level grain management officials and military transport personnel, the individuals who implemented provisioning plans but who remain nameless and forgotten in the literature. Moreover, despite systemic weaknesses, a cadre of experts worked to elevate the status of logistics within Nationalist armies.

Chapter 12 examines how international law is interpreted and applied in climate litigation. The authors explore the interplay between international and domestic law, and how it can shape the outcomes of climate litigation. Their exploration of emerging best practice reveals a progressive trend: domestic courts are increasingly incorporating international climate obligations into their rulings. This trend not only underscores the significance of international law in shaping domestic legal responses to climate change but also amplifies the capacity of domestic legal systems to address the impacts of climate change more effectively. Moreover, the authors spotlight emerging best practices from regional and international bodies. They argue that these practices demonstrate the potency of international legal norms in influencing the trajectory of climate litigation, fostering a global legal landscape that is increasingly responsive to the climate crisis.