India’s welfare state offers a wide array of initiatives, including pensions, subsidized loans, school lunches, employment guarantees, food rations, and subsidized housing. Unlike other programs, subsidized housing transfers wealth, significantly influencing household decision-making across various aspects of life. It shifts psychological and behavioral outcomes related to poverty and enhances beneficiaries' sense of control and relationships. In contexts where the poor are often neglected, these changes empower beneficiaries to advocate for their interests within their communities. The study finds the greatest benefits in programs that do not require relocation and in urban areas with dynamic real estate markets. Property rights are crucial for success. The chapter finally highlights the distributional consequences of subsidized housing, suggesting both positive and negative externalities on broader communities. Overall, the findings illustrate how wealth shapes household decision-making among low-income, upwardly mobile citizens and emphasize the need for welfare policies that promote inclusive and accountable democracies, especially as the middle class grows.

This chapter focuses on how sounds can shift when they occur in particular environments. It introduces key concepts from the field of phonology, such as phonemes and allophones, and demonstrates how sounds commonly change during speech production. The major types of sound shifts discussed in this chapter include assimilation, deletion, insertion, and dissimilation. By the end of the chapter, you will be asked to apply phonological rules to a small data set and create a set of potential phonological shifts you can incorporate into your language.

This seventh chapter explores how conscience might be regulated on the basis of the theory proposed in earlier chapters. The emphasis of the chapter is on a broad sketch of how that regulation might work, as opposed to a model statute or other more specific model. It presents a series of nested connections between various stakeholders such as government bodies, healthcare institutions, third parties such as insurance companies, individual healthcare providers, and patients. All of these parties have roles to play in the regulation of conscience.

Through mapping the sociological origins of Palestinian doctors: their birthplace, class and family origin, early educational background, and university education, this chapter shows the social transformations of Palestinian communities during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. It traces the development of the professional classes, from landed, mercantile, and religious notability, which converted, and sometimes supplemented, existing economic and cultural capital into professional education. It argues that throughout the Mandate period, the social origins of the professional community diversified to include families and individuals who gained mobility through sociocultural and economic capital. The chapter also looks at secondary and higher education as a meeting ground for the formation of lifelong professional and personal networks on a regional scale, as doctors were one of the only groups educated outside Palestine. The chapter builds on quantitative analysis of biographical data of about 400 doctors who worked in Palestine. Sources include biographical dictionaries, biographies and autobiographies, and various educational and employment lists.

Chapter 1 introduces linguistic illusions, focusing on how the mind processes language in real time and how systematic errors, such as agreement attraction, occur. The chapter first explains how linguistic illusions are cases where listeners or readers misunderstand or fail to notice anomalies in language. Agreement attraction, a phenomenon where mismatched subject–verb agreement is overlooked due to interference from nearby elements, serves as the primary case study. The chapter draws parallels between linguistic illusions and optical illusions, emphasizing that while both reveal discrepancies between perception and reality, linguistic illusions are more probabilistic and context dependent. This chapter also sets up the importance of studying these illusions to uncover fundamental cognitive mechanisms and processes underlying language comprehension. By systematically analyzing linguistic illusions, researchers can gain deeper insights into the cognitive architecture of language and the role of memory encoding and retrieval in language processing. The chapter concludes by outlining the book’s structure and key questions that the study of linguistic illusions aims to answer.

Why did the Spanish Crown sell offices? The chapter explores the rationale behind the sale of important executive, judicial, and fiscal positions across the colonial administration. The Crown’s justification for sales was that of a measure of last resort to meet urgent fiscal needs created by European wars. Based on the analysis of the pattern of sales and the fiscal situation of the Crown at the time, this chapter argues that this account falls short in two ways. First, proceeds from sales were not destined to fund war directly, nor was office-selling the only financing option available to the Crown. Instead, and second, the timing, frequency, and type of positions sold reveal that the Crown was more selective than commonly acknowledged. Namely, privileging the sale of positions that allowed it to seize economic surplus from the colonial (indigenous) populations without jeopardizing the territorial integrity of the empire by selling geopolitically sensitive posts. These findings question the extent to which office-selling was the sole product of the Crown’s irrationality, or to create buy-in by local elites, or as a way to chiefly weaken the power of viceroys at the time.

This chapter will demonstrate the breadth of travellers and travel-writing both from ‘Arabia’ and to ‘Arabia’ across the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It begins with a definition of ‘Arabia’ and a short, succinct overview of medieval Arabic travel and travel-writing with a view to showcase the vitality of movement including but not limited to pilgrimage. The chapter will hone in on two forms of travel-writing in particular: the earliest genre of geographic literature often titled Kitab al-masalik wa’l – mamalik (‘Book of Routes and Realms’) composed in the early Islamic period and associated with the Balkhi school of geographers and the rihla, a genre developed from the twelfth century onwards by Muslim travellers from the Islamic West (Al-Andalus and North Africa) as a record of their pilgrim travels ‘to Arabia’. From here, we turn to the rihla, focusing on the Valencian ‘father’ of the genre, Ibn Jubayr who journeyed east between 1183−85. Across these examples, we will encounter different types of and reasons for travel, but all expressed in literary form. It concludes by bringing into the fold the voices of Muslim women pilgrims.

Did the period immediately after independence erase or reverse the legacies of the colonial era? While much changed in Spanish America throughout the nineteenth century, this chapter challenges the idea that the consequences of venality, particularly at the local level, were stamped out with independence. Through a detailed examination of archival and administrative sources, the analysis unveils the continuation or revitalization of labor and fiscal policies from the colonial era; limits to the formation of new representative governments in provinces more exposed to venality; the persistence of grievances devolving into conflict; and in some countries, the continued segregation of the indigenous population. Part of this continuity lies in the strong influence of the colonial administration for the configuration of states that emerged: while much changed in terms of territory, much less changed in terms of population. Overall, these findings make the case that the legacies from earlier venality constrained the state-building paths these countries could follow in the nineteenth century.

While the preceding two chapters focused on the physiological domains whose motions take place ‘by nature’, that is, involuntarily, this chapter looks at the activities of the physiological system responsible for the motion ‘by will’. Galen depends on Hellenistic anatomists, especially Herophilus, for much of what he knows about the nervous system, but this chapter looks at both inherited knowledge and polemic interaction. In a rare case of disagreement, Galen criticizes Herophilus regarding the claims about the inherent sensitivity of the nerve tissue. The fact that Galen does not accept Herophilus’ experiments and maintains that nerves only receive capacity from the brain shapes his understanding of this physiological domain. The activities of the nervous system encompass not only voluntary motion but also sense perception and pain, and this chapter argues that each of them has distinctive implications for the unity of the living body as a whole.

This chapter illuminates the impact of the 1948 war on the Palestinian medical community and locates its role in assisting their communities during the Nakba. Within a few months, the British administration withdrew its funding from all governmental health services, most Palestinian Arab doctors were displaced, and casualties mounted. Observing the medical profession during the war, this chapter follows heroic stories of perseverance. Lacking any state structures or national independent institutions, however, these efforts were necessarily localized and short-lived, suffering from a severe lack of supplies. Largely dependent on private practice, the Arab medical profession in Palestine began unionizing only three years before the war and had limited resources of its own. The chapter reviews the resources mobilized to deal with these challenges and the community’s fate following the Nakba.

Byzantine travel accounts written in Greek belong to a wide variety of literary genres and are contained in texts that cross such boundaries as may have existed, given that the concept of genre for the Byzantines was not coherent. The narratives falling within the orbit of Byzantine travel literature vary significantly in goals and approaches; taking the form of – or, in some cases, being incorporated in – pilgrims’ accounts, saints’ lives, memoirs, correspondence, reports of official missions, poetry, chronicles, and prose romances. However, travel writing cannot be said to have been a genre flourishing in Byzantium during the middle and the late Byzantine periods. The travellers’ accounts that came down to us were written by clergymen, male officials, and secular literati. Female-authored ones do not survive; the sole exception being the Alexiad written by Anna Comnena which includes passages describing journeys and expeditions that took place during her father’s Alexios reign.