This chapter introduces Arthurian translations and adaptations originating in medieval Scandinavia, from the earliest translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a late ballad version of the story of Tristan and Isolde. It considers the translations of Marie de France’s Arthurian and Tristan-related works and the three romances of Chrétien de Troyes that made their way into Old Norwegian. The chapter demonstrates how this material had impact on the pre-existing Old Norse literary system, introducing new emotional expression into the saga repertoire, and providing popular motifs that were adopted in later indigenous romances.

The Ptolemaic ’oil monopoly’ shows extensive control of local economic processes over at least a century and a half. The so-called Revenue Laws lay out strict state control of cultivation, production and distribution, which is confirmed by many other Greek and Demotic papyri. The entire harvest of oil crops had to be sold to the state, oil was produced exclusively in state workshops, and retail was subject to exclusive local concessions. Import restrictions and severe penalties were introduced to safeguard the revenues from this system, which were leased out to private contractors. Although it contributed to the monetisation of the countryside, the ‘oil monopoly’ was a rather inefficient form of organisation. The parallel bureaucracy of officials and contractors created red tape, the confiscation of capital eroded trust, oil crop cultivation proved unpopular, and the resulting shortages in concert with high fixed oil prices led to considerable black market activity, which further disrupted the official circuit. Evidence from the Late Period and the reign of Ptolemy I shows that the ‘oil monopoly’ was a creation of Ptolemy II, representing a remarkable experiment in fiscal policy.

In the run-up to the publication of J.M. Coetzee’s first book, Dusklands (1974), Ravan Press’s publisher, Peter Randall, asked the new author for a photograph of himself for the book’s jacket cover. Coetzee was initially reluctant to provide a picture and also reticent to supply biographical information about his schooling, family background and personal interests, because, as he put it, such information ‘suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in’.

The analogies Aristotle employs in Parts of Animals (PA) are indispensable to the scientific investigation he undertakes in that work. This is because many analogies in PA express relations strong enough to ground a unique variety of unity. What is analogical unity? What sort of relationship must an analogy capture to ground such a unity? What role does analogy play in the scientific study of animals and their parts? I first contrast analogical unity with two different varieties of unity: formal unity and generic unity. I then examine the analogies in PA to discern which of the proportional relationships they express yield analogical unities. The most promising interpretations of these passages risk analogical unity’s collapse into one of the other varieties of unity Aristotle accepts. I argue that Aristotle employs the same concept of analogy in PA and in the Metaphysics and that this consonance allows us to preserve analogical unity’s unique explanatory role.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

Chapter 2 traces the evolution of the overseas listing of Chinese companies and its regulatory regime. It defines the main modes of overseas listings of Chinese companies, divides the historical development of the overseas-listing market into several stages and discusses how China has gradually established its regulatory regime in this area. It then focuses on the current regime, particularly the uniform filing regime introduced in 2023, including the key elements and their implementation issues. It also conducts an evaluation of the new regime and makes relevant comments.

The last decades witnessed important developments in our understanding of Ptolemaic Egypt. Traditionally seen as a highly centralised state exercising close control over the economy, it is now clear that the king was part of a broader coalition with the primary aim of raising stable revenues. Recent work on land tenure and taxation furthermore challenges the idea of a ‘royal economy’. This book tackles the other major pillar of this model: the so-called state monopolies in industry and trade. Ill-defined and anachronistic, it has been a problematic concept from its inception in the early twentieth century, yet it remains in wide use. Inspired by the famous ‘Revenue Laws’ papyrus, it evokes a centrally planned state economy. The book offers a deconstruction of these ideas and provides the first full assessment of the actual organisation of the sectors involved. The institutions are analysed within the framework of New Institutional Economics, including an analysis of their effect on economic performance. The study takes full account of both the Greek and the Demotic Egyptian sources. The Ptolemaic institutions are, moreover, contextualised within Greek and Egyptian fiscal history.

This paper examines the themes of history, psychology, and epistemology in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In the first half, I argue that the origin of religion Hume seeks to uncover in this work is psychological rather than chronological: he is looking for religion’s origin in human nature rather than human history. In doing so, I reject the common view, going all the way back to Hume’s near contemporary Dugald Stewart, that the Natural History is a work of “conjectural history”. Examination of the work itself, and of the use of the term “history” at the time, corroborates the view that a “natural history” of religion, for Hume and his contemporaries, was an early form of what we would now call a theory of religious psychology.

This chapter provides an overview of the core findings of the book. It outlines the key theoretical and methodological insights gained through a qualitative comparison of the politics of corporate regulation and liberalization in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, including the introduction of the theory of rent-conditional reforms. It further outlines the relevance of the rent-conditional reform theory to ongoing debates around the political and economic effects of natural resource wealth, particularly amid the potential global transition toward a less carbon-intensive economy.

This chapter advances three primary arguments about the politics of corporate regulation in twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. First, that the state’s legislative regulation of company creation was the product of two often-opposing pressures: the private sector’s demand for a domestic regulatory environment that reflects prevailing international norms, and the religious establishment’s reticence to cede their traditional competences. Second, that Ibn Saud’s legislative initiatives in the early 1930s constituted a critical juncture, after which subsequent Saudi kings would promulgate corporate reforms, while the religious establishment would contest their judicial recognition. These tensions pushed judicial institutional development into a pattern of oscillation between unification and separate systems for corporate issues. Third, that the 1990 Gulf War and the contemporaneous liberal and conservative reform movements constitute another somewhat broader critical juncture in Saudi politics. Cross-class movements for greater political influence tangibly shaped corporate regulations, the state’s political institutions, and, consequently, how any future regulations would be formulated.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

Chapter 11 concludes with a summarization of relevant research findings and suggestions for improvement. It also identifies a series of questions to be answered by future research.

Chapter 5 addresses these weaknesses by combining STS with sociological systems theory, which provides a persuasive account of law in society, but has been criticised as technology-blind. This does not mean, however, that systems theory lacks the means to conceptualise the interface between the materiality of a distribution medium (e.g. the Internet) and the sociality of communicative systems (e.g. law), since structural coupling provides the means to explain how operatively closed systems can relate to each other, e.g. the sphere of technical materiality (the technosystem) and the sphere of communicative sociality (society and its subsystems). A separation between the material and the social is the prerequisite for adopting a critical or normative position vis-à-vis digital media, enabling us to empirically study the diverse interrelations between the two spheres in online communication. To do so, technologies must be understood as artefacts possessing affordances, that is possibilities and constraints, raising the question of how digital technologies acquire affordances. The final question concerns the concept of normativity in the digital ecosphere, namely whether normative expectations about digital technologies can emerge. Since normative expectations structure the legal system, our answer will explain the nature of the structural coupling between law and technology.

Commencing with the allegorical adaptations and politicisations of Arthurian settings that arose in the wake of the 1688 Revolution, this chapter examines several discrete modes of literary Arthurianism across the long eighteenth century. As Britain formed around them, eighteenth-century English-language writers adapted the character of Arthur to new aesthetic tastes and modified the Arthurian story to suit emergent modes of story-telling, reshaping the vales of the Arthurian myth according to their own cultural and political concerns. The chapter explores the ways in which Arthur was increasingly embroiled in contested debates about English nationhood and English/British national identity whilst also tracing the evolution of the Arthurian legends into a wider Arthurian ‘mythos’ in which the overarching culture, settings, structures, symbols and themes of the Arthurian world became as significant as the individual figures and narratives featured within them.

It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love, for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.

But apart from perhaps the national income estimates, he is remembered more for his academic work, especially his role in the 1930/1 ‘Cambridge Circus’ which set John Maynard Keynes on the path to his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the first Keynesian textbook in economics; his contribution to the enquiries of the Oxford Economists Research Group; and his 1950s work on the theory of international economic policy, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1977, as well as a long series of academic articles and 30 books. This biography tells the story of his involvement in policymaking as well as the development of his more theoretical work in economics.