In order to understand the current intercommunal violence in the western Niger Delta we must examine the historical deprivation of representation and resources by the Nigerian state--in its colonial, nationalist, and post-independence forms. This introduction provides an overview of this historical process, laying out the key interventions of this book. First, Nigeria’s current political culture relies on the competition between majority and minority ethnic and religious groups. Second, minorities are constitutive of the national story, and their existence disrupts the standard nationalist narrative that centers a tripartite social structure based on the three numerically major ethnic identities. Third, considering the history of minority communities in Nigeria compels us to question the nature of citizenship and belonging in modern Nigeria.

Intellectual property plays a central role in beer law, and this chapter addresses a range of intellectual property issues including trademarks, geographical indication, patents, know-how, and trade secrets. Importantly, the chapter also analyses the beer market on both a global and local level.

Even if everyone wants to talk about sex, the most intimate aspects of a culture are the little things, which are often the most opaque. Jokes, toilet etiquette, and mutual deferrals in doorways mark shared achievements of mutual recognition. But humor and bodily practices can be the least translatable of cultural identifiers. Diaspora and foreign observers tend to overlook local class differences and a deep-seated culture of political skepticism, fixating instead on more superficial revelations of sexual behavior that may not be so surprising. How do we translate cultural differences? Is it even possible to understand each other’s jokes?

This concluding chapter highlights the important contributions that this volume makes in featuring the diversity of forms of leadership in the ancient world and in illustrating how ancient people were asking questions about leadership that we should be asking more often today. It further argues that future research on ancient leadership should help readers to draw connections among the different forms of leadership in the ancient world, especially those readers who are not expert in ancient studies, and also to draw lessons that can help us better lead and better select our leaders. Ancient leadership studies need to play a vital role in helping us understand contemporary leadership as a moral, creative and collaborative art that we can all learn from one another.

Beer has been taxed since 3000 BCE. It has provided a reliable source of revenue for governments since the Middle Ages because beer was easily made, relatively cheap, and therefore consumed in large quantities. Also, the collection of beer taxes developed, which helped secure it as a revenue source. The revenue raised from beer taxes was used to fund wars (such as the Dutch Revolt), strengthen governments, and protect local industry (the UK in the seventeenth century). More recently, health and behavioural concerns dominated to the point that governments were prepared to forgo the revenue in favour of prohibitions to improve the health of their citizens (US, Finland, and Norway, 1920s and early 1930s). Sadly, beer taxes did not achieve the goal of reducing consumption or the adverse behaviours previously blamed on beer. Governments later changed the basis of taxation to link it to alcohol content. This has led to an increasing trend in the development of craft beers and low-alcohol or non-alcoholic beers. Beer taxes are certainly going to continue, but they are more nuanced now, with the aim of balancing health and welfare, revenue-raising, and the free market

‘Mayors’ and village chiefs figure prominently in the iconographic and administrative record of ancient Egypt as key representatives of the pharaonic authority. Moreover, there also existed other local actors (wealthy peasants, ‘great ones’, etc.) whose occasional appearance in the written and archaeological record points to the existence of paths of accumulation of wealth and power that crystallised in the emergence of potential local leaders who owed little (or nothing) to the state in order to enhance their social role. The aim of this contribution is to explore how mayors and informal leaders ‘built’ their prominent local position in ancient Egypt, how it changed over time (especially in periods of political turmoil) and how they mobilised their contacts, family networks, wealth and official duties in order to consolidate and transmit their privileged position to the next generations. Inscriptions from Elkab, Akhmim and elsewhere, references in administrative texts and archaeological evidence (houses, etc.) related to a ‘middle class’ provide crucial clues about these themes.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

The Czech Reformation was unique in some of its manifestations. It preceded the main Reformation wave of the early 1500s by a century. One of its distinctive features was the creation of its own repertory, with vernacular (Czech) songs and paraphrased chant, preserved in characteristic songbooks, so-called cantionals. Certain printed cantionals, especially those produced by the Unity of Brethren, stand out in terms of both scope and typographic sophistication, even in an international context. The polyphonic repertoire, persisting well into the sixteenth century, retained some aspects of late medieval style. Despite the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620, leading to the prohibition of non-Catholic worship in Bohemia and Moravia, the practice of singing in Czech during liturgy continued to be tolerated within Catholic worship. Several songs have endured as a consistent part of the church repertory up to the present day.

Preparing this review essay – a compilation covering the best of the last two years’ publications – I have been reflecting on what I mean by ‘Shakespeare in performance’: what does this category permit, and what might it exclude? The connotations of ‘performance’ with ‘liveness’ and the here-and-now prompt an eagerness to review the latest studies about the latest performances, yet even as I do this is complicated by new light being shed on historical theatre practices and re-evaluations of adaptations in a variety of media (across TV, cinema and online platforms), let alone how digital and technological advances are forcing us to reconsider how we might conceive of ‘liveness’ at all. ‘Performance studies’, as a term, seems almost at odds with ‘theatre history’, the latter stuck in the past, the former thrillingly vital, yet both are on offer within Shakespeare studies; in fact, often, there is surprising continuity between theatre practices old and new (not to mention the building of new theatres, and new-old (replica or archetypal) theatres). And enough of the intentions of the performances: what of the reception? It is remiss not to also consider the focus of audiences, and their practices of decoding, reinterpretating and reappropriating.