In philosophy of science, Mach’s account of thought experiments is more often described as relevant for contemporary usage than Ørsted’s. In this chapter, I survey recent Kantian accounts of thought experiment, arguing that the leading views inspired by Kant in philosophy of science remain broadly empiricist. This tendency may be due to their focus primarily on the role of thought experiments in the sciences. In later chapters, I will argue – against recent Kantian views – that Kant understood cognition more broadly to include not only sensory perception but also mathematical construction. Acknowledging that cognition does not always require empirical fulfillment opens new ways of understanding how thought experiments work in philosophy, which may rightly differ from their use in the sciences.

Since the Reagan era, American economic policy has amounted to self-colonization. Democratic majorities have consistently supported legal regimes that have enabled corporations to extract the lion’s share of the gains from trade from the public. For example, they have supported a corporate law regime that denies the public democratic control over the behavior of corporations and instead gives dictatorial powers to shareholders and managers. The Internet has made it even easier for firms to extract surpluses from consumers through surveillance and algorithmic pricing. One small contribution toward a project of decolonizing the public would be for consumers to obtain a property right in their personal information. This would allow them to claw back some of the surpluses that technology has taken from them.

Nature was an indispensable part of the British domination of the world. Visualization of nature was inextricably linked with the political legitimacy of the British Indian Empire. This chapter explores the complex entanglements of the natural environment and imperialism. I am interested in how visual representations of flora and fauna became inextricable to colonial natural historical enquiries in India, a topic yet to receive attention at par with the histories of natural history in Europe. Imagery of nature, as we shall see here, became a metaphor for British rule as well as its limitations.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, British interest in India's natural world had become nothing short of material enrichment, as evident from Erasmus Darwin's portrayal of the Britannic Majesty adorned in the productions of nature.

This essay explores the evolution of the discourse of leadership in pre-imperial (pre-221 bc) China. I show how the formation of the ideology of monarchism during the formative age of traditional Chinese culture was accompanied by subtle bifurcation between the concept of the ruler and that of the leader. Chinese intellectuals of what is often dubbed the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought agreed that the monarch should possess absolute power, but they had carefully shaped the monarch’s image in the way that allowed much leverage to the members of their own stratum. A subtle and yet well-pronounced bifurcation between political leadership of the monarch and the moral and intellectual leadership of an outstanding minister or an aspiring minister remained one of the major features of Chinese political thought and political culture for millennia to come.

This chapter starts to explain what the genealogical continuity between states and international organizations means in practice. First, it reappraises how we should go about defining international organizations. Crucially, it is not because international organizations meet certain abstract criteria of ‘organizationhood’ that they should be admitted into our legal ontology, but rather because these institutions are expressions of the same communal capacity to self-describe. The chapter then revisits two persistent doctrinal puzzles regarding these institutions: the notion that international organizations enjoy a will that is ‘distinct’ from their members and the notion that they enjoy a legal personality that is opposable to non-members. It argues that both problems should be viewed in the context of more general problems that equally affect states’ corporate existence.

We model discrete-time dynamical systems using a specific class of lenses between polynomials whose domains are equipped with a bijection between their positions and their directions. We introduce Moore machines and deterministic state automata as key examples, showing how these morphisms describe state transitions and interactions. We also explain how to build new dynamical systems from existing ones using operations like products, parallel composition, and compositions of these maps. This chapter demonstrates how polynomial functors can be used to represent and analyze discrete-time dynamical behavior in a clear, structured way.

In his Sketches Illustrative of Oriental Manners and Customs, published in 1797, British soldier and artist Robert Mabon made a last-minute change to the frontispiece (Figure I.1). While we do not know exactly why he changed his mind, this illustration encapsulates the interface between visual arts and British imperialism. Mabon brings together the emblematic figures of History and Painting. While History draws the attention of Painting to Indian subjects as depicted on a tablet, a rainbow unfolds with the power of the latter's pencil. A picture is worth a thousand words, but, more importantly, visual representations convey deeper and more subtle significances than words are capable of producing. These are constituted by the images’ literary and historical backgrounds, the decisions made by artists and patrons alike, audience response, and, above all perhaps, the ideas that are revealed about power. Mabon's frontispiece allows us to think about imagery as an important arena to address how the British Empire in India can be known, understood, and, most importantly, remembered.

An Empire of Images is not a history of the British Indian Empire as told in images; rather, it foregrounds the visual arts’ centrality in the making of political legitimacy during the early years of British rule in India. I am concerned with the visual languages of imperialism between 1688 and 1815, a chronology internalized as the long eighteenth century in British historiography. A reassessment of this period, however, requires us to turn to its wider colonial context.

The campaign to address severe forms of labour market exploitation in markets around the world has led activists, unionists, policymakers, and legislators to explore the role of corporations in driving human trafficking and modern slavery (LeBaron, 2020). Based on the understanding that lead firms are not merely complicit actors but active contributors – through their purchasing and sourcing practices – to violations of workers’ human rights and labour standards, the focus on corporations seeks to expand corporate responsibility to working conditions throughout global value chains (GVCs) (Anner, 2015). In this chapter, we compare two labour governance models that have developed in the quest to combat modern slavery.

To better comprehend the structural aspects of efforts to eradicate modern slavery within GVCs and the dynamics created around them, as well as the measures pursued and their implications, we further develop and employ our analytical concept of ‘anti-trafficking chains’. This term refers to the provision of anti-trafficking services by both non-profit and for-profit entities to multinational corporations (MNCs), mirroring the logic and structure of supply chains (Barkay et al., 2024). The comparative analysis presented here focuses on two types of anti-trafficking chains: one that has proliferated following the enactment of State Anti-Trafficking laws in various countries and another that emerged from the deployment of the Worker Social Responsibility (WSR) model. This analysis seeks to discern the extent to which State Anti-Trafficking laws provide the expected hardening of soft-law anti-trafficking tools and to identify the conditions under which anti-trafficking chains may transform corporate behaviour and serve as drivers of change in human trafficking in GVCs. To this end, this chapter offers a structural analysis of the governance models behind State Anti-Trafficking laws and WSR and of the power dynamics created by each.

We describe a range of additional category-theoretic structures on the category of polynomial functors. These include concepts like adjunctions, epi-mono factorizations, and cartesian closure. We also cover limits and colimits of polynomials and explore vertical-cartesian factorizations of morphisms. The chapter highlights how these structures provide new tools for working with polynomial functors and extend their usefulness in modeling various types of interactions and constructions.

This book began after a series of conversations with Ayesha Jalal on the nature of reform and religious life on the campus of Tufts University over a decade ago. An extension, of sorts, of the many discussions with her on the topic since my days as her PhD student twenty years ago, I was struck by the need to study religion in the era of nineteenth-century reform not with an eye toward communalism that developed later in time, but to the many meanings of religion, especially comparative religion, in the nineteenth century.

Another important moment emerged at a 2014 conference on the occasion of the anniversary of the Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, convened by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. In a panel on religion in nineteenth-century India in which I discussed religious reform, I fell into a long conversation with the great scholar Professor Susannah Heschel on various aspects of religion, history, and approaches to empire. This chance encounter led me to think seriously about religion's many historical guises. For that generative discussion and for ongoing friendship and fellowship, I am grateful.

Ideas developed in this book grew after the ‘Religion and Its Others: Power, Sovereignty, and Politics in Indian Religions Past and Present’ workshop, funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute at the University of Victoria in March 14–15, 2019. This workshop featured the generative work of Rinku Lamba, A. Azfar Moin, J. Barton Scott, Shruti Patel, Brian Hatcher, Uday Chandra, and Ramesh Bairy.

5.1 [338] The blessed David reveals that the inability to control one’s tongue is the most shameful of diseases. For example, he even used to offer prayers about it, saying: “Place a guard on my mouth, O Lord, and a gate of constraint about my lips. Do not turn my heart away to words of wickedness.”1 In fact, I would say that it is priceless to make the wise choice of keeping one’s mind focused upon the thoughts that are appropriate for truly sensible people and, indeed, to use irreproachable speech in this endeavor. For it has been written that, “If a person does not stumble in his speech, he is a perfect man, capable of reining in the rest of his body too.”2 On the other hand, how could anyone not find fault, and quite understandably so, with someone using a carefree and relaxed tongue that has free rein to proceed to each and every [339] reprehensible thing?