Search results for ""Commons""

This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20.Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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How far did the European Union (EU) referendum result of 23 June 2016 really justify and necessitate the policies executed in response to it? What are the implications of that vote and its prolonged aftermath for the United Kingdom (UK) constitution? What other challenges does our political system face? This book seeks to answer these questions. It considers from a constitutional perspective the way in which the decision to leave the EU was taken and then implemented, discussing in particular the role of Parliament. It includes a close analysis of the referendum legislation, and relevant Commons debates. Adapting methods from applied history, the author considers the wider implications of Brexit by assessing a series of proposals for constitutional reform produced in the UK since 1900. He addresses features of the UK system including referendums, representative democracy, Parliament, devolution, and the executive, from both an historic and contemporary point of view. The book assesses other issues that do not arise directly from Brexit but that have constitutional implications and a global aspect to them. They include political applications of the Internet and climate change. Finally, the author makes a series of proposals for reforms that will help the democratic system of the UK to adapt to its changing environment.

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Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common. In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology. Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common’s citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.

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The Peak District is a vital place with landscapes of great beauty from wild moorlands to walled fields around picturesque villages. There are few places in the world where such a rich history is visible in one relatively small but varied landscape. This book introduces a wealth of archaeological sites and landscapes. It explores patterns of settlement, with contrasting zones where villages dominate and others where scattered farmsteads are the norm. These settlements are found in radically different farming landscapes, some with medieval origins, others coming later when extensive upland commons were enclosed. Industrial sites and landscapes are examined, including those for quarrying for stone and mining for lead and coal. People have always travelled through the Peak, with many old routeways now abandoned but still visible. Water has been vital and it was carefully managed. The landscape has many surviving prehistoric sites. There are also Roman and medieval remains built by church and state. Similarly, there are polite landscapes created by the wealthy contrasting with conflict landscapes where men trained for war, while others defended their homeland. The book concludes with description of the ways individual communities have long cross-cut local differences in landscape character, each using a wide variety of different resources.

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If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing and proliferating, but, folded into the academic terrain, they often remain disconnected from the global issues associated with the present crisis of capitalism, contributing, in turn, to the fragmentation of the resistances that are opposed to it.Instead of locking the perspective of emancipation into the registers of utopia, or relegating it to the side of an empty populism, Isabelle Garo studies in this book the conditions of a contemporary revival of the alternative as a collective construction, anchored in real aspirations and struggles and inseparable from a rethinking of the theoretical work. By addressing the impasses faced by many of the most fashionable radical theorists - Badiou, Laclau, the theorists of the commons, and revisiting them in relation to Marx and Gramsci also allows us to re-read the latter from the point of view of contemporary questions of the state and the party, of work and property, of conflict and hegemony. Thus, to rethink strategy is above all to re-explore the question of mediations, whether they be forms of organisation or existing mobilisations, as sites par excellence of political invention.

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Welfare states face profound challenges. Widening economic and social inequalities have been intensified by austerity politics, sharpened by the rise in ethno-nationalism and exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, recent decades have seen a resurgence of social justice activism at both the local and the transnational level. Yet the transformative power of feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial/decolonial thinking has become relatively marginal to core social policy theory, while other critical approaches – around disability, sexuality, migration, age and the environment – have found recognition only selectively. This book provides a much needed new analysis of this complex landscape, drawing together critical approaches in social policy with intersectionality and political economy. Fiona Williams contextualizes contemporary social policies not only in the global crisis of finance capitalism but also in the interconnected global crises of care, ecology and racialized borders. These shape and are shaped at national scale by the intersecting dynamics of family, nation, work and nature. Through critical assessment of these realities, the book probes the ethical, prefigurative and transformative possibilities for a future welfare commons. This significant intervention will animate social policy thinking, teaching and research. It will be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the complexities of social policy for the years ahead.

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Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself. A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the economy leads it to trample over all that which ought to be private. Underlying this image, and the neoliberal state phobia it justified, is the question of how individual interests ought to relate to the public good in a large modern society, which, it is assumed, cannot possibly function by the non-private logics of householding. This book tells the story of a large modern society that did.

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Legislating under the Charter explores how governments and Parliament justify limitations on rights when advancing laws that raise rights concerns or when responding to judicial decisions under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Through an analysis of legislation concerning criminal justice policy, the approval of new safe consumption sites, sex work, and medical assistance in dying, the book provides a detailed analysis of the extent and nature of parliamentary deliberation about rights, the extent to which government initiatives are properly scrutinized, and the broader institutional relationships under the Charter. The authors draw from a host of qualitative data, including research interviews and examination of judicial decisions, various bills under study, Hansard debates from the floor of the House of Commons, committee and Senate scrutiny of legislation, bureaucratic advice and Charter statements by the department of justice, and news media coverage. The book offers a set of concrete reform proposals to improve the transparency and accountability of executive and bureaucratic vetting processes, and to strengthen the role of Parliament in upholding constitutional values and holding the government to account. In doing so, Legislating under the Charter contributes to the broader comparative scholarship on models of judicial review, morality policy, policy change, and constitutionalism.

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Legislating under the Charter explores how governments and Parliament justify limitations on rights when advancing laws that raise rights concerns or when responding to judicial decisions under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Through an analysis of legislation concerning criminal justice policy, the approval of new safe consumption sites, sex work, and medical assistance in dying, the book provides a detailed analysis of the extent and nature of parliamentary deliberation about rights, the extent to which government initiatives are properly scrutinized, and the broader institutional relationships under the Charter. The authors draw from a host of qualitative data, including research interviews and examination of judicial decisions, various bills under study, Hansard debates from the floor of the House of Commons, committee and Senate scrutiny of legislation, bureaucratic advice and Charter statements by the department of justice, and news media coverage. The book offers a set of concrete reform proposals to improve the transparency and accountability of executive and bureaucratic vetting processes, and to strengthen the role of Parliament in upholding constitutional values and holding the government to account. In doing so, Legislating under the Charter contributes to the broader comparative scholarship on models of judicial review, morality policy, policy change, and constitutionalism.

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Foreword by Dame Winifred Mary Beard. -------- This updated edition is a complete account of the first 100 years of women in Parliament. In 1919 Nancy Astor was elected as the Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton, becoming the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. Her achievement was all the more remarkable given that women (and even then only some women) had only been entitled to vote for just over a year. In the past 100 years, a total of 491 women have been elected to Parliament. Yet it was not until 2016 that the total number of women ever elected surpassed the number of male MPs in a single parliament. The achievements of these political pioneers have been remarkable – Britain has now had two female Prime Ministers and women MPs have made significant strides in fighting for gender equality - from the earliest suffrage campaigns, to Barbara Castle’s fight for equal pay, to Harriet Harman’s recent legislation on the gender pay gap. Yet the stories of so many women MPs have too often been overlooked in political histories. In this book, Rachel Reeves brings forgotten MPs out of the shadows and looks at the many battles fought by the Women of Westminster, from 1919 to 2019.

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James D. Rice's fresh study of the Potomac River basin begins with a mystery. Why, when the whole of the region offered fertile soil and excellent fishing and hunting, was nearly three-quarters of the land uninhabited on the eve of colonization? Rice wonders how the existence of this no man's land influenced nearby Native American and, later, colonial settlements. Did it function as a commons, as a place where all were free to hunt and fish? Or was it perceived as a strange and hostile wilderness? Rice discovers environmental factors at the center of the story. Making use of extensive archaeological and anthropological research, as well as the vast scholarship on farming practices in the colonial period, he traces the region's history from its earliest known habitation. With exceptionally vivid prose, Rice makes clear the implications of unbridled economic development for the forests, streams, and wetlands of the Potomac River basin. With what effects, Rice asks, did humankind exploit and then alter the landscape and the quality of the river's waters? Equal parts environmental, Native American, and colonial history , Nature and History in the Potomac Country is a useful and innovative study of the Potomac River, its valley, and its people.

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The south London parish of Battersea has roots as a working village, growing produce for London markets, and as a high-class suburb, with merchants’ villas on the elevated ground around Clapham and Wadsworth Commons. Battersea enjoyed spectacular growth during Queen Victoria’s reign, and railroads brought industry and a robust building boom, transforming the parish into another of London’s dense, smoky neighborhoods, though not without its unique and distinguishing features. Among these are Battersea Park, which was created by the Crown in the 1850s; the monumental Battersea Power Station, completed in 1939; and Clapham Junction railway station, which is, by measure of passenger interchanges, the busiest station in the United Kingdom. The two latest volumes of the Survey of London, 49 and 50, trace Battersea’s development from medieval times to the present day. Offering detailed analysis of its streets and buildings both thematically and topographically, and including copious original in-depth research and investigation, the books are a trove of architectural history and British history. Profusely illustrated with new and archival images, architectural drawings and maps, these volumes are welcome additions to the acclaimed Survey of London series.Published for English Heritage by Yale University Press on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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From the founder of Simple Politics comes a guide to rediscovering the heart of our democracy, reshaping our political system and making the UK a better place for all. Strikes across the country. A prime minister resigning after just forty-four days. Accusations of bullying in the House of Commons. Our politics and our democracy appear to be fundamentally broken. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. Things can get better. There are solutions out there to the complex web of failure in which we’re currently entangled. Politics, But Better will look at the very fabric of our system and what improvements can be made. Exploring twenty-six issues in UK politics, from A to Z – including censorship, elections, insults and U-turns – it clearly lays out the problems and challenges we face, and puts forward possible solutions. Looking at a variety of ideas and real-world examples, it will encourage us to rethink the fundamental ways we do things, to question the status quo, and to chart a path towards a more hopeful future. Respect and understanding are at the heart of this book, promoting open debate, tolerance and compassion as the cornerstones of a reformed political landscape. Politics is about improving the world – and we can do better.

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‘An extraordinary history’ PETER ACKROYD, The Times‘A lively account of (Bazalgette’s) magnificent achievements. . . graphically illustrated’ HERMIONE HOBHOUSE‘Halliday is good on sanitary engineering and even better on cloaca, crud and putrefaction . . . (he) writes with the relish of one who savours his subject and has deeply researched it. . . splendidly illustrated’ RUTH RENDELLIn the sweltering summer of 1858, sewage generated by over two million Londoners was pouring into the Thames, producing a stink so offensive that it drove Members of Parliament from the chamber of the House of Commons.The Times called the crisis ‘The Great Stink’. Parliament had to act – drastic measures were required to clean the Thames and to improve London’s primitive system of sanitation. The great engineer entrusted with this enormous task was Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who rose to the challenge and built the system of intercepting sewers, pumping stations and treatment works that serves London to this day. In the process, he cleansed the Thames and helped banish cholera.The Great Stink of London offers a vivid insight into Bazalgette’s achievements and the era in which he worked and lived, including his heroic battles with politicians and bureaucrats that would transform the face and health of the world’s then largest city.

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Longest serving Home Secretary until Theresa May, his tenure covering the Ripper murders, Fenian violence and social unrest, Matthews is notable as the first Catholic member of the Cabinet during a time of continued prejudice, yet this enigmatic character has been largely ignored or written off. Roger Ward challenges hostile judgements and examines Matthews' life and career in the context of turbulent times. A successful barrister, he entered the world of nineteenth century politics as MP for an Irish constituency, before becoming the sole Conservative MP in Chamberlain-controlled Birmingham. Championed by Lord Randolph Churchill, he found himself unexpectedly propelled into Salisbury's government of 1886-92, but lost his protector and was left to face a hostile press and Commons. Despite being born into solid Herefordshire gentry, Matthews grew up in Ceylon and was educated in Paris, multi-lingual, cosmopolitan and ill at ease in the brute ranks of the Tory party. Lone Catholic in Cabinet, lone Conservative in Birmingham, with no political coterie, he was an outsider on the inside. Raised to the peerage in 1895, he dedicated his life to Catholic causes. On his death he left instructions to burn his private papers, leaving tantalisingly few traces of a fascinating career.

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For the first time, the 10 great speeches of Benedict XVI's pontificate are collected. From the first homily delivered as soon as he became pope to the last public hearing, these speeches reveal the depth of his theological reflection in simple language that has nourished the faith of millions. Since Pope Benedict XVI died he has had a remarkably good press. Indeed many have argued that there is a natural evolution between Pope Benedicts mission and that of his successor Pope Francis. Dubbed and dismissed by many as an unrepentant traditionalist, we now see a man of profound intelligence and wisdom on matters relating not just to religion but to what is not termed 'The Common Good'. It is thus more important to read these texts carefully and with measure and not in garbled versions dreamt up by the Press. With this in mind, Benedict will be seen as an inspiring thinker who has a lot to teach us now and the future. Included here are his speech on visiting Auschwitz, his address to the House of Commons and House of Lords, his address to the German Bundestag in Berlin, his address to the United Nations, his notorious Regensburg speech and his speech when he finally announced his resignation.

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This volume looks at a collection of the latest techniques used to quantify the genome-by-environment-by-management (GxExM) interactions in a variety of model and plant crops. The chapters in this book are organized into five parts. Part One discusses high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) protocols for plants growing under controlled conditions. Part Two present novel algorithms for extracting data from seed images, color analysis from fruits, and other digital readouts from 2D objects. Part Three covers molecular imaging protocols using PET and X-ray approaches, and Part Four presents a collection of HTPP techniques for crops growing under field conditions. The last part focuses on molecular analysis, metabolomics, network analysis, and statistical methods for the quantitative genetic analysis of HTP data. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Cutting-edge and practical, High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping: Review and Protocols is a valuable resource for both novice and expert researchers looking to learn more about this important field.Chapter 21 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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The United States, Barry R. Posen argues in Restraint, has grown incapable of moderating its ambitions in international politics. Since the collapse of Soviet power, it has pursued a grand strategy that he calls "liberal hegemony," one that Posen sees as unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful. Written for policymakers and observers alike, Restraint explains precisely why this grand strategy works poorly and then provides a carefully designed alternative grand strategy and an associated military strategy and force structure. In contrast to the failures and unexpected problems that have stemmed from America’s consistent overreaching, Posen makes an urgent argument for restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength. After setting out the political implications of restraint as a guiding principle, Posen sketches the appropriate military forces and posture that would support such a strategy. He works with a deliberately constrained notion of grand strategy and, even more important, of national security (which he defines as including sovereignty, territorial integrity, power position, and safety). His alternative for military strategy, which Posen calls "command of the commons," focuses on protecting U.S. global access through naval, air, and space power, while freeing the United States from most of the relationships that require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces overseas.

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An Historical Dictionary of Forestry and Woodland Terms describes the special words used by those working or hunting in England's woodlands and forests from the early Middle Ages until the present. The author does not simply give the meanings of words: he describes the customs and practices to which they refer, and frequently adds quotations from contemporary sources, the latter ranging from medieval royal charters and Shakespeare's As You Like It to such books as Taylor's Common Good or the Emprovements of Commons (1652), John Evelyn's Sylva (1664) and Jefferies's Wildlife in a Southern County (1879). From this dictionary the reader will not only learn the meaning of such terms as pismires, perambulation, furlong and quaking ash, but will find brief histories of the forest courts of the Middle Ages, and the lawing of dogs. Long entries describe such complex procedures as bark-stripping, dishing and dressing, and the care and exploitation of coppice. Many words and practices described here survived until the recent past and some are still in use today. This unique book will be welcomed by everyone interested in the history of English rural life in which woodlands and forests have played, over the centuries, such a vital role. The entries are fully referenced and illustrated where appropriate with line drawings.

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'Very funny' Spectator Book of the Year'Robust and entertaining' Sunday Times Book of the Year'Betcha we don't leave.' I wrote that on the evening of 24 June 2016, once the euphoria had passed. A lot of us leavers, despite being elderly and thick, knew. The establishment wouldn't let it happen.Quite how the establishment stopped us from leaving the European Union, though, we could never have guessed. A mandate which became a process and resulted in the UK being the laughing stock of the world. We might have guessed at the relentless howls of outrage from that extreme block of transgressed remainers, the hostility of the House of Commons, the civil service and the BBC. That was a given, and it all played its part. But beyond our imagination was the readiness of politicians to ignore or subvert the vote, the sheer ineptitude of those charged with negotiating our withdrawal, the spite of the EU and the intercession of that usual thing, events. The Great Betrayal tells the story of a failed Brexit and a betrayal of the British people, drawn from interviews with those at the very centre of what became, in the end, a surreal charade.

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A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.

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This collection of 20 tried-and-tested circular walks has been written specifically for dogs and their owners, allowing for maximum off-lead time. These routes, covering every corner of the Surrey Hills, will allow you to explore somewhere new, safe in the knowledge that the surroundings will be suitable for your dog. The hills stretch from the county border with Kent almost to Hampshire and were officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1958. Explore Leith Hill, Box Hill and the Devil's Punch Bowl as well as the extensive footpaths and tracks including the famous North Downs Way, Greensand Way and the ancient Pilgrims Way. There are many open commons and rolling hillsides, dotted with rural pubs, market towns and villages, rich in wildlife and woodland, making the Surrey Hills an ideal place to walk your dog. All the walks include details of: * Distance and terrain * Details of livestock and stiles * Recommended dog-friendly pubs and cafes * Numbered route directions * Points of interest along the way * Contact details for the nearest vets David and Hilary Staines are the authors of many popular dog walking guides, including Kent: A Dog Walker's Guide and East Sussex: A Dog Walker's Guide.

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The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell the story of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers. Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC

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A major contribution to the history of Parliament, to medieval English history, and to the study of the English constitution. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509), after which they were superseded by the journals of thelords, and, somewhat later, the commons. This volume covers the last four parliaments of Henry VI's minority (1432-7) and the first three held during his majority (1439-1445). Once the king had come of age, the constitutionalneed for frequent and regular parliaments subsided. The rolls show clearly the transition towards the king's personal role. The impact of the king's own preferences is seen in material linked to the foundations at Eton and Cambridge which were initiated in 1440. The second session of the 1445 parliament saw the coronation of his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Growing financial problems as well as in the war with France after the defection of the duke of Burgundy from his English alliance are also revealed in the rolls. The rolls from the period are reproduced in their entirely, complented by a full translation of all the texts from the three languages used by the medieval clerks (Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English). Anne Curry is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton

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How the death of a fifteen-year-old girl aboard the slave ship Recovery shook the British establishment. On 2 April 1792, John Kimber, captain of the Bristol slave ship Recovery, was denounced in the House of Commons by William Wilberforce for flogging a fifteen-year-old African girl to death. The story, caricatured in a contemporary Isaac Cruikshank print, raced across newspapers in Britain and Ireland and was even reported in America. Soon after, Kimber was indicted for murder - but in a trial lasting just under five hours, he was found not guilty. This book is a micro-history of this important trial, reconstructing it from accounts of what was said in court and setting it in the context of pro- and anti-slavery movements. Rogers considers contemporary questions of culpability, the use and abuse of evidence, and why Kimber was criminally indicted for murder at a time when kidnapped Africans were generally regarded as 'cargo'. Importantly, the book also looks at the role of sailors in the abolition debate: both in bringing the horrors of the slave trade to public notice and as straw-men for slavery advocates, who excused the treatment of enslaved people by comparing it to punishments meted out to sailors and soldiers. The final chapter addresses the question of whether the slave-trade archive can adequately recover the experience of being enslaved. NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at York University, Toronto.

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How the Soviet Union reestablished power in a changed Kyiv following the retreat of Nazi forces, consolidating its regime as it headed into the Cold War. Kyiv as Regime City charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation, focusing on the efforts of returning Soviet rulers to regain legitimacy within a Moscow-centered regime still attending to the warfront. Beginning with the Ukrainian Communists' inability to both purge their capital city of "socially dangerous" people and prevent the arrival of "unorganized" evacuees from the rear, this book chronicles how a socially and ethnically diverse milieu of Kyivans reassembled after many years of violence and terror. While the Ukrainian Communists successfully guarded entry into their privileged, elite ranks and monitored the masses' mood toward their superiors in Moscow, the party failed to conscript a labor force and rebuild housing, leading the Stalin regime to adopt new tactics to legitimize itself among the large Ukrainian and Jewish populations who once again called the city home. Drawing on sources from the once-closed central, regional, and local archives of the former Soviet Union, this study is essential reading for those seeking to understand how the Kremlin reestablished its power in Kyiv, consolidating its regime as the Cold War with the United States began. Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NC

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This anthology focuses on the ethical issues surrounding information control in the broadest sense. Anglo-American institutions of intellectual property protect and restrict access to vast amounts of information. Ideas and expressions captured in music, movies, paintings, processes of manufacture, human genetic information, and the like are protected domestically and globally. The ethical issues and tensions surrounding free speech and information control intersect in at least two important respects. First, the commons of thought and expression is threatened by institutions of copyright, patent, and trade secret. While institutions of intellectual property may be necessary for innovation and social progress they may also be detrimental when used by the privileged and economically advantaged to control information access, consumption, and expression. Second, free speech concerns have been allowed to trump privacy interests in all but the most egregious of cases. At the same time, our ability to control access to information about ourselves--what some call "informational privacy"--is rapidly diminishing. Data mining and digital profiling are opening up what most would consider private domains for public consumption and manipulation. Post-9/11, issues of national security have run headlong into individual rights to privacy and free speech concerns. While constitutional guarantees against unwarranted searches and seizures have been relaxed, access to vast amounts of information held by government agencies, libraries, and other information storehouses has been restricted in the name of national security.

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Politicians are weird - we can all agree on that. But do you know how much weirder they used to be? If not, Honourable Misfits is the book for you. Spanning from the past seven hundred years, this is a celebration of the oddest and most eccentric MPs the House of Commons has ever seen. From mad inventors and fearless adventurers to machiavellian villains and mavericks with more money than sense, it offers sixty-five pen portraits of the unique, the mysterious and the downright deranged.There is the one who built a complex network of tunnels and underground rooms underneath his estate; the one who liked to go hunting naked; the one who set himself on fire to cure his hiccups, and the one who invented a very small gun with which to kill flies.Still, they weren't all useless; there was also the MP who invented weather forecasts, and the one who documented more animal species than nearly everyone else. They weren't all good either; between the fascist turned Buddhist monk and the spy who faked his death, there are more than enough villains to go around. They also weren't all lucky; included in Honourable Misfits are tributes to MPs with tragic deaths, from falling on a turnip to getting in a car accident the day after getting elected. This is a book to celebrate human nature in all its odd, compelling complexity.

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Politicians are weird - we can all agree on that. But do you know how much weirder they used to be? If not, Honourable Misfits is the book for you. Spanning from the past seven hundred years, this is a celebration of the oddest and most eccentric MPs the House of Commons has ever seen. From mad inventors and fearless adventurers to machiavellian villains and mavericks with more money than sense, it offers sixty-five pen portraits of the unique, the mysterious and the downright deranged.There is the one who built a complex network of tunnels and underground rooms underneath his estate; the one who liked to go hunting naked; the one who set himself on fire to cure his hiccups, and the one who invented a very small gun with which to kill flies.Still, they weren't all useless; there was also the MP who invented weather forecasts, and the one who documented more animal species than nearly everyone else. They weren't all good either; between the fascist turned Buddhist monk and the spy who faked his death, there are more than enough villains to go around. They also weren't all lucky; included in Honourable Misfits are tributes to MPs with tragic deaths, from falling on a turnip to getting in a car accident the day after getting elected. This is a book to celebrate human nature in all its odd, compelling complexity.

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This volume takes up the challenge embodied in its predecessors, Alternative Shakespeares and Alternative Shakespeares 2, to identify and explore the new, the changing and the radically ‘other’ possibilities for Shakespeare Studies at our particular historical moment.Alternative Shakespeares 3 introduces the strongest and most innovative of the new directions emerging in Shakespearean scholarship – ranging across performance studies, multimedia and textual criticism, concerns of economics, science, religion and ethics – as well as the ‘next step’ work in areas such as postcolonial and queer studies that continue to push the boundaries of the field. The contributors approach each topic with clarity and accessibility in mind, enabling student readers to engage with serious ‘alternatives’ to established ways of interpreting Shakespeare’s plays and their roles in contemporary culture.The expertise, commitment and daring of this volume’s contributors shine through each essay, maintaining the progressive edge and real-world urgency that are the hallmark of Alternative Shakespeares. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of Shakespeare who seek an understanding of current and future directions in this ever-changing field.Contributors include: Kate Chedgzoy, Mary Thomas Crane, Lukas Erne, Diana E. Henderson, Rui Carvalho Homem, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Willy Maley, Patricia Parker, Shankar Raman, Katherine Rowe, Robert Shaughnessy, W. B. WorthenThe Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC)] 4.0 license.

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When the brilliant classical architect Charles Barry won the competition to build a new, Gothic, Houses of Parliament in London he thought it was the chance of a lifetime. It swiftly turned into the most nightmarish building programme of the century. From the beginning, its design, construction and decoration were a battlefield. The practical and political forces ranged against him were immense. The new Palace of Westminster had to be built on acres of unstable quicksand, while the Lords and Commons carried on their work as usual. Its river frontage, a quarter of a mile long, needed to be constructed in the treacherous currents of the Thames. Its towers were so gigantic they required feats of civil engineering and building technology never used before. And the interior demanded spectacular new Gothic features not seen since the middle ages. Rallying the genius of his collaborator Pugin; flanking the mad schemes of a host of crackpot inventors, ignorant busybodies, and hostile politicians; attacking strikes, sewag,e and cholera; charging forward three times over budget and massively behind schedule, it took twenty-five years for Barry to achieve victory with his 'Great Work' in the face of overwhelming odds, and at great personal cost. Mr Barry's War takes up where its prize-winning prequel The Day Parliament Burned Down left off, telling the story of how the greatest building programme in Britain for centuries produced the world's most famous secular cathedral to democracy.

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Ken Livingstone is a product of the political changes that have already taken place in the Labour Party. As Leader of the Greater London Council he has provided a voice and a vision for tens of thousands of party activists and Labour supporters, in the process implementing a set of measures that indicate the possibilities of a real alternative to Thatcherism. His determined opposition on the Falklands War, subsidised public transport, Ireland, the 1984 miners strike, sexual liberation and racism has made him a far more effective spokesperson for Labour than the shadow luminaries who occupy the front benches in the House of Commons.In these fascinating conversations with Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist debarred from the Labour Party by Kinnock/Hattersley, the two men discuss the future of Labour and socialist politics in Britain. What emerges is a picture of Livingstone as a formidable socialist politician and an adroit tactician, who displays a refreshing ability to discard the stale and battered formulae of traditional Labourism. Socialism is defended with humour, warmth and passion in a discussion that ranges from the merits of proportional representation to the delights of herbaceous borders in London's parks.In a polemical introductory essay, 'Labourism and the Pink Professors', Tariq Ali contests the views of Bernard Crick and Eric Hobsbawm, which have become the 'common sense' of the consensual Establishment in the Labour Party and the liberal media.

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Now with a new chapter on the end of the chumocracy era - and Oxford's upcoming elite for 2050. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2022 Power. Privilege. Parties. It's a very small world at the top. 'Brilliant ... traces Brexit back to the debating chambers of the Oxford Union in the 1980s' James O'Brien 'A searing onslaught on the smirking Oxford insinuation that politics is all just a game. It isn't. It matters' Matthew Parris 'A sparkling firework of a book' Lynn Barber, Spectator 'Exquisite and depressing in equal measure' Matthew Syed, Sunday Times Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners. They aren't just colleagues - they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. Thirteen of the seventeen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford University. In Chums, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of talent pools - and the friendships and worldviews it created - shaped modern Britain. A damning look at the university clique-turned-Commons majority that will blow the doors of Westminster wide open and change the way you look at our democracy forever.

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'The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 was a wake-up call to all who study and practice in the field of law and economics: traditional approaches are simply inadequate for understanding the co-evolution of the economic and legal systems, and that inadequacy can result in missed opportunities to warn of impending social harm. Atkinson and Paschall demonstrate the value of an alternative approach - law and economics from an evolutionary perspective - that builds on the work of John R. Commons, a leading figure in the field nearly a century ago. In the process, they offer an eye-opening historical account of the role of the state in the economy and provide a vital starting point for future policy discussions.'- Charles J. Whalen, author of Financial Instability and Economic Security after the Great Recession'An indispensable history of business law and regulation, alongside a powerful theory of law and the courts. Glen Atkinson and Stephen P. Paschall give us an evolutionary casebook for the twenty-first century, deeply rooted in the ideas of Veblen, Commons, and other masters of the tradition.'- James K. Galbraith, The University of Texas at Austin'The language of court documents is notably difficult to understand for people with no legal training. The present volume, a product of fruitful collaboration between a university professor and a lawyer, offers valuable assistance in translating US Supreme Court decisions made in the span of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with respect to economic disputes into the language spoken by evolutionary and institutional economists. As the authors persuasively show, law and economics co-evolve. A much-needed follow-up to and development of John Commons's Legal Foundations of Capitalism! - Anton Oleinik, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada and the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, RussiaLaw and economics are interdependent. Using a historical case analysis approach, this book demonstrates how the legal process relates to and is affected by economic circumstances. Glen Atkinson and Stephen P. Paschall examine this co-evolution in the context of the economic development that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the impact of the law on that development. Specifically, the authors explore the development of a national market, the transformation of the corporation, and the conflict between state and federal control over businesses. Their focus on dynamic, integrated systems presents an alternative to mainstream law and economics.The authors apply John R. Commons's approach to three main law and economics issues: the changing relationship between corporations and the State, the application of the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to state and federal regulation of business, and the relationship of antitrust law to industrialization. They provide a valuable linking of law with changing economic circumstances, such as antitrust policy changes and the development of the corporate form. This analytical approach to the practice of law and economics will be of interest to researchers, students, and faculty in law and economics, economic history, constitutional law, economic regulation, public policy, and the sociology of law. Business students and researchers will also find value in this book's presentation of court decisions and exploration of economic development.

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"Pack soup, cheese and a copy of How To See Nature by the Bard of Wenlock Edge and Guardian diarist."John Vidal With a title taken from the 1940 Batsford book, this is nature writing for the modern reader. Evans weaves historical, cultural and literary references into his writing, ranging from TS Eliot to Bridget Riley, from Hieronymus Bosch to Napoleon. It is a book both for those that live in the country and those that don't, but experience nature every day through brownfield edge lands, transport corridors, urban greenspace, industrialised agriculture and fragments of ancient countryside. The essays include the The Weedling Wild, on the wildlife of the wasteland: ragwort, rosebay willowherb, giant hogweed and the cinnabar moth; Gardens of Light, about the creatures to be found under moonlight: pipistrelle bats, lacewings and orb-weaver spider; The Flow, with tales from the riverbank, estuaries and seas, including kingfisher, minnow, otter and heron. The Commons looks at meadowland with a human footprint, with the Adonis blue butterfly, horseshoe vetch, skylark, black knapweed and the six-belted clearwing moth. The author also looks at the wildlife returned to Britain, such as wild boar and polecats, and finds nature in and around landscapes as varied as a domestic garden or a wild moor. The book ends with an alphabetical bestiary, an idiosyncratic selection of British wildlife based on the author's personal encounters.

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Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”

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This fourth edition explores fully up-to-date standardly used cryopreservation, vitrification, and freeze-drying protocols for specimens that are used for research purposes, conservation of genetic reserves, and applications in agriculture and medicine. Beginning with a section on the fundamentals as well as the use of mathematical modeling to solve cryobiological problems, the book continues with sections on technological aspects of freezing and drying, analytical methods to study protectant loading of cells and tissues, cell behavior during freezing and drying, and thermodynamic properties of preservation solutions, as well as cryopreservation, vitrification, and freeze-drying protocols for a wide variety of samples and different applications. Written for the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Thorough and authoritative, Cryopreservation and Freeze-Drying Protocols, Fourth Edition serves as an ideal guide for researchers and technical assistants in academia and industry with a background in life sciences, medicine, or engineering who want to investigate freezing and drying of biological systems or set up methods to safely store biological specimens while maintaining their function upon reconstitution.The chapter “Freezing Technology: Control of Freezing, Thawing, and Ice Nucleation” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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The Fall of Boris Johnson is the explosive inside account of how a prime minister lost his hold on power. From Sebastian Payne, former Financial Times Whitehall editor and author of Broken Heartlands.Winner – Parliamentary Book Awards, Best Political BookA New Statesman, The Times, Daily Mail and FT Book of the Year'Revelatory' - The Daily Telegraph'Delicious detail' - The TimesBoris Johnson was touted as the saviour of the country and the Conservative Party, obtaining a huge commons majority and finally getting Brexit done. But within three short years, he was deposed in disgrace, leaving the country in crisis.Sebastian Payne, Whitehall Editor for the Financial Times, tells the essential behind-the-scenes story, charting the series of scandals that felled Johnson: from the blocked suspension of Owen Paterson to partygate, and, then the final death blow: the Chris Pincher allegations. This is the full narrative of the betrayals, rivalries and resignations that resulted in the dramatic Conservative coup and set in motion events that saw the party sink to catastrophic new lows.With unparalleled access to those who were in the room when key decisions were made, Payne tells of the miscalculations and mistakes that led to Boris’s downfall. This is a gripping and timely look at how power is gained, wielded and lost in Britain today.'Genuinely page-turning' - Andrew Marr'Brilliant' - Fraser Nelson

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Law and economics is the leading intellectual movement in law today. This book examines the first great law and economics movement in the early part of the twentieth century through the work of one of its most original thinkers, Robert Hale. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1930s, progressive academics in law and economics mounted parallel assaults on free-market economic principles. They showed first that "private," unregulated economic relations were in fact determined by a state-imposed regime of property and contract rights. Second, they showed that the particular regime of rights that existed at that time was hard to square with any common-sense notions of social justice.Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights. Taken together, these writings on coercion and property rights offer one of the most profound and elaborated critiques of libertarianism, far outshining the better-known efforts of Richard Ely and John R. Commons. In his writings on public utility regulation, Hale also made important contributions to a theory of just, market-based distribution.This first, full-length study of Hale's work should be of interest to legal, economic, and intellectual historians.

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Exploring artistic authorship and intellectual property in the contemporary world. If you have tattoos, who owns the rights to the imagery inked on your body? What about the photos you just shared on Instagram? And what if you are an artist, responding to the surrounding landscape of preexisting cultural forms? Most people go about their days without thinking much about intellectual property, but it shapes all aspects of contemporary life. It is a constantly moving target, articulated through a web of laws that are different from country to country, sometimes contradictory, often contested. Some protections are necessary—not only to benefit creators and inventors but also to support activities that contribute to the culture at large—yet overly broad ownership rights stifle innovation. Is It Ours? takes a fresh look at issues of artistic expression and creative protection as they relate to contemporary law. Exploring intellectual property, particularly copyrights, Martha Buskirk draws connections between current challenges and early debates about how something intangible could be defined as property. She examines bonds between artist and artwork, including the ways that artists or their heirs retain control over time. The text engages with fundamental questions about the interplay between authorship and ownership and the degree to which all expressions and inventions develop in response to innovations by others. Most importantly, this book argues for the necessity of sustaining a vital cultural commons.

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"An essential book for everyone who seeks to reclaim the commons and build a just and equitable society."—John Nichols, The NationAn exploration of bottled water's impact on social justice and sustainability, and how diverse movements are fighting back. In just four decades, bottled water has transformed from a luxury niche item into a ubiquitous consumer product, representing a $300 billion market dominated by global corporations. It sits at the convergence of a mounting ecological crisis of single-use plastic waste and climate change, a social crisis of affordable access to safe drinking water, and a struggle over the fate of public water systems. Unbottled examines the vibrant movements that have emerged to question the need for bottled water and challenge its growth in North America and worldwide. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, residents, public officials, and other participants in controversies ranging from bottled water's role in unsafe tap water crises to groundwater extraction for bottling in rural communities, Daniel Jaffee asks what this commodity's meteoric growth means for social inequality, sustainability, and the human right to water. Unbottled profiles campaigns to reclaim the tap and addresses the challenges of ending dependence on packaged water in places where safe water is not widely accessible. Clear and compelling, it assesses the prospects for the movements fighting plastic water and working to ensure water justice for all.

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'Essential reading ... An incisive and urgently needed book' Tim Harford'[An] entertaining introduction to the uses (and misuses) of data ... a penetrating analysis of why statistical literacy matters to our politics and our daily lives' Professor Jonathan Portes Our politicians make vital decisions and declarations every day that rely on official data. But should all statistics be trusted?In BAD DATA, House of Commons Library statistician Georgina Sturge draws back the curtain on how governments of the past and present have been led astray by figures littered with inconsistency, guesswork and uncertainty.Discover how a Hungarian businessman's bright idea caused half a million people to go missing from UK migration statistics. Find out why it's possible for two politicians to disagree over whether poverty has gone up or down, using the same official numbers, and for both to be right at the same time. And hear about how policies like ID cards, super-casinos and stopping ex-convicts from reoffending failed to live up to their promise because they were based on shaky data.With stories that range from the troubling to the empowering to the downright absurd, BAD DATA reveals secrets from the usually closed-off world of policy-making. It also suggests how - once we understand the human story behind the numbers - we can make more informed choices about who to trust, and when.

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This book explores the idea of privacy at sea, from early sixteenth-century maritime expansions to nineteenth-century naval developments. In this period, the sea became a focal point of political and economic ambition as technological and cultural shifts enabled a more extensive exploration of maritime spaces and global coexistence at sea. The exploration of the sea and the conflicts arising from establishing control over maritime routes demanded a more nuanced distinction and negotiation between State and private efforts. Privateering, for example, became a bridge between the private enterprises and the State’s warfares or trade struggles, demonstrating that the sea required public control at the same time as it enabled private endeavours. Although this tension between private and public interests has been explored in military and economic studies, questions of how the private appeared in maritime history have been discussed only through a particularly merchantile lens. This volume adds a new dimension to this discussion by focusing on how privacy and the private were perceived and created by the historical agents at sea. We aim to move beyond the mercantile “private” as a direct opposite to the “public” or the State, thereby opening the discussion of privacy at sea as a multiplicity of lived experiences.Chapters 1, 8 and 14 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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The true, unvarnished history of the town at the heart of Silicon Valley.Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In Palo Alto, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century.Palo Alto is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

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A major contribution to the history of Parliament, to medieval English history, and to the study of the English constitution. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW The rolls of parliament were the official records of the meetings of the English parliament from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) until the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509), after which they were superseded by the journals of thelords, and, somewhat later, the commons. The three parliaments of Edward IV's second reign are strikingly unbalanced. The first, which lasted from 1472-75, was from the king's point of view mainly concerned with financing theprojected war against France, but also sees the final settlement of the Yorkist regime with former Lancastrians making their peace and a further act of resumption reconsidering earlier royal grants. The last two parliaments weremuch briefer and, again from the king's perspective, mono-causal. That of January 1478 was called to try Edward's brother the duke of Clarence, although this is barely reflected in the roll itself. Five years later Edward was in search of funding for his Scottish war. The rolls from the period are reproduced in their entirely, complemented by a full translation of all the texts from the three languages used by the medieval clerks (Latin, Anglo-Normanand Middle English). Dr Rosemary Horrox is Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

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Vibro compaction and vibro stone columns are the two dynamic methods of soil improvement most commonly used worldwide. These methods have been developed over almost eighty years and are now of unrivalled importance as modern foundation measures. Vibro compaction works on granular soils by densification, and vibro stone columns are used to displace and reinforce fine-grained and cohesive soils by introducing inert material.This second edition includes also a chapter on vibro concrete columns constructed with almost identical depth vibrators. These small diameter concrete piles are increasingly used as ground improvement methods for moderately loaded large spread foundations, although the original soil characteristics are only marginally improved.This practical guide for professional geotechnical engineers and graduate students systematically covers the theoretical basis and design principles behind the methods, the equipment used during their execution, and state of the art procedures for quality assurance and data acquisition.All the chapters are updated in line with recent developments and improvements in the methods and equipment. Fresh case studies from around the world illustrate the wide range of possible applications. The book concludes with variations to methods, evaluates the economic and environmental benefits of the methods, and gives contractual guidance.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

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How medieval Dutch society laid the foundations for modern capitalismThe Netherlands was one of the pioneers of capitalism in the Middle Ages, giving rise to the spectacular Dutch Golden Age while ushering in an era of unprecedented, long-term economic growth. Pioneers of Capitalism examines the formal and informal institutions in the Netherlands that made this economic miracle possible, providing a groundbreaking new history of the emergence and early development of capitalism.Drawing on the latest quantitative theories in economic research, Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden show how Dutch cities, corporations, guilds, commons, and other private and semipublic organizations provided safeguards for market transactions in the state’s absence. Informal institutions developed in the Netherlands long before the state created public safeguards for economic activity. Prak and van Zanden argue that, in the Netherlands itself, capitalism emerged within a robust civil society that constrained and counterbalanced its centrifugal forces, but that an unrestrained capitalism ruled in the overseas territories. Rather than collapsing under unrestricted greed, the Dutch economy flourished, but prosperity at home came at the price of slavery and other dire consequences for people outside Europe.Pioneers of Capitalism offers a panoramic account of the early history of capitalism, revealing how a small region of medieval Europe transformed itself into a powerhouse of sustained economic growth, and changed the world in the process.

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THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBritish politics is broken.Anyone sitting down to watch the news will get the sense that something has gone terribly wrong. We have prime ministers who detonate the economy, secretaries of state who are intellectually incapable of doing the job and MPs who seem temperamentally unsuited to the role. Expertise is denigrated. Lies are rewarded. And deep-seated, long-lasting national problems go permanently unresolved. Most of us have a sense that the system doesn't work, but we struggle to articulate exactly why. Our political and financial system is cloaked in secrecy, archaic terminology, ancient custom and impenetrable technical jargon.Lifting the lid on British politics, How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't exposes every aspect of the system in a way that can be understood and challenged, from the heights of Downing Street to the depths of the nation's newsrooms, from the hallways of the civil service to the green benches of the Commons.Based on interviews with some of the leading voices in politics, from former occupants of No.10 to key figures in Whitehall, Westminster and Fleet Street, Ian Dunt provides exactly what people in power have always tried to avoid: a full description of the mechanisms of British government. And a vision of how we can fix it.

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