The concept of human security was first introduced formally in the 1994 UNDP Report and signaled a significant shift of focus from state security to the security of individual human beings and human communities. Unlike the abstract and theoretical debates within academia around that time about deepening and widening the definition of security, the human security approach was born from within the policy world and was policy-oriented. In the thirty years since its introduction, human security has undergone a series of reformulations, come under serious criticism, and inspired significant policy initiatives and numerous debates. Nevertheless, it remains the most formidable contender against traditional state-centered thinking around national and international security. In this chapter, we will look at the emergence and evolution of the human security approach, its core components, and its relationship with other important notions such as human development and responsibility to protect.

Peace Science research is interested in understanding the causal relationships between independent and dependent variables. Based on prior knowledge or existing theories, they develop hypotheses about the strength and direction of impact of independent variables on dependent variables, whether they be arms races and war, economic stability and civil war, or democracy and peace. Quantitative methods provide researchers with a way of confirming or disconfirming these hypotheses.

Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of early modern Aristotelian scholasticism. His fame in the seventeenth century and beyond rests to a great degree on his Disputationes Metaphysicae, or Metaphysical Disputations (DM), first published in Salamanca in 1597. The work is explicitly described by its author as having been composed out of a desire to provide the grounding in metaphysics that is necessary for the proper study of supernatural theology, and it constitutes an extraordinarily comprehensive statement of a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. It is sometimes said to be the first systematic work of scholastic first philosophy not to take the form of a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. This is not quite right, however: for one thing, the Dominican Diego Mas (1553–1608) published his Metaphysical Disputation on Being and Its Properties in 1587. Moreover, it seems that in the 1570s many Jesuits wrote metaphysical treatises that did not follow the traditional order of exposition. Nevertheless, if we confine ourselves to published works, Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations is unprecedented in size and scope.

This chapter provides an overview of sound inventories and analysis of some segmental changes from Old English (OE) to Present-Day English (PDE). The topic selection is based on relevance to the PDE phonological structure and to the way specific processes are elucidated by current models of language change. The empirical data are treated in terms of the changes’ mechanism and causation in relation to phonetic and system-internal triggers, and in the context of language contacts and sociocultural pressures. Updating the results of existing accounts, the chapter includes many familiar processes, highlighting areas that are either missing or under-represented in the canon. The notorious letter-sound discrepancy for vowels in PDE is prioritised, while space limitations require a less nuanced survey and analysis of consonantal and prosodic changes.

Industrialists and enabling financial institutions accelerated America’s economic motion, operating organizations so colossal that they commanded economic influence and encroached upon the nation’s cultures and politics. These institutions altered the national face of business and wielded increasing quantities of money, laborers, technological innovations, and political power. Narratives increasingly portrayed businessmen as a new type of hero, “self-made” even if operating within potent networks. They and their advocates portrayed their influence and wealth as proof of their superiority and, by implication, everyone else’s shortcomings. The rhetoric of self-making acquired a new grandeur. The frequency of the term “self-made” reached its nineteenth-century peak in the press around 1890, by which time the concept was well embedded in mainstream culture, and a related term, “individualist,” was climbing rapidly, along with terms like “self-reliance” and “survival-of-the-fittest.” Elites defended their male offspring as “self-made” if they didn’t lose family fortunes. At the same time, laborers and other critics asked whether the rich were “Self-Made or Made for Self”?

The Disputationes metaphysicae was doubtlessly an epoch-making book. Through the centuries it was read and praised not only by scholastic authors such as Hurtado de Mendoza and Gilson but also by non-scholastic ones such as Schopenhauer and Heidegger. After briefly describing the systematic framework of the work, I examine its character, arguing that not only does Suárez attempt to construct a rigorous Aristotelian science of being, but that there is also a certain dialectical character to the work that might be seen as an attempt to capture “contrary aspects of reality.” This peculiarity may at least in part explain the fact that its impact is far more difficult to assess than it is usually assumed.

This chapter examines an entirely new source – collections of bundles of loose receipts, notes, and bills in local record offices – to demonstrate how older forms of oral credit were augmented by the use of informal local forms of paper currency to add liquidity to local transactions. This is linked to the changing legal status of paper bills and notes. It looks at the continuing shortage of silver coins and how the increasing minting of guineas was used to make the circulation of local notes work by providing enough coins to make notes over one pound in value redeemable for cash amounts. This chapter also uses the evidence provided by the extraordinary Chronicles of John Cannon as a sort of micro-history within the argument. This is a 500,000 word set of memoirs, diary entries, and record of his scrivening activities over c.1720–1742. Finally, there is a section on the increasing use of inland bills of exchange and their relation to local notes of hand by examining the diary of the mid-eighteenth century Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner. The records of the Royal Mail are used to show just how developed the national bill market was by the early eighteenth century, as the transfer of such paper instruments was a major part of its growing business.

The end of the American Revolution energised concerns about the political, economic, and moral state of an empire that had become inextricable from the plantation economy and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Intent on forging an empire without slave-trading, some Cambridge students and fellows took a leading role in attacking the slave economy, enslavers, and the consumption and production of goods tied to the plantation economy. Other past and present Cambridge fellows, however, were emboldened by defeat in the Revolution to support enslavers, arguing that enslavement was the principal foundation of Britain’s rapidly growing economy and should remain entrenched in the British Caribbean. The problem of the slave trade was particularly evident in Britons’ engagement with West Africa, where antislavery activists, colonisers, and explorers had to negotiate and collaborate with local slave-traders and imperial companies to achieve their aims. These conflicts reveal the challenges and limitations of idealism when confronted with the realities of Britain’s slave empire.

This chapter demonstrates how the definition of Anglo-Norman has evolved over the last fifty years, and how this has led to a better understanding of the pervasiveness and longevity of the impact of insular French on British culture. It demonstrates the Anglo-Norman Dictionary’s response to this development in its inclusion and treatment of different types of ‘new’ sources, and discusses the problematic nature of some of these. As a digital platform, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary has introduced a range of additional dictionary-wide features and search tools that highlight the growing awareness of the multilingual context of Anglo-Norman lexis. This chapter shows how these tools provide new data for etymological research, while emphasising the implications of how the term Anglo-Norman language should be interpreted.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

This chapter examines the different trajectory Scotland adopted to the problems it faced in the 1690s. After suffering a terrible famine in the middle of that decade, which England avoided, Scotland’s leaders embarked on a plan to create a modern economy. Since Scotland suffered an even more acute shortage of specie than England, but did not need to bankroll foreign wars, it was decided to create the Bank of Scotland as an institution designed primarily to create specie-substitute paper currency. In addition to Scotland, many of the British Thirteen Colonies also issued paper currencies to meet demand for money in the face of even more acute specie shortage than Scotland. By doing so they were able to increase their consumption of British-produced goods. France also attempted to create a system of paper currency under the influence of the exiled Scot, John Law, who had previously written pamphlets arguing for the link between currency, liquidity, and economic growth. However for the French government the conversion of the huge debts it had built up fighting the war of Spanish Succession into currency was more important, and the result was over-issue, inflation, and collapse.

Recent scholarship presents Suárez as falling in a broadly Thomist tradition regarding the question of how many substantial forms a material substance can have. Scholars present Suárez as endorsing a unitarian view of substantial forms due to Thomistic concerns about substantial unity. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken, and that it obscures an important difference between Suárez’s brand of unitarianism and Aquinas’s. Suárez does not have a unity argument against plurality of substantial forms because he has the metaphysical resources to account for the unity of a substance with multiple substantial forms. It is also a mistake to claim, as some scholars do, that Suárez was a unitarian in the same sense that Aquinas was: unlike Aquinas, Suárez thinks that non-human organisms contain multiple substantial forms. Paying close attention to the differences between Suárezian and Thomistic unitarianism results in a more nuanced picture of the plurality of forms debate.

This chapter considers the intricate account in Suárez’s Disputationes metaphysicae of the “matter” (hylê) portion of his hylomorphic conception of the material world. There is a focus on the interrelations among the notions of prime matter, extension, and quantity in this account. Suárez in fact posits three different kinds of extension: the penetrable and divisible extension of prime matter, itself an “incomplete substance” with its own mereological structure; the penetrable and indivisible extension of angelic substances, which extension such substances occupy “whole in whole and whole in each part”; and the impenetrable and divisible extension of quantity, which extension is a causal result of this “real accident.” Suárez’s treatment of these three kinds of extension is related to the relevant scholastic debates he engaged as well as to the more “modern” views of Descartes, Hobbes, and More.

Critical Security Studies (CSS) is a diverse and multidisciplinary field that approaches traditional security studies through a critical lens and examines the ways in which security discourses and practices reify and reinforce existing power relations and contribute to the marginalization, oppression, and precarity of various groups of people. CSS scholars ask whose security we center when we talk “Security,” and whose security we neglect or sacrifice, what issues are present/absent, who is afforded agency, and who appear only as voiceless victims. They examine the ways in which security and power are intertwined so that evoking security can generate power, enable various kinds of interventions, perpetuate relations of domination and subjugation, and reproduce social hierarchies. Many CSS scholars adopt an interpretivist methodology and normative approach to scientific knowledge; they are interested in analysis not just for the sake of it but for bringing about change to the status quo.