The chapter analyzes the intersection of population control policies, Cold War dynamics, and racial considerations in the post–World War II era. It highlights the challenges faced by Western states in influencing birth control policies in postcolonial countries, with a focus on the perceived link between population growth and the spread of Communism. Key figures like Dudley Kirk and Frank Lorimer advocated for redefining relationships with developing nations to counter Communist expansion, emphasizing economic support and the reduction of fertility rates over military intervention. The chapter also explores the evolution of demographic viewpoints, moving away from racist eugenic traditions toward more democratic and liberal approaches to population control. The chapter provides insights into how intellectuals grappled with the unprecedented scale of population growth and its potential impact on global stability and resources, highlighting the strategic evolution of overpopulation discourse from Western industrialized countries to influence birth rates in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The First World War and its aftermath destabilized the international economic system. From volatile exchange rates and hyperinflation to industrial stagnation and mass unemployment, the collective challenges facing the nations of Europe threatened to undermine the prevailing order. In response, the Bank of England assumed a set of responsibilities aimed at upholding the City of London as an international financial center. It employed technical advisers who were able to shape domestic industrial policy, coordinate the creation of new central banks across the empire, and exert additional pressure on foreign governments abroad. Through these interventions, the Bank established a reputation as a leading monetary and intellectual authority and, in the process, redefined the structures of economic governance.

The introduction points out that changing human presence in the Pacific affected Japanese politics throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, the whaling boom of the 1820s to 1840s caused security anxieties among policymakers, while Japanese whalers by mid-century struggled with declining catch rates. Building on scholarship from Oceania, the introduction suggests thinking of Japan not as an island, but as a “Sea of Islands,” a terraqueous zone awash in currents such as the Kuroshio south of Honshu that allocate warmth, humidity, and nutrients and create a specific, though fluid, offshore geography in which consequential historical conflicts and competitions unfold. It lays out a set of questions that emerge from such framing and suggests conceptualizing the history of the Kuroshio’s catchment area as an oceanic frontier. This brings the historical significance of ocean, islands, and human travelers beyond the traditional human habitat to the fore. Since the seventeenth century, ongoing attempts at controlling this frontier has informed business practices and expansionist ideologies of Japan.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

The Bank sought to deflect blame for the British slump in response to many critics, including John Maynard Keynes. Through correspondence and testimony before government commissions, its technical advisers provided an intellectual defense of the gold standard. However, as the prevailing monetary arrangements proved increasingly untenable as the interwar years progressed, economists and civil servants were forced to confront the flaws and instabilities endemic to the system. The subsequent 1931 crisis might have dealt a major blow to the authority of the central bank. Yet in its aftermath, experts began to devise new ways of thinking about the organization of the international financial system, as well as the Bank’s centrality within it.

The Bank’s transformation as a central bank in the interwar years paralleled many developments in the twenty-first century. Its operational independence in 1997 granted it the freedom to set monetary policy without direct government intervention. With the continued employment of economists, notably embodied by the appointment of Mervyn King as Deputy Governor (1998–2003) and later Governor (2003–2013), the central bank developed a reputation as a leading monetary authority. At the onset of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the Bank was able to implement a wide array of unconventional monetary policies due to its independence.

Prior to the First World War, the operations of the British financial sector primarily fell under the jurisdiction of a banking aristocracy. The Old Guard, comprising prominent bankers and industrialists based in the City of London, oversaw a system of indirect regulation, characterized by the lack of direct government intervention and the self-sustaining operations of the classical gold standard. Yet the outbreak of the war fundamentally upended the traditional balance between the state and the economy. With the abandonment of the gold standard and the closure of the London Stock Exchange in 1914, the nation faced a series of unprecedented crises that threatened Britain’s hegemonic position in the global order. By war’s end, the Bank of England had begun to reconsider its position in the City, throughout Europe, and across the empire.

From the Middle English period grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English were increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions, without however completely replacing the former. Two prominent syntactic alternations arose as a result of this development, that is the dative and genitive variations: (1) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary. (2) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king. This chapter brings together research on these alternations, tracing their emergence and development, and focusing on the role of harmonic alignment (in particular, animacy). Although they are separate alternations, one operating on the VP level (datives) and the other on the NP level (genitives), their development shows some parallels, which are attributed to analogy based on functional overlap across the two alternations.

Evolutionary theory and especially evolutionary psychology have been recruited to explain and justify women’s constrained social roles and the restrictions historically placed upon them in mass societies. This chapter, on scientific grounds, challenges three myths allegedly emerging from empirical research: the myth of female intellectual inferiority, the myth of female domesticity, and the myth of female natural monogamy. While there are anatomical, physiological, and psychological differences between men and women, reflecting their different reproductive strategies, the overuse of the principle of comparative advantage has resulted in the subjection and exploitation of women in nearly all known societies.

Following the abandonment of the gold standard in 1931, the Bank of England searched for a policies that would stabilize the international financial system. Its officials turned to the empire as a potential solution to pervasive economic problems. Over the course of the 1930s, they sought to create new independent central banks that promoted intra-imperial trade and the use of sterling as a reserve currency. Neither upholding a particular set of “gentlemanly values” nor seeking to exert complete imperial dominance, the Bank envisioned a network of Empire Central Banks would appease rising nationalism and facilitated imperial monetary cooperation. It worked with foreign governments and economists who provided additional legitimacy to these reforms. With the establishment of the Reserve Bank of India and the Bank of Canada, the Bank was able to secure British financial interests abroad amidst the fracturing of the global economy.

The chapter analyzes the crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s as a dual phenomenon of the population control movement. It explores the disillusionment among population control activists due to the failure to achieve desired fertility rate reductions despite international efforts. The chapter highlights the shift in perspectives on the human rights framework for population control, with criticisms emerging from various actors including demographers, sociologists, and international organizations. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new actors such as the women’s movement in advocating for human rights in family planning. It argues that UN reports on family planning were shaped by conflicting political imaginaries between UN member states along Cold War and North–South divides. Furthermore, it delves into the debates among international lawyers regarding coercion, national sovereignty, and the role of international law in addressing population growth. It argues that international lawyers saw the legal regulation of population control as a test of the effectivness of international law as such.