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.

The primary significance of scientific theories, laws, models, etc. lies in how they enable prediction and control of some part of the world that interests us. Pragmatists see this as the whole story with science; science is problem-solving inquiry that helps us when our habitual anticipations and practices fail us. What scientific inquiry delivers is new modes of prediction and control that resolve such problematic situations. Further talk of “pure” science, of the role of “explanatory virtues” beyond the empirical and practical, the pragmatist is wont to dismiss as “quasi-religious” and metaphysical claptrap. All of this is right, except the dismissiveness and the epithet “claptrap.” There is a perfectly pragmatic account to be given of this other (genuine and important) element of science, and it depends on taking seriously the social and personal role of religion and mythos. We may need science to play a key role in this secular age: providing synoptic understanding of the place of humanity in the universe and the meaning of it all. This suggests complex criteria for the synthetic and visionary parts of science that can fulfill this role.

Chapter 3 argues that Tokugawa Japan exerted an important influence on the way global geographers mapped and conceptualized what is known today as “the Pacific.” It shows how the ocean has been the object of diverging metageographical categorizations in different cultural and political contexts in Japan, Asia, and Oceania. Over the Tokugawa period, its meanings changed radically in Japan. In fact, even decades after the issue of maritime prohibitions, in 1675, the Tokugawa shogunate successfully explored and mapped the then-uninhabited Bonin Islands. For Japanese intellectuals, the subsequent “discovery” of the Pacific coincided with an intellectual emancipation from the continent, as Hayashi Shihei’s late-eighteenth century works illustrate. Concepts and geographical data created in the process were highly classified, yet they were among the first Japanese texts to be translated in Europe in the early nineteenth century, where they entered globalizing geographical discourses. Like the malleable category of Nan’yō or “the South Sea,” some metageographical categories remained politically distinct until the twentieth century.

In light of global crises such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and viral pandemics, scholars increasingly emphasize the epistemic authority of science while embracing its value-laden nature. This chapter challenges this “New Orthodoxy of Value-Laden Science” to engage with the roles of science in enabling environmental destruction and accelerating social inequality, particularly in the Global South. Using examples from agriculture and biodiversity, the chapter highlights contradictions where science is both a solution to and a cause of social-environmental crises. Moving beyond the New Orthodoxy, the chapter advocates for a justice-oriented approach that emphasizes distribution, recognition, and representation to make science not only epistemically but also socially just. This approach emphasizes the need to bridge the gap between critical scholarship and public trust, fostering a science that genuinely serves global justice.

R-sounds (rhotics) have been a part of English phonology throughout its history. Although there is no agreement on the precise articulatory characteristics of these sounds, they have played a central phonological role in the language since the earliest times. The possible nature of rhotics in Old English, and hence in later periods of the language, is considered in detail. Various phonological processes, vowel breaking, vowel mergers, metathesis, a number of sandhi phenomena, have been triggered by R and many of these processes are still productive in Present-Day English. The scope of R sounds can be restricted by syllable position for some varieties of English which do not license any rhotics outside of a syllable-initial prevocalic position. The dynamics of R in varieties of English today are considered, with normative pronunciation models varying in their allowing non-prevocalic R or not.

When and why did English grammars first start to be written, and by whom? Who else were involved in the grammar-writing process apart from the grammarians? And what was the grammarians’ expertise based on to begin with? This chapter will address these questions by discussing the rise of the English grammar-writing tradition during the late sixteenth century down to the end of the eighteenth century. Focusing on the linguistic climate of the period, it will show how grammars were written at a time when only Latin grammar was available as a descriptive model, and that grammarians gradually developed an eye for features specific to the English language. Contextualising research on the subject by discussing traditional and state-of-the-art research tools, it will show that writing grammars for English was increasingly professionalised, and that female grammarians played an important role in the process.

The world of research and innovation is no exception to a broader societal demand (at least in liberal democracies) for more direct participation of citizens in various areas of public and political life, as attested by the significant development of various forms of “citizen science” programs. Such inclusiveness is nowadays commonly considered a means to better align the outputs of scientific research and innovation with the values and needs of society, hence fostering a more humanistic science. This chapter discusses the cogency of this requisite by addressing both epistemological and political challenges raised by opening up the process of knowledge production to nonprofessional inquirers and stakeholders. It assesses the prima facie tension between the inclusion of stakeholders in scientific research and traditional expectations of objectivity and impartiality. It also challenges the valuation of culturally well-entrenched features of science such as the valuation of unpredictable and unforeseen applications of scientific developments. Finally, it identifies various challenges to be met to enable a more inclusive science to effectively reduce the gap between its outputs and society’s needs, such as the need for an evolution of the professional training of scientists and of incentives from scientific institutions.

The rediscovery that the Vienna Circle’s neopositivist philosophy of science was not an exercise in theory for theory’s sake, but regarded by some of its most prominent practitioners as closely related to ongoing struggles for the social, economic, and political transformation of society (in his North American exile Rudolf Carnap spoke of “scientific humanism”), has attracted the attention of feminist and anti-racist philosophers. This chapter seeks to establish that two doctrines also associated with neopositivism (and shared by Carnap and Otto Neurath) need not prove as rebarbative for contemporary activist scholars as they may appear initially. It is argued, first, that understood as a qualified adoption of Max Weber’s position their conception of scientific value freedom (better: scientific value neutrality) does not undermine their ambition that science and its philosophy serve their sociopolitical engagement, and, second, that their conception of value noncognitivism does not at all render discussions of nonepistemic normative matters meaningless, but only bars deciding them as intersubjectively binding on a priori philosophical or empirical scientific grounds. Joint deliberation is needed.

The concern of this chapter is with varieties of philosophical humanism and their own conceptions of the nature and significance of science. After an initial characterization of major themes in Renaissance humanism, it describes three main varieties that are evident in twentieth-century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Different varieties of humanism are associated with different conceptions of science, some allied to the sciences, others antipathetic to them, while yet others offer subtler positions. The upshot is that there are different tales to tell about the relationship of (varieties of) philosophical humanism to (conceptions of) science, only some of which fit popular modern celebratory claims about a necessary alliance of humanism and science. If we take a wider look at the history of philosophy, we find ongoing experimentation with forms of humanism and explorations of diverse ways of understanding and evaluating scientific knowledge and ambitions. What we find is what we ought to expect of social, creative, epistemically sophisticated, self-expressive creatures: endless variety.