Chapter 7 explores an empirical challenge for both representational- and retrieval-based accounts of attraction, focusing on object pronouns and their resistance to attraction effects. While attraction has been observed across various linguistic dependencies, such as subject–verb agreement and reflexives, attempts to induce attraction with object pronouns have consistently failed. This chapter reviews past studies and introduces new high-powered self-paced reading experiments designed to test attraction for object pronouns. The findings show, for the first time, that object pronouns are indeed susceptible to attraction effects, specifically when attractor nouns match the pronoun in gender. The experiments also reveal a grammatical asymmetry, where attraction occurs only in ungrammatical sentences, aligning with the predictions of retrieval-based accounts. These results challenge representational accounts, which predict attraction in both grammatical and ungrammatical configurations. This chapter provides new insights into how gender cues are processed during pronoun resolution and offers crucial evidence favoring the retrieval-based account of attraction.

This chapter develops new measures of American economic and security hierarchy using a Bayesian latent measurement model. It discusses the challenges in measuring hierarchy and the advantages of the latent variable approach. The chapter details the construction of the measures, incorporating various indicators such as trade dependence, foreign aid, alliances, and troop deployments. It validates the measures by examining their relationship with key outcomes and comparing them to existing data. The new measures provide a foundation for testing the book’s arguments.

Chapter 2 analyzes the regulation of colonial archives in Kenya as a method of racialized secret-keeping that involved cooperation between the Colonial Office in London and officials based in Kenya. It demonstrates that the regulation of its archives was one of several strategies of the colonial administration to control access to information and intelligence pertaining to the Emergency. The first half of this chapter examines the negotiations between the Colonial Office in London and the British colonial government in Nairobi over how best to deal with managing and securing secret records. The second half proceeds to analyze the only instance in which a “researcher” has ever been granted full and unconditional access to the secret records of the Emergency. In doing so, it argues that the British colonial government was interested not only in barring access to sensitive documents but also in enabling their use in highly controlled settings so that official documents could serve as evidence supporting sympathetic “research,” or propaganda, which vindicated the government at a time of growing critique.

Moral feelings (e.g., guilt, pity) and values (e.g., honesty, generosity) motivate humans to act on other people’s needs. Research over the last two decades has suggested that these complex constructs can be decomposed into specific cognitive-affective and neuroanatomical components. This chapter gives operational definitions of what distinguishes moral from other forms of social and emotional functions. The cognitive components that distinguish different moral feelings (e.g., guilt being related to self-agency and indignation to another person being the agent) are elucidated. An overview of evidence from brain lesion and functional imaging studies on moral judgement and feeling in general is presented, with a focus more specifically on recent evidence that links particular brain networks to specific moral feelings (in particular, guilt and sympathy). The implications of this evidence for understanding psychopathology are addressed. The chapter also discusses the implications of opposing models of frontal cortical function for the understanding of moral cognition. Suggestions for future avenues of research in this area are provided. The cognitive neuroscience of moral emotions and motivations may provide novel and powerful ways to gauge complex aspects of adaptive and maladaptive human social behaviour.

This chapter traces the development of money, credit and banking systems in Europe, from their origins to their modern forms. It examines how the reintroduction of monetary systems following the collapse of the Roman Empire contributed to economic growth. The chapter also discusses the evolution of credit markets, the rise of banks and the development of paper money, with an emphasis on the role these institutions played in supporting economic development. It explores the relationship between financial innovation and economic crises, illustrating how the financial system has both facilitated growth and contributed to periods of instability. The chapter concludes by assessing the impact of financial systems on long-term economic development in Europe.

Many late medieval travellers left us extensive accounts about their experiences, but they often do not differ from each other in significant ways, commonly because they copied from previous sources and followed the same routes, such as coming from Germany, crossing the Alps down to Venice, from there taking the ship traveling along the coast of the Adriatic Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, to reach the Holy Land. German merchants who travelled south to reach the Italian markets were all required to stay in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Those who travelled north, often members of the Hanseatic League, found necessary trading centres in the various harbour cities along the coastlines of the Scandinavian cities, the British Isles, and Russia. In a way, we have thus to perceive German medieval travellers as being part of a mass European movement. The motifs for travels were commonly shared: religious desires, economic interests, diplomatic purposes, intellectual curiosity (learning), and professional needs.