One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

This chapter begins by discussing the impulses that motivated Schoenberg to begin composing in the twelve-tone style: his desire to circulate through all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, and his need to make the remainder of a piece develop from its initial material or Grundgestalt. It briefly traces his path toward twelve-tone music, as well as relating that journey to Josef Matthias Hauer’s work. The main part of the chapter defines the principal feature that set Schoenberg apart as a twelve-tone composer: the ‘musical idea’, and illustrates the musical idea as an overarching framework in an analysis of the Prelude from the Suite, op. 25. It then explains how Schoenberg’s followers and successors moved away from the notion of ‘idea’ as framework toward other modes of organization.

INTRODUCTION

My mother's side of the family came to India as refugees from East Pakistan in 1947. As a result, we grew up with what my brother and I coded as ‘stories of relentless lament’. But some of the Partition lament narratives were also stories of bravery and heroism. Among those, an oft-repeated one was how our grandmother crossed the border with her four daughters, an infant son and a box of gold. When land is lost, gold offers the only hope as security for fleeing families. But these heroic stories quickly morphed into family intrigues and outright fraud, often by the close relatives whom one trusted the most. And there were gendered stories of jealousy: who got or did not get which piece of jewellery or how much gold, from whom! Gold possession and its emotionally fraught distribution are the staple of the familial bonds (and their breakdown) in India. Gold is most contentious when dowry prestations are calculated. Yet, as in my family, until the idea of this book took shape, they are so quotidian that they easily escape academic scrutiny. Gold dominates our rituals and customary exchanges and, at the same time, it functions as a quasi-currency and store of value. It constitutes the lifeblood of women's inheritance.

Through a multidisciplinary study of gold in India, this volume connects a reconnaissance of the roles of gold in familial and gendered wealth with a range of key issues in political economy. It shows how exploring the quiddity of gold offers a perfect plot to deepen our understanding of the socially regulated Indian economy.

Study of ancient warfare has become increasingly the domain of specialist historians of war. This book sets itself against that, insisting that wars are political, social and cultural events, not simply military events – and that this war, in particular, because we have such rich source material in Athenian literature, epigraphy and archaeology beyond Thucydides, provides an exceptionally good lens through which to examine a society, polity and culture under pressure. In this, this book differs from past studies of the Peloponnesian War which, almost without exception, have essentially rewritten Thucydides. By contrast this book tries to examine the Peloponnesian War not only as a textual event but as an historical event. The book therefore looks at the war as a war, with causes and a course, but also as a manifestation of the entanglement between Greek cities, as a product and shaper of empire, as a political upheaval, as a challenge in political thought, as a reshaping of the way the local and wider world was understood and as a religious crisis.

Who was God for Schoenberg? And what did Schoenberg believe was the necessary human response? Schoenberg’s spiritual and intellectual path was long and winding, often iconoclastic, shaped by antisemitism and personal losses, and always characterized by a deeply personal quest for a transcendent truth – an Ideal or Idea [Gedanke] – that was at the same time intuitively known but inexpressible by human means. The path ultimately led him to a passionate Zionism, an unshakeable belief in ‘one, eternal, all-powerful, invisible and unrepresentable God’, and a corresponding ascetic spirituality that survived both inward anguish and political persecution.

Schoenberg frequently betrayed a certain anxiety over his position within music history and especially within the Austro-Germanic canon. He acknowledged Johannes Brahms as a seminal influence on his musical style, in particular regarding phrase construction, metrical manipulations and methods of motivic development. Brahms served as a role model for the young Schoenberg and loomed large in his later teaching and theoretical investigations. Furthermore, Brahms proved fundamental to the ways Schoenberg navigated his own shifting national, musical and religious identities (especially after Schoenberg’s emigration from Nazi Germany in 1933). This chapter explores these three avenues of influence and ends by flipping the two protagonists around, interrogating Schoenberg’s role in the critical evaluation of Brahms’s music and legacy.

Introduction

Energy systems in India are dominated by fossil fuels at present, and a major share, amounting to 48 per cent, of the total energy supply, is contributed through imports. Therefore, the dynamics of energy systems can have serious repercussions for the Indian economy. In this chapter, a methodology has been developed for providing a macroeconomic foundation for analysing development and mitigation pathways for India, which involves a two-sector KLEM (capital [K] and labour [L], energy [E], and non-energy goods [M]) model ‘soft-coupled’ with a bottom-up AIM)/Enduse. The insights from the analysis can further be used to set up a multi-sector economy-wide model.

Energy systems in India are hugely dependent on fossil fuel imports, with energy domestic production1 amounting to only 48 per cent of the total primary energy supply (IEA, 2019). Further, growing energy service demands are expected to cause a rapid rise in domestic energy consumption. Also, given the submission of NDCs, energy systems in India are in transition (MOEFCC, 2015). This scenario can lead to serious macroeconomic repercussions. Therefore, the economic set-up of energy systems is required to assess the development and mitigation pathways. This chapter aims to investigate the macroeconomic framing of energy systems under the BAU scenario, which is based on the current policy framework of the government. For this purpose, the method of ‘soft-coupling’ of the two-sector KLEM model and bottom-up AIM/Enduse model has been introduced.

Global capitalism is facing a systemic crisis that will involve ongoing disintegration rather than a sudden collapse. The study has outlined a theory of global capitalism's exhaustion. The most likely scenario is a new round of capitalist expansion through digitalization that momentarily restores growth and profit rates yet aggravates the underlying contradictions that drive the crisis. Radical redistributive and regulatory reform advocated by sectors of the transnational elite may attenuate social polarization, expand markets, and mediate intra-capitalist competition and interstate conflict, but only for a time being. China will not become a new global economic anchor to world capitalism. As the crisis deepens, capitalism's extermination impulse is rising to the surface, as seen in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the spread of mega-imprisonment around the world, and the hardening of a global police state. A global revolt is underway but where it is headed is not clear. The future may involve a worldwide fascist dictatorship, a global reformism, a revolutionary rupture with capitalism, or the collapse of global civilization, depending on how collective agency and contingency play out.

Why did I come to write this book? Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, reminds us that ‘we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts’. I was born about a couple of kilometres from Qadirabad Headworks Colony (in the district of Gujranwala–Punjab), one of Pakistan's largest 1971 wartime Bengali internment camps, which a former internee described as a place in ‘hell’. This residential colony, located on the bank of the Chenab River, was established in the 1960s by the governments of Australia and New Zealand for the workforce who worked on the construction of Qadirabad Headworks under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. I grew up playing cricket on the Qadariabad Headworks Colony School field in my early teens, and I remember going to drink water from a nearby nalka (traditional water pump). There was a rusted water tank, with the inscription ‘J [Joi] Bangla’ on it. I have heard stories about ‘Bengali qaidi’ (prisoners) being imprisoned in the colony. One story is that a Bengali was shot by a camp guard while attempting to flee from the colony and was buried in a nearby graveyard. As a boy I did not have the orientation to understand most of the ‘stories’ about ‘Bengali qaidi’; however, their residing in the colony has always intrigued me.

During the research for my previous book, The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, I found documentation about the 1971 wartime events in West Pakistan, the opposite of what I had anticipated to seek out.

A survey of several neuroscience models of consciousness shows, supported by numerous measurements and experimental data, that consciousness and brain processes are intimately connected. Quantum physical approaches to consciousness are purely speculative and experimentally unsubstantiated.

This chapter highlights Schoenberg’s encounters with art, literature, politics and religion in Vienna, the city where he spent more than half of his lifetime and where he made his first steps as a composer. With his broad interests, Schoenberg profited from the diverse, international metropolis that affected his world views and artistic work. Social democratic ideas and the workers’ movement were influencing him as well as Jewish culture, embedded in the fall of the Habsburg Empire and rising antisemitic ideas. Vienna’s coffee houses as meeting points for artistic circles, a vivid music scene, as well as the visual arts such as the Secession, Jugendstil and Expressionism, were equally inspiring for his artistic output.