Part I, ‘The Dispensary’, focuses on the consumables on Sturmy’s ship – sweet wines and spices – reflecting on their medicinal, spiritual and commercial value. Chapter 1 analyses Eucharistic images which presented sweet wine as the Christian blood of the Holy Land, providing an ethnonationalist rationale for the essentialised Christianity of the lost crusader territories. Sweet wine was revered and regulated as a category distinct from ‘ordinary’ wines. Archaeological evidence of excavated Frankish winepresses shows that winemaking in the crusader kingdom was a major, organised industry. Sweet wines were first imported to England from these settlements, and subsequently were traded by Italian merchants.

Chapter 6 provides an analysis of the impact of diasporic state-building and its legacy for Iraq, asking what kind of state the diaspora helped to build. Analysing the effects of elite and civil society mobilisation shows how the legacy of diasporic state-building is still felt today and how it has shaped the relationship between state and society in significant ways. This chapter also briefly explores differences in diasporic mobilisation for state-building over time between the United Kingdom and Sweden. With each political period during Iraq’s nascent democracy, opportunities shifted and were reinforced by homeland political dynamics. Charting diasporic state-building over time underscores the patterns and trends that have emerged within the diasporic transnational field to reveal the hegemonic identities, actors, and movements being shaped between Iraq and the diaspora. This two-way transnational flow not only creates attachments, allegiances and loyalties but also has significant implications for the future of the Iraqi state and the Iraqi nation. Finally, the chapter briefly explores the transnationalism of second-generation Iraqis and their commitment to Iraq. It investigates the effects of events in Iraq on their identities and senses of belonging, as well as political transnationalism towards the country.

This book has discussed the power, responsibility and accountability of the US President, examining the Founders’ intentions and the very different presidency we have today. The President is more powerful and less accountable than the Founders ever imagined. Responsible exercise of presidential power today depends more than ever on the character of the person who occupies the presidency. Americans for good reason have less confidence in the constitutional checks and balances the Founders anticipated would restrain abuse of presidential power.

The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

Between 2015 and 2022, the Venezuelan economy was crumbling to an extent otherwise only seen in war-ridden economies. This collapse is mostly attributed to failed economic governance and the collapse of the oil sector, the most important contributor to the country’s foreign income. However, starting in 2017, the US imposed sectoral sanctions limiting financial transactions and oil and gold exports from Venezuela. The main debate about the effects of the US-imposed sanctions has been about their relative responsibility for the plummeting oil-production. This chapter instead discusses the impact of sanctions on the Venezuelan non-oil private sector. Sanctions affected companies through a credit crunch and severe limitations in access to supplies and markets. The sanctions have had the overall effect of informalizing and increasingly criminalizing the Venezuelan economy, while we also see the emergence of a new business elite with close ties to the government. We argue that in the case of Venezuela, sanctions were counterproductive as they had strong negative impacts on groups sharing the cause of those imposing the sanctions. In this case, US-imposed sanctions weakened and divided the private sector (as much as the Venezuelan opposition), which has been a main supporter of the political opposition supporting the US goal of regime change.

On the afternoon of May 9, eighty-five skirmishers of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry were subjected to an “ironing parade”: In front of their comrades, they were stripped of their uniforms, placed in shackles, and marched off to jail. On the next day the revolt began. According to an official report, the spark for the violence was the haranguing of the remainder of the regiment on the previous night by local prostitutes (so-called frail ones) of the sadr bazaar, who challenged the soldiers’ manhood for not defying the British and freeing their brothers in arms. This chapter examines how the gender-inversion taunts of the prostitutes became a staple of “Mutiny historiography” and gradually found its way into the immensely popular “Mutiny fiction” of Flora Annie Steel, only to ricochet back into modern historical scholarship. The chapter also considers an important, competing set of depositions by sadr bazaar “Cashmerians” (high-status concubine-prostitutes), collected by the police superintendent for the North-Western Provinces, indicating that news of an impending revolt was circulating mere hours before the onset of violence.

This chapter defines data-intensive research in the context of the English language and explores its prospects. It argues that data intensiveness extends beyond a single digital method or the use of advanced statistical tools; rather it encompasses a broader transformation and fuller integration of digital tools and methods throughout the research process. We also address the potential pitfalls of data fetishism and over-reliance on data, and we draw parallels with the digital transformation in another discipline, specifically biosciences, to illustrate the fundamental changes proposed as a result of digitalization. The lessons learned from other fields underscore the need for increased multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of broader digital infrastructures. This includes investments in enhanced computing power, robust data management processes, and a greater emphasis on replicability and transparency in reporting methods, data, and analytical techniques.

In the summer of 1787, the young American republic was in a moment of crisis. After eight years of wars to gain independence from the British, the American experiment, despite its high-minded goals, was close to failing. The United States’ first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, had left the thirteen states largely to manage their own affairs as quasi-independent states. The dispersion of power among the states had led to a variety of issues, including dueling foreign policies between the states; each state having its own currency, which made trade between the states and with foreign nations nearly impossible; an inability of the central government to impose taxes to pay off war debts; a reliance on state militias rather than a professionalized military controlled by the central government; and a lack of executive leadership in the central government.

This chapter attempts an overview of some of the legal issues raised by the practice of unilateral sanctions. It revisits the issue of the legal validity of coercive measures, using as its starting point the principle according to which the targeting state is seemingly entitled to sever economic relations with the target. Applicable treaty obligations or other customary law or general principles of international law (such as the principles of nonintervention and self- determination) may restrict such assumed freedom to impose sanctions. Economic coercive measures may however be legally justified where they constitute countermeasures, in the meaning of the 2001 draft articles on the responsibility of states. The chapter then reviews certain cases where unilateral sanctions have actually been subjected to legal challenges, either by the targeted state itself, or an affected third state, or private parties. This encompasses a variety of dispute settlement mechanisms, including interstate dispute settlement options, such as the International Court of Justice, international arbitration, regional jurisdictions such as the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights, and human rights treaty bodies. Finally, the chapter addresses the issue of countermeasures adopted by targeted states in reaction to unilateral sanctions.

In this chapter, a Lockean theory of intellectual property (IP) grounded in labor, desert, and a “no harm, no foul” rule is presented and defended. Building on Locke’s proviso that property claims are legitimate when acquisitions leave “enough and as good” for others, it is argued that intellectual works meet this condition by creating value without worsening others. By situating intellectual property within Locke’s broader framework of individual rights, it is argued that protections for authors and inventors are morally justified. Addressing key objections – including issues of baseline comparisons, the scope of rights, and challenges posed by independent creation – the theory is illustrated and refined. Also considered are the implications of adopting systems that allow perpetual IP rights. Lockean principles provide a robust moral foundation for systems of copyright, patent, and trade secret protection, ensuring respect for the natural rights of authors and inventors.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.