The chapter traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a move that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. The chapter proposes new watery co-ordinates for mapping Irish romanticism via the cases of Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.

Perhaps the most debated question in Arnauld scholarship is whether Arnauld follows René Descartes in holding that God freely creates the eternal truths (the creation doctrine). In this chapter, I offer the first systematic treatment of this issue in Arnauld’s early texts from the 1640s. I begin by distinguishing between two versions of the creation doctrine: the metaphysical and the epistemic. According to the former, God in fact freely creates the eternal truths, while according to the latter we do not know whether God creates the eternal truths, and we should not say that God did not create the eternal truths. I then trace Arnauld’s view through the early texts. I argue that in his earliest texts Arnauld does not hold either version of the doctrine, but likely holds a version of voluntarism in line with his early nominalism and I also compare his early view with Ockham’s. I then argue that in the later texts from the 1640s Arnauld’s view changes and by 1648 he likely held the epistemic creation doctrine.

Chapter 5 layers in investigation of notions of empire and longevity, examined here through the lens of more mundane and pervasive structures—its streets and public highways—to reckon with the attenuated and amalgamated temporalities that these infrastructures construct through the accumulation of large- and small-scale acts of maintenance and repair and the referencing of those interventions by milestone monuments in the extra-urban landscape.

This chapter explains the origins of the Estates General, in practice from the 1484 meeting, and how deputies were chosen, how the meetings of the Estate General operated, and why kings convoked them in its 1560, 1561, 1576, 1588–1589, and 1614 meetings. It also explains the differences between the Estates General and meetings of provincial estates and bailiwick assemblies.

Chapter 1 considers dual transformations – how cadets at West Point became officers, and how immigrants enlisted to become soldiers – and follows these groups to war in Florida. It argues that officers graduated from the military academy with deeply held beliefs regarding what it meant to be a leader in the army family – a stern father to enlisted men and the Native peoples whom the army considered its wards, and a committed protector of supposedly harmless women. Soldiers, many of whom joined up soon after arriving in New York City from places throughout Europe, had other ideas and asserted their privileges as white men, often resisting officers’ efforts to impose discipline.

The Sustainable Development Goal for Health and Well-being (SDG#3) faces major challenges in reaching its 2030 targets, largely due to funding gaps. The pandemic has further strained fragile health infrastructure, reversing progress in life expectancy and maternal mortality reduction. Traditional funding – government spending and aid – falls short of demand.

This chapter explores game-changing solutions to unlock health capital for the Global South, revealing why private investment – common in energy and infrastructure – remains underutilized in health. It examines how blended finance, impact investing, remittances, and corporate ESG capital can transform funding. With real-world examples, it illustrates how catalytic finance can bridge shortfalls and offers a roadmap for policymakers, investors, and changemakers to rethink health finance and mobilize toward a healthier, more equitable world.

The human standpoint and what sets it apart from the standpoint of non-rational animals is discussed. Some distinctions are also drawn between “lower” and “higher" representations of objects in terms of how much they involve of the cognitive apparatus. Additionally, it is discussed briefly how the human standpoint contrasts with the God’s eye viewpoint of traditional metaphysics. This brings us to a distinctive framework for empirical cognition of objects, namely, space and time as human forms of intuition – rather than God’s absolute “sensoria,” as in Isaac Newton. The framework gives rise to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves that comes with Kant’s Copernican turn. However, what is to be defended in subsequent chapters is a special variety of direct realism in philosophy of perception, and, thus, a deflated version of the “transcendental” side of Kant’s position. Even within mere empirical realism, with transcendental idealism bracketed, space can be seen as a form of perceiving, in so far as perceptual content is organized in a space-like manner and mirrors the layout of a spatial, perceived scene.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was composed of a patchwork of different polities. In the aftermath of the early nineteenth-century Napoleonic wars (1803–1815), the Ottoman state began to expand its control over its hinterlands. The violent centralization by three succeeding sultans between 1839 and 1876 might be compared to the centralization efforts of Germany, France, and Italy. In each of these cases, independent or semi-independent principalities were seized by the expanding power centers of Berlin, Paris, and the Piedmont. The processes that unfolded across Eurasia bore striking similarities due to three technologies. These technologies – firearms, steamboats, and the telegraph – were used to centralize Ottoman authority in the mountains. Through these technologies, the Ottoman state was able to first conquer and then, over the course of decades, entrench state rule in areas that had hitherto been autonomous. From the point of view of the inhabitants of highlands, this period of centralization or reordering (Tanzimat) represented nothing short of a violent conquest by the state. The Ottoman conquest of the mountains laid the groundwork for subsequent violence by dividing mountain people against each other.

The conquest of the mountains was represented in very different ways. Within a year of the violence, two broad stories had coalesced. As the Ottoman state monopolized the legitimate use of violence, it also sought to monopolize the use of narrative. Through tight control over the medium of print, it censored narratives deemed dangerous or seditious. Zeki Paşa, the commander of the Fourth Army, wrote the legitimized account of the Sasun violence. His account whitewashed all Ottoman culpability and placed the blame on Armenian "bandits." The other story emerged from the British press, which was not a monolith. The liberal press looked with suspicion at the Ottoman government and with sympathy at the Armenian population of the Empire. The conservative press urged the public to consider the Sultan as a well-meaning ruler and a key ally against Russian aggression. Some conservatives cast doubt on Armenian sources as suspect due to their "racial propensity" for deception. Two experienced journalists were able to reach the Ottoman east and reported detailed accounts based on interviews with Ottoman soldiers and Armenian survivors. The account of an Ottoman-born missionary became the contrasting narrative to the legitimized narrative of the Ottoman state.

This introduction begins by explaining the role of consumers and consumption in both pre-industrial and modern economies, with particular emphasis on the decisive role of the peasantry. The book is framed within a paradigm shift that recognises medieval peasants as key agents of social and economic change. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the connection between consumption, material culture, and living standards in scholarship, identifying gaps and unanswered questions that this book seeks to address. It also highlights the significance of food-related possessions in the material culture of ordinary people, the region under analysis (the Kingdom of Valencia), and the sources under examination (probate inventories, public auction records, and others). The introduction concludes with a general outline of the book’s four parts and presents the central argument: that peasant decision-making as consumers during the later Middle Ages had a positive impact on the overall economic development of a leading Mediterranean polity – thus revealing the power of peasant consumers.

This chapter uses the distinctive element of modern theatre architecture, the proscenium, as a means to consider the distinctive apparatus of the modern theatre, a machine that locates the actors and the spectators within a technically administered representational economy. From the invention and deployment of gas and then electric lighting in Europe – systematized in Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus – in the 1860s to the pervasive digitization of sound, lighting, and climate in the modern theatre, the structure of the event of theatre is increasingly understood as a place for the quiet, silent, and darkened consumption of images of action. Drawing on plays from Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview to Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words I, Play, and Catastrophe, this chapter situates the “black box” of modern theatre alongside the “black box” of modern technologies, as an instrument theatricalizing the human at the interface of input and output.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.