This book draws upon a roughly decade-long research project undertaken as a graduate student and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. The intellectual inquiry driving this research first took root in the summer of 2013 as the campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha election was gaining momentum. As Narendra Modi was appointed as, first, the chairman of the BJP's campaign coordination committee and, then, as the party's official prime ministerial candidate, it became clear that the 2014 election campaign would be like no other. In the weeks and months that followed, surreptitious and ostensibly non-partisan Facebook pages, Twitter (now X) handles, and YouTube channels amassed a cult-like fanbase and began spewing content that ranged from half-truths about the ‘Gujarat model of development’ to blatantly communal propaganda. Shared under the guise of anodyne political humour or as the legitimate rants of the angry Indian voter, this content gradually made its way to my daily social media feed and that of other urban middle-class voters. Next, shadowy organisations such as the Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) and India272+ emerged on the landscape seeking to recruit digital volunteers for their campaigns. 3D hologram rallies and a countrywide digital ‘Chai Pe Charcha’ arrived hot on the heels. Friends, family members and former classmates who were once entirely aloof from the humdrum rhythm of Indian politics were now active participants and spectators of the campaign, enthusiastically imbibing the BJP's digital propaganda. It is with this purpose—to better understand what went behind the making of India's first ‘social media election’—that I began data collection in the summer of 2014. However, social media, as my fieldwork would soon lead me to discover, was only the tip of the iceberg.

Gradually, the object of my inquiry expanded to encompass a wider network of actors, institutions and practices that have come to redefine the contours of election campaigns in India. This was the world of campaign strategists, political consultants, pollsters and social media trolls. I also realised that this could no longer be narrated as a story about the BJP alone; this was about a new grammar of election campaigns that had been adopted by nearly all political parties in Indi

Strategy is a not a word not often used in connection with early medieval warfare ,which is often seen as mere feud or the gathering of loot. This was strongly reinforced by the widespread attitude that military history was a fit subject only for military academies. Only recently has it been recognised that war in this period was the subject of thought, care and calculation. Moreover, early medieval sources are relatively scarce and often pose difficulties of interpretation. And armies had no continuous institutional life of the kind we associate with the formation of strategic ideas. Nor were kings able to impose a monopoly of violence on their followers, for early medieval states were fragile and highly dependent upon the accidents of individual ability. The armies which were gathered were not unitary, but assemblages of diverse elements whose political relation to the sovereign was problematic. But although writing about strategy poses challenges, it is evident that military commanders in this period were not mere bloodthirsty brutes. An army, even a small one, represented a huge financial and political investment whose raising could only be justified by some substantial purpose. But the nature of medieval strategy was conditioned by the political structures which created it. A world where dynastic continuity and political stability were closely intertwined, and where kings were rulers of peoples rather than territories, gave birth to a very different kind of strategic outlook from our own.

This chapter explains how the market process creates the right capital and technology to promote the process of development. It explains how an institutional environment of economic freedom best promotes the process of development and provides empirical evidence to support this view. It then reviews how economic freedom has evolved in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book.

Chapter 13, Germany will collapse (June 19 - July 10) begins with everyone’s eyes on Germany where the uncertainty about the French position towards the Hoover plan increases every day. More generally, politics comes to play a larger role, as Norman increasingly emphasizes that it’s about politics, and Harrison has to take Hoover’s plan into account. At the same time leadership in the epistemic community of central bankers shifts away from Norman toward Harrison, who enters into a dialogue with French central bankers. Tensions arise between Norman and Harrison, as the begin to subscribe to divergent narratives of the situation and what needs to be done. In Germany, the situation gets more concerning by the hour, and Hans Luther travels to London and Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a giant credit to the Reichsbank.

This chapter argues the freedom requires the capacity for self-government or autonomy as one of its components.

The chapter demonstrates that selecting an object of study is a consequential part of doing discourse analysis. Selecting an object of study requires considering many planning and analytic issues that are often neglected in introductory books on discourse analysis. This chapter reviews many of these planning and analytic issues, including how to organize and present data. After reading the chapter, readers will know how to structure an analysis; understand what data excerpts are and how to introduce them in an analysis; be able to create and present an object of study as smaller data excerpts; and know how to sequence an analysis.

Chapter 1 provides a broader picture of electronic evidence and digitalisation. After an overview of the latest EU digital and security strategies and their basic principles, it analyses specific far-reaching legislative instruments based on new ideas of EU criminal law prevention, reaction and cooperation in the digital age. It then analyses the main right affected by the new approach and instruments – the right to privacy – from a historical perspective and a modern understanding through concepts developed initially by the case law of the US Supreme Court. It addresses the question of what legal boundaries are necessary in the digital age for such a right to still be an effective one. Last, the chapter looks at the aspects of digitalisation in the EU criminal law justice area that pose the most questions when comparing digital cross-border cooperation with classical cross-border cooperation based on mutual recognition. It considers judicial (court) authorisation and its meaning, oversight and extraterritorial application of legislation in that regard.

The Elizabethan ‘Botanical Renaissance’ was a movement that touched every sphere of life: the domestic and public; the theological, political and aesthetic; the literary and proto-scientific; and the mercantile, maritime and proto-colonialist. It was embraced by members of every social sphere and took place within changing definitions of the urban and the rural, thereby encompassing people who lived in each of these settings and those who – like Shakespeare himself – lived in both. That is a big claim to make for the role of the humble plant in social and literary history, but it is the claim I will be making in this book and other scholars have begun to offer similar observations.

On 25 June 1950, North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea, commencing the Korean War and aiming to unify the country by forces. On 7 July, when the UN adopted a resolution calling for all possible means to aid South Korea, President Truman announced he was sending in US forces to stop the Communists and expanding his Cold War containment to East Asia. The Korean War became a conflict between China and the United States. To drive UNF out of Korea, Mao sent in 33 divisions, which was only the beginning of Chinese involvement. In April 1951, CPVF launched its spring offensive against UN troops, which put up a strong defence. After the Chinese failure in the battle, the war settled into a stalemate and a more conventional pattern of trench warfare along the 38th Parallel. The Korean stalemate became the longest positional warfare in world military history. This military impasse, from June 1951 to July 1953, has become the most forgotten phase of the ‘forgotten war’. About 45 per cent of all US casualties occurred after truce talks began in July 1951. By 1952, Chinese forces in Korea had grown to a record high of 1.45 million. Realising the huge gap between Chinese objectives and means, Mao became willing to accept a settlement without total victory.

Chapter 4 brings ideas from philosophy, the philosophy of science, and anthropology concerning the debate over worldviews (conceptual schemes) on the one hand and the plurality of worlds on the other. It takes up conceptual and ontological relativism as it pertains to the history of early sciences and the world(s) to which they referred.

“Walking, Climbing, Descending: Negotiating the Landscape” begins with Coleridge’s 1802 tour of the Lakes, culminating with his ecstatic ascent and near-disastrous descent of Scafell. The second section of the chapter explores the 1803 Scottish Tour undertaken by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge, which Coleridge abandoned part way through. Drawing from Dorothy’s journal, Coleridge’s notebooks, William’s manuscript poems and various correspondence, a portrait emerges of their complex and evolving understanding of their responses to Scottish landscape and to the Scots themselves. The third section of the chapter discusses William Wordsworth’s aesthetic fragment on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’, and his struggles to account for his shifting feelings towards the Langdale Pikes. The chapter closes with an account of the climbing and writing of Wordsworth’s neighbour Elizabeth Smith, and, to a lesser extent, his friend Thomas Wilkinson. Wilkinson’s notebook of his Scottish tour served as guidebook for the Wordsworths.

This chapter examines the strategic history of the British seapower state, the last great power to rely on naval power as its primary strategic instrument in peace and war. Maritime strategies reflect the reality that seapower states need to control maritime communications for security and prosperity: that control allows them to attack the shipping, overseas possessions and, critically, the economies of their rivals as an alternative to a land invasion. Military great powers have responded to the maritime threat by building military navies to secure command of the sea, to facilitate the invasion and overthrow of a seapower rival. If that option fails they use naval resources to attack floating trade of a seapower adversary. The Navy become central to national identity.

Between 1688 and 1945 Britain developed and used a unique maritime strategic model that linked strategic decision-making to policy aims, political structures, and economic realities. This strategy enabled Britain, a small offshore island, to act as great power in the European, and later global systems, but it was a fragile asset. Naval power had limited strategic impact, even the purely naval Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century were settled by economics, not sea battles. The combination of insularity and powerful financial instruments enabled Britain to wage long wars of limited mobilisation, but it needed allies to defeat great power rivals. Securing such allies cost money, and restricted war aims. The key strategic concerns were naval dominance, the security of the Low Countries and the legal basis of economic warfare. Whenever possible the Navy was used to maintain peace through deterrence and suasion, war with other great powers was always unwelcome because it would be long, costly and bad for business. There was no short-war strategic option. In war the British Army supported maritime strategy, it was not a ‘continental’ force, and was never committed to that role in peacetime while Britain remained a great power. Britain’s rivals employed a variety of naval strategies to counter or limit the impact of this maritime strategy, an invasion of Britain, arms racing, fleets in being, coastal defences and commerce raiding, but the only method that succeeded was the United States attack that broke the British economy between 1939 and 1945, backed by the construction of an immense fleet. Although no longer a great power after 1945 Britain’s global maritime interests and insular location remained critical aspects of national security.