Evidence for discussing grand strategy in the Roman Empire is extremely limited. In reaction to Luttwak’s thought-provoking book, ancient historians have tended to focus on limitations in the information available to emperors and hence their capacity to determine priorities. Kagan’s reformulation of Luttwak’s thesis to use troop movements as a proxy for strategic decision making does not adequately take into account the personal and cultural considerations that often influenced rulers, and in particular that suppression of internal rivals took priority over external threats. That said, grand strategy remains a useful tool for investigating imperial decision making, especially for emperors such as Augustus and Diocletian, both of whom had to stabilize the empire after protracted bouts of civil war and enjoyed long reigns. It is also relevant to the later empire (after AD 300) when rulers regularly had to balance threats and opportunities on different frontiers against the more limited resources that were available.

The rise and the survival of the Ottoman Empire for six centuries is one of the most important event of the European and Middle Eastern histories. At the apex of the Ottoman conquests in the mid-1500s, Süleyman the Magnificent pushed deep into Hungary and Mesopotamia, as well as making the empire the master of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Later sultans advanced into southern Russia, Caucasia, Persia and north Africa. In concert with these military successes, the empire transformed itself into a sophisticated administrative entity of great strength, which encouraged diversity, culture, learning and religious activity. The Ottoman high tide reached the gates of Vienna in 1683, only to fail because of faulty command decisions and internal deficiencies. While the Ottomans were trying to counter the military reverses, the forces of the socio-economic revolutions in the West and rapidly evolving market economies added new stresses to it. A new generation of sultans and members of the governing elite evolved, who were convinced of the need for modernisation and westernisation (both terms have been used synonymously and interchangeably) and were committed to change in order to keep the empire intact. They did achieve some results but they failed to stop the interventions and machinations of the Great Powers, which sought to benefit from the empire’s collapse. The Ottoman Empire gained notoriety as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and additionally became a target for the forces of ethnic nationalism that fought to dismember it. The First World War became the swan song of the empire. For the first time since the 1680s, the Ottoman Army consistently defeated its European enemies. But it was too late. The empire, bankrupt and blockaded, could not match the resources of its enemies and surrendered.

In chapter 4, Foreign creditors (May 16 - May 25) the actors deal with the problem of raising an Austrian government bond loan, while at the same time Credit Anstalt’s foreign creditors are getting involved. Conflicts begin to disappear between Austrian actors and central bankers and international creditors, and it becomes increasingly clear to the latter that the situation may well be more problematic than they imagined in the first place. On the Austrian side talks of a moratorium upsets central bankers and creditors who favor a guarantee. It’s getting increasingly difficult for the central bankers to emplot a narrative that can make sense of the situation and enable action to dodge the crisis. The fear of contagion becomes widespread, adding to the uncertainty.

Sondheim was an unknown and untested man of the professional theatre when Arthur Laurents suggested him as a possible collaborator on West Side Story. Sondheim had hoped to bring his music and lyrics to the Broadway stage, but Saturday Night (1955, with book by Julius and Philip Epstein) stalled after its main producer, Lemuel Ayers, died in August 1955. With this project stalled, Sondheim heeded the recommendation from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, to seize the opportunity to work with Laurents, Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins. This article attempts to explain the opinions of Laurents and others in the mid-1950s that Sondheim’s lyrics were brilliant but his music left them cold. Sampling his early lyrics and Sondheim’s recordings of himself singing his songs, I show how his music might be considered challenging but would nevertheless propel his words and musical theatre in general to a greater understanding of music’s dramatic possibilities.

Chapter 3 introduces lower-level constituents of the prosodic hierarchy – mora and syllable. The syllable structure is discussed from different perspectives: the role played by the sonority hierarchy and the phonotactic restrictions it imposes on sequences of segments in the syllable; the individual positions such as onset, nucleus, coda as well as prefix and appendix; and the weight of individual segments expressed in moras, leading to relative weight of the syllable itself. It is shown that the number of segments allowed in each position is strictly fulfilled. As for the weight properties of syllables, lax vowels are monomoraic, tense vowels are bimoraic and schwa is non-moraic. The syllable itself can be non-moraic, bimoraic or trimoraic. The chapter ends with a detailed proposal on how ranked OT constraints can account for the sonority sequencing among the segments as well as the restrictions observed in the number of segments that can fill the different syllable constituents. The second part of the OT analysis focuses on the moraic constituency of the segments of a syllable.

In this first global history of strategic practice, we define strategy making (following K. Kagan) as making choices, prioritising means in pursuit of political ends in the context of armed conflict, actual or threatened. The usage of the term took a long time to spread from the East Roman Empire to the Occident, and most civilisations discussed in these volumes did not have a distinct word to describe what they were doing in the modern sense. Yet by applying Kagan’s definition, we see evidence of complex reasoning and prioritisation of means and ways; even the greatest empires could not pursue unlimited ends. Our volumes bring together experts on each individual civilisation and period to explore analogous dimensions of strategy making: who are the enemies, and why? What means are available to them? What are the political strategic goals? And the central questions: how were ultimate and immediate goals formulated, and how were they linked up with military means? What were the enablers and limitations, in terms of geography, resources and other means, which produced distinctive approaches? But also, was there a transfer of ideas and methods? How were they translated, adopted, enacted, imitated and emulated in warfare around the world?

Chapter 3 discusses the fundamentals of backscatter radio communications, analyzes the RFID backscatter channel, its major limitations and mitigation approaches, and presents recent advances including novel RFID quadrature backscatter modulation techniques.

This chapter discusses the many counter-majoritarian actions of state legislatures and state executive branch officials and elaborates the profound impact of those actions on the functioning of US democracy. These include gerrymandering, nine common voter suppression strategies, and various other less-publicized manipulations of the electoral process. Too often, it will be seen, state governments have purposely targeted African American and other minority voters, threatening to undo decades of social progress.

The many years of service evident in the careers of some ladies-in-waiting who received annuities for decades while continuing to complete responsibilities in the royal household demonstrates that the opportunities of court service were valued by many. Such service offered one of the only salaried professional positions available to women in later medieval England, and for many was a true career. Families sought to promote their daughters at court because female servants could seek to gain not only remuneration but also intangible patronage opportunities for themselves, their families, and their associates. Employment in elite households enhanced servants’ loyalty, built and deepened relationships, and also heightened the status of the royals and nobles who bestowed rewards. Including gender in the analysis helps us to recognize the porous boundary between domestic life and political life at the royal court, and, in an era when politics was all about access to the decision-making monarch, female courtiers enjoyed and benefitted from such informal routes to access. Although in service, and always answerable to the needs and commands of their queens and aristocratic employers, understanding the history of ladies-in-waiting underscores how they nevertheless found ways to exercise agency and access political power in medieval England.

In chapter 2, central bankers and their world, I first present the most important protagonists and a few other actors. They include Montagu Norman and Harry Siepmann of Bank of England, George L. Harrison of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Francis Rodd of the Bank for International Settlements. I discuss their background and worldview as they were headed into the 1931 crisis. Having presented these main actors and a few others, I proceed to present their world and how they saw it in 1930 and early 1931. The world was already in the midst of the great depression and private bankers as well as central bankers and other decision-makers were aware that they were dealing with crisis and radical uncertainty that might bring about the end of the gold standard and capitalism. I discuss the actors view of the "present world depression" and how they viewed the gold standard and their options as they got ready for trying to save the world from economic disaster.

This chapter provides a legal explanation for the different homeowners’ association (“HoA”) rates in Shanghai (94 percent), Shenzhen (41 percent), and Beijing (12 percent). Despite China being a unified regime with national law that is supposed to apply across different parts of the country, the local rules applicable to HoA elections differ across the three cities. Beijing has consistently followed national law, whereas Shenzhen adopted its own legislative rules until the passage of the Civil Code in 2020, at which time local rules gave way to national law, and Shanghai has left the choice to individual neighborhoods, with its courts relying on the idea of autonomy in private law to justify local practices that contradict national law. Both the national rule adopted in Beijing and the city rule adopted in Shenzhen have imposed significant decision-making costs on the establishment of HoAs, as well as collective governance problems ranging from parking space allocation to building maintenance. By contrast, the Shanghai approach, that is, allowing homeowners to write their own voting rules into HoA constitutions to reduce decision-making costs and using the courts to safeguard procedures and minority interests, contributes to functioning neighborhood democracy in Shanghai.

The material of central interest to this book belongs to the ancient historical world of the Middle East, specifically to what I have previously and continue to classify as science in Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform texts. Cuneiform texts were my point of departure, but they led me down an unexpected path for the historiography of premodern science in the direction of the anthropology of science. As a consequence, in contrast to previous emphases on historical epistemologies reflected in historical bodies of knowledge, my interest shifts here to historical ontologies reflected in the worlds of the scribal compilers and practitioners of those bodies of knowledge. The shift in emphasis toward ontology, I will argue, can be theorized in terms of worldmaking, best approached by means of an anthropology of premodern science.