The landscape of contemporary religious ecology is presented in this article as a variety of responses to disenchantment and what Lynn White identified as the theological roots of environmental ruin (Biblical divine transcendence and human exceptionality). The various positions are mapped in terms of those who deny divine transcendence and make nature, either as actually or only potentially infinite, the highest (pantheists); those who deny divine unicity and return to a pre-Christian, “enchanted” nature (neo-pagans); and those who defend in various ways the ecology of the Biblical account of creation (Jewish, Muslim, and Christian monotheists).

The Introduction provides an overview of the Caribbean, its Indigenous peoples, particular colonial and slave histories, as well as migrant and immigrant pasts, all presented as reasons regarding why each island/country is culturally and musically distinct. Understanding Caribbean history is essential to understanding the musics of the islands. This introduction provides that broad summary of Caribbean history, emphasising its binding relationship with the music of the islands – a necessary task for understanding and appreciating forthcoming chapters of the book.

Modern Black horror literature and film depict the complex mechanisms of social death threatening contemporary African Americans. Drawing on slavery to metaphorize social death, texts like Linden Hills and Stigmata, films such as The House Invictus and popular media like Lovecraft Country and “This Is America” also reveal how the lure of the American Dream seduces African Americans into colluding in their own suffering and the suffering of others like them. Yet even as slavery is presented as a point of historical horror, it is also presented as a source of ancestral knowledge, as African American artists rewrite the history of Black slave resistance to urge modern audiences to a much needed and long-overdue revolution.

We have little information from external sources about the order in which Plato composed his dialogues. In the mid-nineteenth century, scholars began to study stylistic affinities among certain groups of dialogues, conjecturing that stylistically similar works were composed during the same period of Plato’s life. A consensus among scholars working independently of each other emerged, according to which the Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws were placed in a discrete chronological group – thought to be late, in part because we have external evidence that Laws is a late work. In recent decades, computer analysis has aided the investigation of Plato’s word choice and style. These studies can also address long-standing doubts about the authenticity of some works attributed to Plato, including his Letters. Using a variety of techniques, the Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus can also be put into a chronological group that comes before the late dialogues but after the other dialogues. Some scholars have sought to use stylometric measures to sort the earlier dialogues, but there is not much basis for any such arrangement.

Studies of trade are predicated on the antithesis between ‘personalised exchange’ (the Network) and ‘arms-length exchange’ (the anonymous Market). As regards ancient trade, the putative incongruity between the two has informed the view of the supremacy of personalised exchange, and the concomitant absence of market exchange. In historical analyses, furthermore, trade networks are appraised solely for their role in the distribution of raw materials and commodities. This chapter challenges these views. Focusing on a formalised kind of network, the association, it first charts the diffusion of traders’ associations to, and their integration in the economic life of, eastern Mediterranean commercial centres. Then, it investigates the mechanisms that enabled associational networks to act as fighters of trade constraints, distance-shortening entities, bridge builders between state/fiscal concerns and private profit, co-determinants of routes and prices, and as producers of knowledge and trust. Formalised networks, it is concluded, helped trade to break out of its lone-peddler mode and to amalgamate with a wider organisational world, whose newly fashioned business behaviour approximated that of the firm. In all this, this chapter is in alignment with the more recent trend among social scientists to consider networks as integral parts of market models of the economy.

This chapter demonstrates how decolonisation serves as a crucial point of reference in this book. Each chapter has unpacked ‘the colonial encounter’ – that sustained collision of ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds, from the mass movements of people (many taken into the Caribbean against their will) to imperialism’s continued economic, political and social conquests – through music analysis, thereby addressing the visibility of issues confronting the colonising methods and scope of music scholarship of previous scholarship on the Caribbean and Caribbean music.

Northern Greece is much less well known than regions further south, and the Black Sea area is rarely referred to in works about historical economies. Despite this lack of modern curiosity about the region, its importance in economic terms cannot be underestimated. The southern parts of what is now Ukraine and Russia were one of the great bread baskets of the ancient Mediterranean, and merchants from various Greek islands, and coastal cities of the Aegean, shipped foodstuffs (wine, olive oil, nuts, fish products) in the opposite direction. Surviving written and archaeological evidence offers a very broadbrush picture of these relations. Inscriptions and graffiti from a limited number of exporting, recipient, or transshipment centres (notably Kallatis, Methone, Olbia, Pistirus, Thasos, Pantikapaion), give more detail and nuance, as well as pointing towards dimensions of these economic relations that have not fed back into the dominant economic models. The economic power of some players, notably Byzantium and Pantikapaion, as well as rulers of inland states, including Thrace, and cities of the Hellespontine Straits and Bosporus, deserve greater recognition. Lead letters and contracts, as well as commercial graffiti, also provide important data on the infrastructure of trade.

In the mid-1860s, as Britain enjoyed global power thanks to coal-fueled industrial capitalism and as American industrialization was poised to take off, George Perkins Marsh of Vermont in America and William Stanley Jevons from Liverpool in Britain published books that warned unsustainable use of natural resources threatened to impoverish future generations. Their Reformed Protestantism upbringing, descended from forebears’ Puritanism, had instilled in both Marsh and Jevons perspectives and values that informed their analyses and solutions. Since their publication, their books’ reputation has risen with concern for the environment and about limits to growth. They remain valuable and relevant today.

This chapter argues that American horror is defined both by its “paraliterary” status and by its representations of the bloodied body in pain. Unlike the more culturally prestigious category of the Gothic, which typically dwells on the crisis of the rational mind, horror has tended to appear in culturally maligned or ephemeral forms and focus on corporeal pain, violence, and distress. Horror's focus on the body, it is further suggested, stems from the modern American state's withholding of freedoms according to embodied characteristics: race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. The historical appearance of horror narratives often correlates to crisis and tensions surrounding the expansion of the civil and political rights that centrist liberalism promised, so that when previously excluded or marginalized groups begin to demand inclusion and recognition of their past disempowerment, horror becomes a medium especially electric with these concerns.

There is one fundamental argument in the Republic for the conclusion that justice is the greatest good. It begins in Book II; although adumbrated in Book IV, it is not completed until Book IX; and it draws essentially on material in Books VI and VII about Platonic forms, knowledge, and philosophical training. Justice consists in the rule of reason over spirit and appetite, but to understand the value of this state fully we must see how it is instantiated in the philosopher. Goodness consists in order, and by cognizing and loving forms (the most orderly objects there are) the philosopher possesses the highest goods. A fully just person is a creator and lover of orderly relationships among human beings. This condition exists to some degree in all just individuals, but it is most fully present in those who understand what justice is – philosophers.

From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.

The Greek world from ca. 750 onwards saw the establishment of wealthy elites, the widespread use of chattel and other slaves, and the occupation of new territories across the Mediterranean, all of which laid the groundwork for later developments. Elite property owners exploited the labour of the free poor, thereby adding to their own surpluses while keeping levels of consumption in the wider community minimal and archaeologically invisible. Only when and where social unrest or outright civil war led to restrictions on exploitation, and when new trading opportunities emerged around 600, did a middling class begin to establish itself, and to create demand for a range of staples that they could not produce themselves. In the late sixth century, the economic and social structure of the classical Greek world took shape, as regional and local specialisation and trade networks reached a level that enabled significant – if unquantifiable – per capita growth. Not all parts of the Greek world shared equally in these developments. Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly retained a polarised social structure of leisured elite and slave workers and continued to aim at agricultural self-sufficiency, institutionalising key features of the old predatory regimes that other Greeks were leaving behind.

This chapter demonstrates the critical synonymy of horror and capitalism in American literary narrative. Beginning with colonization before accelerating into the period of exponential growth from around the Civil War through the Great Depression, the chapter looks to scenes of indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, urban industrialization, unemployed immiseration, and finally to the reactionary suppression with which capital protects its interests. The guiding hypothesis is that horror obtains into all of these crucial areas of the economy because capitalist accumulation is, in all of its forms, a catastrophically exploitative relationship between humans that depends on sensuous creation and so requires the productive grist of blood, brains, and bodies.