Why and how economists have historically studied families is not well understood, neither by those in the discipline, nor by scholars studying families in neighbouring fields like sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. This lack derives from a mistaken view that family economics began in the 1960s when price theory was applied to family behaviour. It is also due to the narrowing of economics from the 1940s in the US, when social reform and advocacy work shifted to the discipline’s periphery. Affirming a contemporary need for gender-inclusive language, while using terms that access historical understandings, the book’s first goal is to show that economists developed methodologies for studying families as a function of how they conceptualised family poverty in different periods. Four historical phases are identified, with economists studying nineteenth-century deficits in family labour productivity in Britain and Europe, inadequacies in low-income family consumption in interwar America, underinvestment in human capital by a post-war ‘underclass’, and gendered injustices in resource distribution experienced by lone mothers, by women and girls in poor global South families, and by queer families. The book’s second goal is to show how family economists prioritised some social problems over others, allowing certain injustices to remain uncontested.

This chapter examines the various tropes and representational strategies used by writers to depict urban and rural spaces and their dynamics, highlighting the constructed nature of place and the intimate relationship between history, place-making, memory, and representation. Drawing on key cultural theorists and urban geographers, most notably Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, Yi-Fu Tuan, Susan Buck-Morss, Kristin Bluemel, and Michael McCluskey, and literary texts such as Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), I discuss different imaginative and creative impulses that underlined the discursive construction of place and space. And with reference to texts published in different cultural contexts and historical moments, such as Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897), and Shen Congwen’s The Border Town (1934), I examine not only the various manifestations of urban/rural dichotomies as invoked in literary works, but also moments when these dichotomies are unsettled or blurred. The last section of the chapter focuses on Alicia Little’s A Marriage in China (1896) and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark (1934), exploring the ways in which the rural/urban constructs engage with questions of colonial politics, resistance, and the ideas of home and (un)belonging.

The sixth volume in The Cambridge History of International Law covers the developments of inter- and transnational laws in early modern Europe (1492–1660). The preface explains how recent revisionism of traditional state- and Eurocentric views on the history of international law impacts the study of this subject and how this is reflected in the volume.

Tribes continue to endure constraints on their sovereignty because relatively few people understand what a tribe is. For example, most people believe tribes are a racial minority with special privileges, when in reality, tribes are separate, sovereign governments. This stems from a lack of knowledge about tribal history. Schools do not teach Indian history; hence, people do not learn about the history of tribal governance and treaties. Learning about Indian history can enrich the school curriculum and help people understand why tribes exist. Additionally, great tribal leaders, such as Chief Standing Bear, can inspire students to fight for justice. At the very least, law students should be taught federal Indian law. Tribes are part of the United States constitutional order. They influenced its structure and were vital to its ratification. Plus, ignorance of Indian law’s history enables outmoded, colonial ideology to continue as the basis of contemporary federal Indian law. Knowledge of Indian law’s outmoded concepts will raise questions about the ethics of relying on nineteenth-century stereotypes to limit tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century.

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.

This chapter illustrates the rise of automated decision-making and surveillance technologies in government, alongside the growing political inequality within Western liberal democracies. It examines the historical development of the use of technology in government, from paper-based systems to increasingly networked electronic systems, culminating in the extensive use of automation and AI in government. It demonstrates the effect of new technologies on vulnerable populations, honing in on social security as a case study. It shows that since the 1970s, the rapid advancements of technologies, combined with the “new public management” ideology, have effected fundamental changes in the processes, structures, staffing levels, and operations of government to an unprecedented extent. To illustrate the significant issues relating to the use of automated government decision-making, the chapter focuses on the government’s use of automation in social security as a case study.

In early 1978, Towards the Great Civilization, the last pre-revolutionary book written by Mohammad Reza Shah, was published amid great fanfare. To be sure, from the early 1970s, he increasingly spoke of this ‘great civilization’ and its elements, a significant number of which are found in his first work, Mission for My Country (1961), in his trial balloon aimed at the ideologization of the monarchy, Pahlavism (1966–1967) penned by Manuchehr Honarmand, and in the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party of Shah and People founded in 1975. Expressing great optimism about Iran’s future, the shah portrayed this Great Civilization as an Iranian modernity superior to that offered by the liberal and capitalist West and the communist East.

This chapter looks at the history of climate change, the failure to act, systemic thinking and truth.