So far, Christianity in Mizoram has been understood as having a specific birthdate: 11 January 1894, the day two Christian missionaries from London carried the world religion - along with technologies of writing, education, and print media - into the foothills. Despite the centrality of forest animals and spirits to everyday life in the past, the roles of forest-dwellers in this story have drawn little more than a cursory glance in historical writings. This chapter paints a different picture. The story of the Christianization can be seen afresh by paying attention to both continuity and change in older human relationships with the forest as well as by taking seriously both vernacular sources and the environmental knowledge of uplanders. Ecological transformations and catastrophic collapses in animal populations attended the arrival of the colonial state in the late nineteenth century, alongside the mass ‘vermin’ eradication schemes of the early 1900s. The changes wrought during this period altered the most historically significant of human relationships in the Lushai Hills - those with other animals, plants, and non-human beings. In this complicated ecosystem, these shifts both shaped and mirrored changes in upland society towards modern institutions: a cash economy, state rule, missionary and state medicine, and, most importantly, the near total conversion of the human population to Christianity from the early to mid-twentieth century. It was through the actions and reactions of specific forest species, and through changing human relations with them, that Christian missionaries first become relevant to upland people.

This chapter maps the vast web of German-language theatres that connected Central European audiences around the year 1800. Using periodicals and missives written by those active at these institutions, it investigates how the network functioned in practice as well as how it was imagined across vast distances. It explores the mobility of theatre companies to at once redraw the theatrical map of late eighteenth-century Central Europe and challenge perceptions of oppositional court and public music cultures. The Reich's theatrical network simultaneously existed in the imaginary thanks to print culture and a reading public. While touring companies made the journey from one performance location to the next, readers could be transported to theatres scattered across the Empire with the turn of a page. This rendered the network as much a political and theatrical reality as an imaginary realm, where the bandwidth of data was as important as the institutions, personnel, repertoires, and developments the information conveyed. The Empire’s musico-theatrical complex – both physical and imaginary – was the foundation upon which a shared imperial repertoire could be cultivated.

As discussed in Chapter 8, while the exiled section of the Iranian Kurdish movement experienced massive decline in its activity and was forced to passivity (kampnshini), the Kurdish civil society has in the 1990s and more recent decades innovated and experienced a new trend, known as the era of flourishing NGOs and civil society associations. Though emergence of this trend has been argued to be a development that emerged as result of the reform era under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005), the evolution, politicisation and discourse of Kurdish civil society has been unique to this region and has cherished Kurdish nationalism, culture and language. However, as this chapter highlights, another aspect of this development is that through the latest two decades Kurdistan has entered into a new phase of securitisation, expressed through mass arrests, persecutions and executions of Kurdish journalists, civil society and human rights activists, etc. Securitisation of the Kurdish region has been a development intensified through Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s (2005-13) and Hasan Rouhani’s presidencies (2013-).

As discussed in Chapter 8, while the exiled section of the Iranian Kurdish movement experienced massive decline in its activity and was forced to passivity (kampnshini), the Kurdish civil society has in the 1990s and more recent decades innovated and experienced a new trend, known as the era of flourishing NGOs and civil society associations. Though emergence of this trend has been argued to be a development that emerged as result of the reform era under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005), the evolution, politicisation and discourse of Kurdish civil society has been unique to this region and has cherished Kurdish nationalism, culture and language. However, as this chapter highlights, another aspect of this development is that through the latest two decades Kurdistan has entered into a new phase of securitisation, expressed through mass arrests, persecutions and executions of Kurdish journalists, civil society and human rights activists, etc. Securitisation of the Kurdish region has been a development intensified through Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s (2005-13) and Hasan Rouhani’s presidencies (2013-).

This chapter examines the way small manufacturing firms in western India began to use advertisement in the print media to develop markets for their goods during the early twentieth century.The chapter suggests that advertising gave small producers an opportunity to create the cultural meanings of commodities far away from the point of production.In many cases, they sought to usurp the role of local mercantile actors in fashioning product meanings; that is, they attempted to disembed the process of meaning construction from their local contexts.The chapter explores how advertisements became central to the operations of three firms involved in making indigenous medicines: Amritdhara, Jadibuti, and Dhootapapeshwa.Though the efforts of small manufacturers to undercut the role of local agents were only partially successful and often led to new forms of embedment, advertising was crucial to the creation of a “vernacular capitalism” that has largely been ignored by scholars.