Kerala Is Different … Not the Way You Think

The book began with a one-liner – ‘Kerala is different’. The series to which this book belongs emerged from the intuition that every state in India ‘is different’. Kerala was not more different than Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or West Bengal. Geography and resource endowments, social conditions such as patterns of inequality, politics and markets were significantly dissimilar between the larger Indian states, and sometimes between regions within these states. Scholars doing development or history have not explored the differences enough.

And yet that shallow slogan has had an unparalleled impact on development discourse in the late twentieth century. Why has this one state drawn so much attention in the development scholarship? Because of a misreading of its economic history, the book argues.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the state's economic trajectory can be summed up, if crudely, with a chart with three lines, one measuring economic growth and the other two education and life expectancy. The state's position relative to India fell with the social indices but dramatically improved with economic growth. A preoccupation with social development lacks a strong justification, at least for economic historians of the state. The more challenging task for us was explaining the economic growth divergence with reference to prehistory and the state's geography.

The misreading emerged in the 1980s through an overstatement of human development performance. Many scholars inferred that the state's political ideology was more enlightened and developmental than that of other Indian provinces and that the state government's heart was in the right place. Whether due to the communist movement or Travancore and Cochin's princely heritage, the governments prioritised poor people's access to primary education and healthcare. Others further claimed that the state showed the world that economic growth was not needed for development.

This reading is not wrong. But, historically speaking, it is a naive reading. It is naive for three reasons. First, suppose Kerala was ahead of India in the 1950s and 1960s. In that case, a story of enlightened government does not make much sense because governments were relatively small then, and many factors besides the government were at work behind the initial advances in education and health.

This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

This chapter outlines our book’s contributions to understanding how partisan incentives drive the information-seeking behavior of Congress and its committees. Moreover, it underscores the challenge legislators face in balancing their political roles with the need for expert insights. In this final chapter, we relate our arguments and findings to recent challenges Congress has faced in seeking information in its partisan environment. We propose new lines of research that build on our data and work in our book and emphasize the connections to long-standing issues in American democracy. Our book, empirical evidence, and accompanying analyses promote a new understanding of the dynamics underlying the acquisition and dissemination of information in Congress and, we hope, will stimulate further inquiry into the role of information in shaping public policy in a democracy.

Chapter 8 examines regulatory rules, beginning with an examination of written rules. It underlines the inescapability of interpretive uncertainty and considers ways in which that uncertainty can be addressed, including varying the precision of rules, how they are specified, the publication of interpretive ‘guidance’ (sometimes called ‘soft law’) and the delegation of detailed standard-setting to ‘technical experts’.

In the late twentieth century, television provided more immediate ways of representing the processes of evolution, while the press increasingly seized on debates arising from their human implications. Progress remained an important theme, although the image of a linear ascent to humanity was usually qualified by recognition of diversity. The air of unity promoted in the synthesis era evaporated as biologists explored new and disturbing implications of the selection mechanism, including sociobiology and the notion of the ‘selfish gene.’ Studies of primates were used to throw light on human behaviour. Along with new challenges to the plausibility of the Darwinian theory, the resulting controversies were played out in a blaze of publicity. Darwinism also had to be modified to take account of growing evidence for discontinuities in the ascent of life, including mass extinctions. Creationists presented these ‘Darwin wars’ as evidence that evolutionism was losing its credibility even within science.

In this chapter, we dive deeply into Bohr’s views on (in)completeness and (non)locality. Perhaps the most outspoken and famous respondent to EPR, Bohr is generally thought to be obscure in his reply. We analyse it afresh (at least to our satisfaction), in particular in regard to its argumentative structure, the role of Bohr's examples and that of his 'non-mechanical disturbance'. We also assess its limitations as a reply to Einstein's wider concerns.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Darwinian selection theory was linked to genetics, providing it with a secure foundation, although wider dissemination of this initiative was limited until the 1940s. Historians note that the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ was a rhetorical device to create an impression of unity, leaving the various disciplines involved still functioning independently. Radio now became an important means of disseminating science news, as in the 1959 celebrations of the centenary of the Origin of Species. The new version of Darwinism eroded the plausibility of eugenics and race theory, although these ideologies remained active in less visible forms. Popular accounts of evolutionism now stressed its open-endedness and played down the old assumption that humanity must be the inevitable outcome of progress. Julian Huxley tried to give the synthesis a moral dimension by linking it to his philosophy of humanism, but creationists saw the new initiative in science as a continuation of Darwinian materialism and renewed their attacks.

Currently we may have access to large databases, sometimes coined as Big Data, and for those large datasets simple econometric models will not do. When you have a million people in your database, such as insurance firms or telephone providers or charities, and you have collected information on these individuals for many years, you simply cannot summarize these data using a small-sized econometric model with just a few regressors. In this chapter we address diverse options for how to handle Big Data. We kick off with a discussion about what Big Data is and why it is special. Next, we discuss a few options such as selective sampling, aggregation, nonlinear models, and variable reduction. Methods such as ridge regression, lasso, elastic net, and artificial neural networks are also addressed; these latter concepts are nowadays described as so-called machine learning methods. We see that with these methods the number of choices rapidly increases, and that reproducibility can reduce. The analysis of Big Data therefore comes at a cost of more analysis and of more choices to make and to report.

This chapter will guide a candidate in the core trauma topics that regularly appear in Section 1 of the FRCS(Tr&Orth) exam. The chapter deals with trauma questions providing high quality clinical based SBA questions that provide up to date current thinking in trauma and detailed explanations of management plans along with an evidence based approach to the most appropriate answer.

This chapter outlines the development of the theory of natural selection and the events surrounding the publication and reviewing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, especially in non-specialist publications. The different responses in Britain and the United States are noted. The role of supporters such as T. H. Huxley in reaching a popular audience is explored, although their reservations about the adequacy of the theory are also taken into account. Conservative efforts to present evolution as the unfolding of a divine plan provided a very different way of understanding the general idea of evolution. Many popular accounts failed to understand the difference between Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ model and older ideas of a linear ascent toward humanity, especially when dealing with the issue of human origins. In this area, popular interest in the gorilla as a potential ancestral form distracted attention from some aspects of Darwin’s model, as shown in more detail in Chapter 3. The early evolutionism of Herbert Spencer is introduced and his relationship to Darwinism explained.

The historiography of Nigerian independence from colonial rule has not often considered the role played by trade unions. This chapter seeks to correct this gap in the literature by tracing the history of Nigerian trade unions from the precolonial period to 1960 and beyond. Far from a British import, trade unions were rooted in local craft organizations that predated colonization. The protectionist goals of these organizations informed the development of the first formal trade union in Nigeria in 1912, named the Civil Service British Workers’ Union. This union and others soon expanded their purview from labor conditions to a broader anticolonial agenda, especially because of shared leadership and institutional affiliation with nationalist organizations. As trade unions became politically radicalized, nationalist groups borrowed tactics developed by the unions such as strikes and collective bargaining. Trade unions were instrumental in the nationalist movement and remain powerful engines of social and economic justice.