Chapter 22 investigates Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with Russian immigrants, especially the Molokan, Christian sectarian community, in San Francisco. A comparison of their travelogue with the life stories produced by the nearly contemporary project organized by the anthropologist Paul Radin to survey San Francisco’s foreign-born population offers a means of assessing and contextualizing the writers’ more limited fieldwork. Central to Radin’s project – and also, if less explicitly, to Ilf and Petrov’s journey – was the premise that when cultures came into meaningful contact, people on both sides “acculturated.” The chapter argues that Ilf and Petrov acquitted themselves creditably as amateur ethnographers, pushing against their own presuppositions in their efforts to consider their informants’ perspectives.

Chapter 8 considers how the consolidation of royal authority impacted the agricultural and economic landscapes of southeastern Sicily, paying particular attention to the ways in which the tithe administration may have fostered trade and economic prosperity for the cities of the kingdom.

This chapter identifies the central theoretical-empirical claim of MP, the Merge Hypothesis (MH). It rehearses the motivations for a simple combination operation that takes two objects, combines them in the simplest way possible, and treats the combination so constructed as capable of further combination. I review and explicate the claim that the simplest combination operation would do no more than combine its inputs. This means that the combination operation should not impose a serial order on what it combines, nor should it change the properties of what it combines in any way (as either would involve more than “mere” combination). So construing “simplicity” implies the No Tampering Condition (a principle that forbids changing the structures of the elements combined) and supports the idea that expressions so formed have set-like structure. I further provide a more technical specification of the combination operation by specifying its inductive definition. I then show how to derive a bunch of recognized properties of natural language Gs from this Merge conception of combination and review eight of these, again largely following and elaborating Chomsky’s earlier suggestions.

Chapter 6 takes as its focus the remains of two aboveground granaries that once stood in the agora of Morgantina, one of the cities that recognized Hieron’s authority as king. After a brief discussion of the buildings’ architectural form and function, the chapter explores where the Morgantina granaries fit within the corpus of known Hellenistic granary buildings and goes on to argue they played a central role in the projection of Hieron’s royal authority at the western edges of his kingdom.

A slave society needed different laws from those of the ‘mother country’ and from the earliest days legal systems demarcated between the free and the enslaved. The Whig hegemony based on consent that Long had grown up with could not be practiced in Jamaica: only dominance and coercion were possible. An almost absolute authority for the slave-owner over ‘his property’ was required, but with the additional support, when necessary, of the colonial state. Two years after Long had settled on the island, a major rebellion, Tacky’s rebellion, broke out and was only defeated with the aid of the British army and navy and the Maroons. This hardened Long’s understanding of racial difference and the security needs of a slave society. An active member of the House of Assembly, his representation of it in the History was designed to clear the slave-owners of all blame and he named a particular group of Africans, Coromantees, as the villains. At the same time he struggled with metropolitan authority, believing in the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’. What autonomy could be secured for the colonial state in its mission to defend white planter power?

American Israelis are an understudied but regionally important population in Israel, who use American English as a heritage language. Most heritage language situations previously studied investigate low-status heritage languages rather than high-status heritage languages which function as languages of wider communication. Does the majority language (i.e., Modern Hebrew) influence the minority language (i.e., American English) in this unusual case, as predicted by previous research? This question is investigated through a picture-naming task comparing the speech acoustics of stop production in American English heritage speakers, American olim (i.e., immigrants), and native Hebrew speakers. Results reveal a heritage accent in Modern Hebrew rather than American English, with crosslinguistic influence from the minority language to the majority language. This unexpected result is explained using Flege and Bohn (2021)’s Revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), which argues that phones in a bilingual’s phonetic system are linked, allowing for, and even predicting, this type of crosslinguistic influence.

This conclusion briefly summarises the argument of the book before considering its implications for two connected questions: the 'nature' or 'essence' of statehood under international law and the principle of state continuity. In relation to the latter, it advances a tentative additional principle for political membership that might be taken to explain the presumption of continuity as it applies to contemporary states. It also considers, albeit briefly, the current position of small island states, many of which are at risk of losing their inhabitable land due to human-caused climate change. As regards the nature or essence of statehood, the conclusion takes a somewhat sceptical view of attempts to characterise states in relation to one or more discrete concepts, arguing that not even statehood as political community should be viewed as an exhaustive account of what states 'really' are.