Making money from plantations meant engaging in the circuit of West India trade regulated through a mercantilist system that protected the interests of the ‘mother country’. Long needed to demonstrate to his metropolitan readership that Jamaica brought great wealth to Britain and that the production of sugar depended on slavery. The circuit of the West India trade connected England, West Africa and the Caribbean through a complex set of relations, at the heart of which sat the merchant house. Long’s Uncle Beeston headed the West India house of Drake and Long in the City of London and Long was well aware of the centrality of merchants and the use of bills of exchange to facilitate the sugar and slavery business. Given the increasing criticism of the conditions of the slave trade by the early 1770s, he attempted to sanitize it. The merchants used legers, accounting and numeracy to distance themselves from the realities of slavery. They controlled the system of credit and debt on which this mercantile capitalist formation depended.

ERISA converts pension claims from unsecured contract rights (that are implicitly contingent on the long-term financial health of the sponsor) into property rights by the requirement that defined benefit plans be funded and insured. The defined benefit plan funding, insurance, and termination rules illustrate the tensions and trade-offs between ERISA’s principal policies, particularly the delicate balance between the statute’s worker protection and pension promotion impulses. In response to public outcry over defeated worker expectations from terminated underfunded plans, Congress might have simply mandated periodic, simplified disclosure of the plan’s funded status and the sponsor’s financial condition, leaving it to workers to determine how much risk they were willing to bear and to take steps to protect themselves. Instead, Congress required systematic advance funding of accrued benefits, insisted that employers stand behind their pension promises by outlawing disclaimer of liability for unfunded benefits, and instituted a mandatory government-run insurance program to guarantee most pensions in the event that an underfunded plan is terminated and the sponsor is unable to make good the shortfall.

Chapter 15 places Ilf and Petrov’s reaction to American Indians in the context of Soviet nationalities policy. We can see in Ilf and Petrov’s insistence that the American government made “intentional” mistakes in its treatment of Native American peoples yet another example of their tendency to apply Soviet categories to American realities. Doing so, they provided oversimplified depictions of both American Indian policy and Soviet nationalities policy. The shortcomings of their analyses notwithstanding, reconstructing Ilf and Petrov’s encounters and observations in the desert Southwest opens a revealing perspective on the role of racialized difference in Soviet and American understandings of ethnic minorities. Behind this shared sensibility lay a long history of Russian–American anthropological exchanges that was coming to an end as Ilf and Petrov crossed the United States.

I now have a special interest in Alzheimer’s disease. For nearly 25 years, I practiced general neurology in Portland, Oregon. Some of my patients had dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that causes severe cognitive impairment affecting memory, language, motivation, and mood, interfering with everyday activities. There are several diseases that can cause dementia, including Lewy body disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal degeneration, and vascular dementia, but Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause, accounting for 60–80% of cases. In 2013, I retired because I had developed mild cognitive impairment (MCI) that was soon shown by biomarker testing to be due to early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. I suddenly wore two hats – that of a retired physician with a lot of experience treating Alzheimer’s disease and now a person living with the same disorder.

Chapter 2 focuses on what Ilf and Petrov astutely identified as the American strategy of disparaging communism by associating it with ethnic and racial minorities. Focusing on the story of Alexander Gumberg, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian empire who helped to facilitate Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the chapter analyzes how in the wake of the post-World War I Red Scare, Jewish immigrants negotiated the popular and official tendency to conflate “alienism” and “radicalism.”

This chapter focuses on the social bonds shaped by the mutual interests and co-dependency of Jerusalemite institutions and the city’s burgess population. It shows that by the middle of the twelfth century, the connections between the city’s burgesses and the chapter of the Holy Sepulchre formed a quasi-communal structure that employed mechanisms familiar from western Europe. These relationships forged between the burgess community and the Holy Sepulchre laid the necessary infrastructure to increase the level of social cohesion of a newly formed urban society that was otherwise not yet consolidated. While such mechanisms can be paralleled to similar structures that evolved during that period in the West, in Jerusalem they needed to cater to the unique character and highly diverse social composition of the city’s population.

Chapter 4 focuses on an institution central to the administration of the Hieronian state: the agricultural tithe collected annually from the cities subject to Hieron’s authority.

This chapter describes the main traits of the prevailing view on corruption. In particular, the current consensus view on corruption is all but monolithic, and at its “soft edges” we find themes that in fact deserve center stage, such as the elusive and contested nature of the concept. For example, although a narrow concept of corruption has predominated, it is acknowledged that the concept is elusive and its nature contested. Furthermore, it is frequently recognized that reference to corruption may have a certain degree of instrumentality, and specifically, that an anti-corruption discourse may be utilized as a means to settle scores with political adversaries. Another related theme at the edge of the current debate concerns the relationship between corruption and other social phenomena. On one hand, much effort has been dedicated to understanding the causes and effects of corruption. However, it is often recognized that the concept of corruption, being elusive, is also multifaceted and cannot be considered in isolation. The book intends to move these themes from the edges to the center of the debate.

ERISA strictly regulates fiduciaries. While ERISA’s fiduciary rules were abstracted from state trust law, several important departures exist. Congress adopted a broad functional definition of fiduciary so that all decision makers – not just asset managers (traditional trustees) – can be held accountable. Importantly, however, decisions by employers respecting the design, establishment, or modification of an employee benefit plan are not fiduciary acts for they do not implicate program management (the so-called settlor versus trustee distinction). ERISA specifies a stringent set of fiduciary duties, including four major obligations: loyalty; prudence; compliance with plan terms that do not violate ERISA; and (generally) investment diversification. Plan provisions that would excuse fiduciary breach (exculpatory clauses) are explicitly barred. In addition, certain transactions involving insider dealings with the plan are prohibited regardless of fairness or whether loss ensues. Fiduciary liability with regard to participant-directed investments has received careful attention from both courts and regulators and is specially examined in the chapter.