Mercy is the will to relieve another’s suffering. Justice is the will to give another person what he deserves. Sometimes, giving him what he deserves makes him miserable. Moreover, even apart from punishment, people do suffer. These facts make it difficult to see how mercy and justice can coexist. Yet according to the Tradition, they do. The claim is not merely that God is sometimes just and sometimes merciful – but that He is always both in every act at every time. How could this even be possible?

Although woodblock printing of books has an earlier origin in China, Korea and Japan, the invention of printing with movable metal type that began in Europe in the middle of the 15th century was truly revolutionary. The innovation of printed books spread rapidly and stimulated the process to democratise knowledge as the medieval world transformed into the early modern, with new genres and audiences for books established in just a few decades.

At its simplest, the Market Studies discipline is based on the idea that markets are organized – which is one of the reasons why Market Studies scholarship often overlaps with organization studies (Ahrne, Aspers and Brunsson 2015; Geiger and Gross 2018; Palo, Mason and Roscoe 2019). Though often decentrally and organically evolving, this organization typically is at least partly the result of deliberate shaping, engineering or design efforts by some market actors. Much attention in Market Studies has been given to acts of market making, which we define here as the multi-actor efforts of creating a market organization through socio-material assemblages according to certain organizational principles and directed towards certain goals. These efforts typically result in what Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon (2010) encapsulate through their famous notion of ‘market socio-technical agencements’, or market STAs (or, even shorter, mSTAs).

This chapter considers how we might approach the intertextual relationship between two highly fragmentary texts, in this case Sophocles’ Judgement, a satyr play that dramatised the Judgement of Paris, and the epic Cypria in which that mythological episode featured. The exiguous textual remains of both works are taken as a prompt to consider intertextuality in its broader sense, namely the interrelationship of texts in ways that go beyond direct verbal allusion. The framework of possible worlds is employed to conceptualise the relationship between satyr drama and the world of epic and tragedy on which it draws, suggesting that the latter may be thought of as an actual world on which the alternative world of the former is predicated. Using this as a model of intertextuality allows us to examine the movements of the satyric plot as it opens up and closes down possibilities for radically alternative outcomes. In this reading of Judgement, we see Sophocles engaging with both the Cypria and that epic’s own intertextual network, with the satyrs acting paradoxically as both disruptors of the mythical tradition and a force that supports the story reaching its traditional conclusion.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

Introduction

The Constitution of India promises equality of status and opportunity to the citizens. It entrusts a specific duty on the state to minimise inequalities in income and eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities through social welfare. The aim of the social welfare provisioning by the state is to promote equality of opportunities – with a view to rectifying opportunity gaps of particularly disadvantaged citizens and groups – so that their wealth and earning inequalities are kept to a minimum. Such provisioning has to be secure and sustainable to meet the mandate of equality contemplated under the Constitution. In fact, the state is mandated to secure a decent standard of life, including social and cultural opportunities, for all workers through their work.5 It is, thus, the state's constitutional duty to pursue equitable outcomes for all workers irrespective of the nature of their work and their organisation. This is a broader mandate than the achievement of a decent life through market-based employment relationships. It is a mandate of equity wherein no worker should be left behind in achieving a fulfilling life through work. At the same time, this constitutional mandate is not a guarantee of work. The aim is the achievement of the decent life by means of work. If work – that is, human agency – should be the basis of an equitable decent life, the state must also secure social provisioning linked to work in order to facilitate the decent life of workers when work (including opportunities to work) falls short of delivering such a life. This specific constitutional concern for workers is an instance of the more general concern for the equitable treatment of disadvantaged citizens and groups through social welfare.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the Constitution creates a space for the operation of workers’ individual agency through market exchanges. This is important from the constitutional perspective because individual agency is the basis of the ideal of worker-citizens, as analysed in Chapter 1. However, as noted earlier, the worker-citizen is not an exclusively individualistic ideal. The ideal also signifies a deep relationship with the state. The Constitution entrusts the nation-building initiative to worker-citizens and expects them to be industrious in this collective undertaking. Thus, in spite of the prima facie focus on individual agency, there exists a deep social relationality to the idea of the worker-citizen.

This chapter provides an in-depth study of composition algebras over commutative rings, which we carry out in the more general framework of conic algebras (called quadratic algebras or algebras of degree 2 by other authors). We present the Cayley–Dickson construction and define composition algebras as unital nonassociative algebras that are projective as modules and allow a non-singular quadratic form permitting composition. We use this construction to obtain first examples of octonion algebras more general than the Graves–Cayley octonions and to derive structure theorems for arbitrary composition algebras. Specializing, it is shown that all composition algebras of rank at least 2 over an LG ring arise from an appropriate quadratic étale algebra by the Cayley–Dickson construction. Other examples of octonion algebras are obtained using ternary hermitian spaces. We address the norm equivalence problem, which asks whether composition algebras are classified by their norms and has an affirmative answer over LG rings but not in general. After a short excursion into affine (group) schemes, we conclude the chapter by showing that arbitrary composition algebras are split by étale covers.

This chapter considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.