This chapter examines the work of Alejo Carpentier, who achieved canonical status linked to the 1960s Latin American Boom but whose body of work registers distinct literary-cultural moments of Cuba’s and Latin America’s almost entire twentieth century and who, unlike many other Cuban writers of his generation, navigated postrevolutionary cultural politics such that he continued to be viewed as a “revolutionary” writer. Drawing on persistent questions about the legitimacy of Carpentier’s claims to Cubanness (he was a childhood immigrant whose first language was French), the chapter suggests that the writer’s prevarications regarding his origins tell us something about notions of belonging and membership in Cuba in the republican and revolutionary periods. The chapter organizes its concise overview of Carpentier’s entire oeuvre into successive periods of Carpentier’s “becoming” – first a Cuban, then a Latin American writer, and then a writer of the revolution.

This chapter investigates the tensions between the so-called cosmopolitan and national realms in works of several writers who departed the island at various points after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, spending much of their subsequent lives in the diaspora in Mexico, Spain, Paris, or the US. Some of these writers had impactful careers in Cuban publications and institutions prior to their departure. Through close readings of the fiction of Nivaria Tejera, Julieta Campos, Severo Sarduy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Jesús Díaz, and Eliseo Alberto, the chapter unpacks the heterogenous travelers’ gazes and experiences that frame Cuban history, literature, and identity at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

This chapter examines Cuba’s most renowned nineteenth-century writer, José Martí, also known as the precursory founding figure of the transformative poetic movement Spanish American modernismo and an essayist, fiction writer, playwright, orator, political activist, and national hero. Connecting sequential key moments of Martí’s personal, intellectual, and political biography with his writing, ideas, and emergent social and political consciousness, the chapter considers Martí as a hemispheric figure whose work intertwines Cuba, Latin America, and the US. The chapter focuses particularly on Martí’s extensive body of journalistic crónicas, the majority of which were written outside Cuba, demonstrating his adept use of the genre’s stylistic and thematic malleability for multiple social and political effects and in the creation of his social philosophy and a hemispheric imaginary.

In this chapter, we ask two questions: (1) Does the constitutionalization of emergency provisions help governments to cope with disasters and other extraordinary events? (2) What particular parts of emergency constitutions fare best? We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.

The Growth of the Tea Industry

The tea industry was the earliest commercial enterprise established by private British capital in the Assam Valley in the 1840s. It grew spectacularly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued to expand in the first half of the twentieth century. Tea production increased from 6,000,000 pounds in 1872 to 75,000,000 pounds in 1900, and the area under tea cultivation expanded from 27,000 acres to 204,000 acres. From the mid-1860s, labour for the Assam Valley plantations was mobilised under the indenture system. Employment in the Assam Valley tea plantations increased from 107,847 employees in 1885 to 247,760 in 1900. At the end of colonial rule, the Assam Valley tea plantations employed nearly half a million labourers out of a total labour population of over three quarters of a million, more than 300,000 acres were under tea cultivation (with a million acres under the control of the tea companies) and 397 million pounds of tea were being produced. The important features of this plantation enterprise were the monopolitic control of private British capital, production for a global market and the employment of a migrant labour force recruited and transported under indenture contracts from different parts of British India.

The Indentured Labour Regime

Having failed to ‘persuade’ the indigenous communities of Assam to work in the plantations, the planters brought labour from other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Recruitment was arranged by British managing agencies based in Calcutta through a hierarchy of local intermediaries known, for example, as arkattis and sirdars. This mobilisation was described at the time as the ‘coolie trade’. Through a process of recruitment, transportation and employment, the colonial plantation regimes transformed Indian agrarian communities into labouring ‘coolies’. During the course of this transformation, their castes and their religious, regional, social and cultural diversities were homogenised under the disparaging term ‘coolie’, which was universally used by planters in plantations around the globe and the colonial bureaucracy. Individuality was subsumed within anonymous ‘gangs’ and ‘muster rolls’ and only survived in the plantation ‘coolie lines’ for the duration of their working lives. Labourers were converted into what James Duncan has described as ‘abstract bodies … that are made docile, useful, disciplined, rationalised, and controlled sexually’.

Another common and significant feature of plantation life under the indenture regime was the immobilisation of the labour force upon arrival.

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TODAY

Trinidad and Tobago is a twin-island republic located at the southern tip of the Caribbean archipelago. Approximately 10 kilometres from the northern coast of Venezuela, the islands are collectively comprised of around 2,000 square miles of land. Tobago is the smaller of the two with a wealth of natural scenic beauty. Trinidad is the agricultural, industrial and service hub of the nation. Both islands have separate and interesting histories. While Tobago has a predominantly homogeneous racial grouping, Trinidad reflects a mosaic of races and cultures, the result of its separate and distinct historical antecedents and heritages (built and natural). This multicultural mix is reflected in existing population statistics, in its philosophical, social, economic, religious and physical landscape and in its artistic expressions. It is manifested in its performative traditions: its fasts, feasts, rituals and festivals. Within this cultural dynamo the Indo-Trinidadian contribution is noteworthy, adding significantly to the rhythm of daily life. This chapter explores what has been, and what continues to be, the role of the Indo-Trinidadian in shaping this dynamic, syncretic culture.

Addressing this question requires a definition of the term ‘culture’. Culture in this sense is the sum total of one's norms of behaviour, one's values, attitudes to spiritual and religious development, to society, to family and to personal growth and development, to life in general. It is influenced by our heritage, traditions, legacies and our present circumstances. Culture is thus the vehicle and platform for maintaining historical linkages and for shaping one's environment. It guides and inspires a people, giving them a personality of their own. It influences the environment, provides historical continuity and opportunities and sets out a veritable road map for future development.

Over the years the various cultural streams in Trinidad have assimilated. These streams have included the cultures of the former European colonizers, of the various ‘mother’ countries as well as internal innovations within them. To them have been added both North and, to a lesser extent, South American ideas, values, behavioural patterns, traditions and aesthetics. Today, evidence reveals the existence of a unique, syncretic emerging culture in Trinidad and Tobago. Intertwined with this emergent culture are major identifiable elements of cultural persistence in the Indo-Trinidadian psyche, as is very apparent in their everyday lifestyles. There is a kind of ‘ethnic dualism’ as parallel cultural traits exist side by side.

Who does not know the most basic fact from the science of genetics, that peas and people reproduce in a similar fashion?

It is taught in high schools. Gregor Mendel discovered the fundamental scientific way that organisms breed, and it works the same way in people as it does in peas. Everyone knows that. They may not remember the specifics, with dominant uppercase A and recessive lowercase a – but they know that humans and peas reproduce basically the same way, because they were taught it, and it’s true.

Now I am certainly not going to try and convince you otherwise. But have you ever actually seen peas reproduce? Thanks to the internet, you can readily see videos of plant breeding. The videos of humans breeding, of course, are posted on more restricted internet sites.

This chapter probes the relative absence in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century India of the style of essay that predominated in Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century. Rather than the heterogeneous, speculative, provisional, unmethodical, Montaignian essay, the essay that appeared in India at this time was more structured, more critical, and leaned more heavily into history. This chapter argues that the shape the essay took in India was the outcome of three factors: the condescension of colonial thinkers such as James Mill, who dismissed Indians as outside reason; the Victorian form of the essay that was transplanted to the subcontinent; and an indigenised version that transformed the essay into a vehicle for the writing of histories that was sweeping the subcontinent and was a cornerstone of the nationalist, anti-colonial struggle.

Threespine sticklebacks, numerous species of disease-causing bacteria, and Darwin’s finches have all shown rapid evolutionary change in response to changing environments. Evolutionary ecologists use a variety of genetic and molecular approaches to study evolutionary change in these and other species. Gene flow, genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection can cause evolutionary change within a population, but natural selection is the only evolutionary process that can lead to adaptation. The benefits and costs of adaptations are environment-dependent and reflect evolutionary tradeoffs, so a trait may be beneficial in one environmental context and costly in a second. Natural selection may lead to speciation when genetic divergence is maintained either by physical barriers to gene flow, or by assortative mating of similar genotypes within a population. Evolutionary ecologists compare morphological, behavioral, and, most commonly, molecular characters in related groups of organisms, and use similarities in these characters to create phylogenetic trees that reflect evolutionary relationships.

Nine out of ten modern constitutions contain explicit emergency provisions, describing who can call a state of emergency (and under which conditions) and the additional powers government enjoys under a state of emergency. As states of emergency typically allocate additional powers to the executive, they lend themselves easily to abuse and provide political incentives to declare emergencies. In this paper, we analyze under what conditions government behavior under a state of emergency deviates from constitutional provisions and a de jure/de facto gap thus emerges. Such a gap can be caused by the unlawful declaration of an emergency, the noncompliance with constitutional provisions in the course of an emergency, or the perpetuation of a state of emergency beyond the constitutionally defined length. Based on a novel dataset comprising 853 emergency declarations, 115 are identified as unlawful. We find that events caused by political turmoil are more likely to be followed by an unlawful emergency than natural disasters. Autocratic governments are more likely to renege against the constitution than democratic governments.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Early Rider Empires, from 600 BCE to 600 CE. Compared to running messengers, the Achaemenid empire sharply boosted message speed by using horse relay stations. A major rise in empire area resulted, also helped by split delegation of provincial power. The Xiongnu steppe empire broke the Achaemenid size record hugely but briefly, while Han did so longer but minimally. Rome fell short in size but lasted longer. By population size Han mostly was top, but Maurya and Rome at times surpassed it. Most of these empires profited from religious tolerance, compared to previous theocracies; Sassanids were an exception. The Qin-Han rule established a harsh centralized bureaucracy, while Rome limited it, allowing for local autonomy. Han official contact with Hellenic Bactria in 127 BCE marks the first indirect linkage of states from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

In the context of rapid modernization, urban growth, and immigration, this chapter examines the fiction of Carlos Montenegro, Lino Novás Calvo (both working-class Spanish immigrants), and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (a feminist from a bourgeois background). The analysis elucidates the emergence from the 1920s to 1940s of new urban characters whose stories were brought into Cuban literature by these writers, and these characters’ complex enactment of the intertwining of class, gender orientation, sexuality, and race. The chapter’s comparative analyses of work by writers who all enjoyed promotion by or association with the avant-gardist Minorista group or the Revista de Avance encompass Montenegro’s prison narratives, told through the perspective not of intellectual political prisoners but of working-class inmates who have committed crimes, and exploring complex hierarchies shaping interracial homoerotic love; Novás Calvo’s stylistically inventive narratives of the fluidity of race and class intersections in settings of exploitative heavy labor; and Rodríguez Acosta’s fictional renditions of middle-class women resisting norms of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and heteronormativity.

Over the years, the Serengeti has been a model ecosystem for answering basic ecological questions about the distribution and abundance of organisms, populations, and species, and about how different species interact with each other and with their environment. Tony Sinclair and many other researchers have addressed some of these questions, and continue to work on understanding important biotic and abiotic linkages that influence ecosystem functioning. In common with all types of scientific inquiry, ecologists use predictions to test hypotheses about ecological processes; this approach is highlighted by Sinclair’s research that explored why buffalo and wildebeest populations were rapidly expanding. Like other scientists, ecologists use observation, modeling, and experimentation to generate and test hypotheses. However, in contrast with much biological inquiry, ecologists ask questions that link numerous levels of the biological hierarchy, from molecular to global ecology.

Beginning with a discussion of evaporation thermodynamics, it goes on to discussing factors controlling evaporation, evporation estimation, models of evapotranspiration such as Penman, Penman-Monteith, FAO, Hargreaves, Priestley-Taylor, Blaney–Criddle, Turc, and Thornthwaite, selection of a method, estimation of net radiation, measurement of evaporation, potential evapotranspiration, reference and actual evapotranspiration, and estimation of actual evapotranspiration.