Over 5000 years, the world population has grown from 10 million to 8 billion. Yet the number of separate tribes and states has shrunk from tens of thousands to a few hundred, despite an increase in the number of states during the 100 years. This book traces these historical macro-trends, contributing a new perspective through multidisciplinary exploration. The present chapter outlines its structure. Population growth was boosted by the population–technology interaction but is now rapidly slowing down, limited by Earth’s ultimate carrying capacity. Hence, today’s centenarians are unique in human history: the world population more than quadrupled during their lifetimes. The number of states has been reduced by empire growth. Empire sizes have increased in three main phases triggered by breakthroughs in message speed: Runner, Rider, and Engineer Empires.

Caribbean migration studies have focused overwhelmingly on the forceful and semi-free movements of Africans and Asians during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as the extra-regional movement of Caribbean nationals to Europe and North America following the Second World War. These studies have done remarkably well in excavating the dynamics so associated with the aforesaid patterns of Caribbean migration, namely how migrants were uprooted from their homeland and transported across the Atlantic and Indian oceans to provide the oxygen of labour on the Caribbean plantations. Studies of migration from the Caribbean following the Second World War show how Caribbean nationals have been pushed out of the region and pulled to developed destinations. Moreover, these studies have provided the fundamental reasons for the leaving and settling of the migrants. They have revealed how the migrants have adapted, settled and even reconfigured the demographics, economics and cultures of the receiving enclaves. Howbeit, studies of migration within the Caribbean pale in comparison to the larger influx during the period of slavery and indentureship as well as out-migration following the Second World War. Still, even when studies are conducted on migration within the Caribbean, they are ethnically imbalanced, focusing largely on Africans and Hispanics. Yet when studies are conducted on Asians, the remigration of them within the Caribbean is largely absent.

The academic exclusionary treatment of Indians in the general Caribbean migration narrative is rather unfortunate since Indians have been on the move since the mid-nineteenth century from India to the Caribbean, within the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to Europe and North America and back to the Caribbean. Crispin Bates and Marina Carter ask, ‘Why did such a large number of Indian labour migrants who had completed one term of service overseas return to India, and then remigrate, or move from one colonial territory to another?’ These scholars espouse that ‘the frequency of remigration, and of onward migration to other colonies suggests considerable enterprise and strategic thinking on the part of labour migrants seeking out opportunities within the interstices and constraints of the colonial labour economy’. Until we understand how wide and complex the remigration of Indians has been, one important aspect of their migratory experience will remain a puzzle and buried in the lower depths of Caribbean migration.

This chapter focuses on the poetry, fiction, and essays of José Lezama Lima, the Grupo Orígenes he cofounded, and its literary journal of the same name, noting their reverberations far into the postrevolutionary era. The chapter encompasses the work and poetics of Lezama, other poets in the Orígenes orbit, and the group’s journals, including their high-modernist esthetic and internationalist reach; Lezama’s view of poetry’s “epistemic role in Western and non-Western cosmologies” and “innate resistance to causal and empiricist visions of time and progress” and the group’s incursions into myth and cosmogony; the canonical or cult status later achieved by many Orígenes poets; and the critical ostracism and resuscitations Lezama and Orígenes experienced in Cuba’s postrevolutionary periods. Lezama’s 1957 essay La expresión américana is central to an in-depth analysis of the Orígenes group’s “grand mosaic of hemispheric and transatlantic creation”; Lezama’s intricate conception of a New World Baroque; and the essay’s projection, as in other writing by Lezama, of a distinctively Caribbean Baroque, even as specific Antillean referents remain unnamed.

Forecasting elections is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Today’s polling rock star is tomorrow’s has-been. It is a high-pressure gig. Public opinion polls have been a staple of election forecasting for almost ninety years. But single source predictions are an imperfect means of forecasting, as we detailed in the preceding chapter. One of the most telling examples of this in recent years is the 2016 US presidential election. In this chapter, we will examine public opinion as an election forecast input. We organize election prediction into three broad buckets: (1) heuristics models, (2) poll-based models, and (3) fundamentals models.

To wit, we have three specific goals here. First, we want to review the activities of the three-hatted pollster. We do this to provide greater context for each type of pollster. Some of us are all three; others are some combination of these. Any pollster worth their salt must at least be a data scientist, or they risk losing credibility.

Second, we explore the role of the pollster in society. Ultimately, what is the purpose of the pollster? In our view, pollsters are critically important in any democracy. We believe this is often overlooked due to the ranking frenzy after every electoral cycle. Here, we put the profession into proper perspective.

And third, we discuss the use of non-survey, or alternative data, inputs as proxy measures for public opinion. We provide a framework for pollsters to think through them in a critical manner. Validation is a key concept which we introduce here – one more tool for the data scientist.

Cities seem to form when state population surpasses 10,000. Over 5000 years, top city populations have remained 0.1−0.5% of world population. The square root law of city population: The largest city population tends to be hundred times the square root of state population. This law held from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE. Constantinople exemplifies it from 400 to 1800. It no longer holds, as the economic reach of major cities surpasses international borders.

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

This chapter addresses the “lost” epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, which was rediscovered in 1836 and has, since then, been considered the first work of Cuban literature, a status that has also been contested. The poem narrates the 1604 kidnapping and freeing of a Spanish prelate, then Bishop of Cuba, by French pirates. The chapter first examines the poem’s archival history, the nineteenth-century debates about slavery and race that framed the poem’s consideration as a foundational work, and the debates into the twenty-first century contributing to the as-yet-unresolved question of its foundational status. The chapter then details Balboa’s imaginative recasting of European Renaissance conventions of the epic genre, in a version distinct to the Americas and with new epistemological consequences in the treatment of Cuban nature and in the literary creation of a distinct local territory of inhabitants, marked by a poetics of community and loaded with cultural heterogeneity.

This chapter complicates Cuba’s contributions to Spanish American modernismo, interweaving close readings of the poetry of Julián del Casal and others in his circle with larger polemics about Cuban poetry that have marked Casal’s critical reception in Cuba into the twenty-first century. Casal, characterized in the chapter as an enduring mystery, a provocateur, and a dissident, wrote journalistic crónicas, as did José Martí. But Casal’s work embraced the more inward-turning estheticist and decadentist modernista tropes drawn from French Parnassianism, which has led to what the chapter portrays as the protracted debate about Casal and Martí as opposites, an overdrawn contrast in this chapter’s view, ranging from attacks on Casal as “exotic” or “Frenchified” to his recasting as an “autonomous agent” who rebelled against literary norms. If Martí rebelled on behalf of others, the chapter affirms, Casal rebelled to free himself, even if it meant denying his body certain desires and habits, an observation pointing to critical initiatives to contextualize Casal as a gay writer, which the essay also examines.

Chapter 3 presented the major theological conceptualizations of the faithful's obligation to provide welfare in a Muslim society. These include such institutions and practices as awqaf (trusts), zakat (annual obligatory charity), and ushr (obligatory charity from irrigated land), khams (obligatory Shia donation to one's Imam), sadqah (donation to the poor or those working ‘in the way of God’), infaq (spending to please God), and qurbani (donated meat of sacrificed animals). We examine, over the next four chapters, the specific practices of Islamic social welfare in Pakistan.

Providing zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam and the one that many Muslims take most seriously; the invocation to pay zakat is made thirty-two times in the Quran, although it begins to appear only in the second year of Muslim life in Madinah. The Prophet Muhammad referred to zakat as the ‘treasure of Islam.’ Without payment of zakat, it has been said, prayers are not meaningful. The recommendation that one should spend in ways that please God (infaq fi sabilillah) is made more than 150 times in the Quran. Infaq receives more emphasis in the Quran than praying or fasting.

Pakistan is home to practices—including pilgrimages to and worship at dargah (shrines) and provision of langar (community kitchens)—that are common to Southern Asia. Pilgrimage to and worship at a dargah is common to Asian Islam, from Iran, where it is known as a mazar, to Indonesia, where it is known as a makam. Bangladesh and India are also home to madaris (Islamic seminaries) and Indonesia to pesantren (Islamic seminaries). And these practices are not unique to Islam. The langar is a central feature of any Sikh gurudwara. Welfare practices based at religious institutions are central to social life throughout Pakistan.

Khairat is in the weave of Pakistan. Like Pakistan and its population, the diversity of charitable activity itself is astonishing. Thousands of associations— of all varieties—are providing welfare services annually to tens of millions of people. Most of these welfare associations are private, operating without support from government, and independent, operating without political affiliation.

In war-torn Afghanistan, ‘one thing that all Mujahideen groups agreed on was Amitabh Bachchan’. President Mohammad Najibullah’s (1987–1992) repeated insistence that Bachchan make a film in Afghanistan attests to the actor’s prodigious fandom. Consequently, Bachchan’s Khuda Gawah (God Is My Witness, 1992, dir. Mukul S. Anand), in which he played an irreproachable Pathan, part of the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, was shot there. His popularity spanned other parts of the world as well: Egypt, parts of the Middle East, Nigeria, and West Asia. Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor known for his Hollywood roles, noted, ‘[T]his Amitabh Bachchan seems to be more popular than me in Egypt.’ Not surprisingly, Bachchan was chosen as the star of the millennium in a 1999 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) poll, beating Lawrence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Robert De Niro, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. Not only was his stardom global, but he also had political and economic clout in equal measure. His near-fatal accident on the set of the film Coolie (1983, dir. Manmohan Desai) summoned prime minister Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, to his bedside and sent the nation into mourning. Two years hence, Bachchan ran for a seat in parliament on Gandhi’s Congress party ticket, winning by a landslide. In the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the Indian cinemascape abounded with Bachchan, earning him the moniker of Hindi cinema’s shahenshah (king of kings).

This chapter spans the mid-1970s to the early 2000s when Bachchan dominated Hindi cinema’s landscape locally and globally, explicating his protean star switching power in the sociocultural, political, and economic realms that enabled him to be a significant change-maker for the film and entertainment industry. The chapter presents a triptych that illustrates (a) the emergent Bollywood network, (b) the key nodes that get added to it in this incipient phase of globalization, and (c) the switching power Bachchan—the king of kings—has within it.

This chapter explores approaches to the theme of diaspora in twenty-first-century Cuban film, demonstrating how archipelagic thinking can help elucidate the transnational connections, translations, and collaborations constituting Cuban cinema and that entail a difficult reckoning with geographical or temporal limits for structuring the analysis of literary-cultural production. The chapter dissects this landscape using four categories – outgoing journeys, returning diasporas, on-island films about migration, and representations of exile from inside Cuba – in an analysis of Juan Pablo Daranas’s Ángela (2018), Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso’s 2018 Un traductor [A Translator], Armando Capó’s Agosto (2019), and José Luis Aparicio’s 2021 Sueños al pairo [Dreams Adrift].

Under the leadership of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian community staged the first non-violent mass movement in South Africa. This involved defiance of unjust laws, courting of imprisonment, boycotts, marches and strikes. In the Transvaal, then under British rule, 3,000 Indians, including more than one-third of adult males and even some children, went to prison and suffered privations between 1908 and 1911. Over a hundred were deported to Bombay and Colombo, often leaving their families behind without support. In 1913, the struggle extended beyond the Transvaal when nearly 40,000 workers, equivalent to over half of the adult Indian population of Natal, struck work. Almost 10,000 were imprisoned, some in mining compounds. Some workers were killed and many injured. Yet in the vast corpus of literature on the Satyagraha campaigns, the treatment of Indian prisoners, both men and women, has not been examined or documented fully.

Existing studies have focused mainly on the leadership of Gandhi and the socio-economic background of the Indian resistance in South Africa. Gendered aspects of the struggle have mainly been documented through a feminist lens seeking to debunk the myth of docile Indian women in the diaspora. Surendra Bhana and Neelima Shukla-Bhatt published poems written in Gujarati, English and Hindi during the movement and produced an interesting literary study of the struggle. In addition, numerous biographies of Gandhi deal with the Satyagraha campaigns, but they are focused on Gandhi, his leadership and spiritual development. However, none of the aforementioned studies has examined, in-depth, the prison conditions and treatment of satyagrahis.

Gandhi’s Collected Works and the Indian Opinion are perhaps the only first-hand insights on the prison conditions of both men and women incarcerated in Durban and Johannesburg during the Satyagraha campaigns between 1907 and 1914. This chapter documents the treatment and impact of prison conditions on satyagrahis between 1907 and 1914. For many resisters, the prison became a site of struggle; it did little to deter or diminish their resilient spirit. They became more defiant amidst the plethora of discriminatory laws and repeated imprisonment. In exploring the incarceration of Satyagraha prisoners, this chapter shifts the focus from the coloniser to the colonised, to the marginalised and subaltern groups, ‘viewing them as important historical actors in their own right’. Clare Anderson, in her study on the 1857–1858 Indian uprising, shares a similar trajectory revealing how prisons became ‘sites of Indian resistance’.

People from LGBTQ+ communities are more likely than the general population to use alcohol and drugs and to be diagnosed with substance use disorder. LGBTQ+ individuals often do not seek or receive the substance use treatment that they need. We explore the substance use treatment trends of the LGBTQ+ population, including the efficacy of current evidence-based practices and group treatments for use with LGBTQ+ clients with substance use disorders. We then discuss the influence of spirituality in the lives of recovering LGBTQ+ individuals, define characteristics of LGBTQ+ affirmative relapse prevention, and provide a sample LGBTQ+ relapse prevention plan. We conclude with a theoretical case vignette.

Ways of Remembering has examined the role secular law plays in the ways in which the Gujarat pogrom is collectively remembered in the New India. In this regard, I worked with two interrelated aims. The first was to offer a critical reading of two memorial narratives of Gujarat 2002 from the disciplinary vantage point of law in/as aesthetics scholarship. The second was to expand the understanding of what constitutes secular law by considering how law and justice are imagined in a broader cultural context, both inside and outside of conventional sources. The book has pursued these aims by developing a methodological orientation that enables the reading of the narrative compact of law and cinema in the making and ordering of collective memory. What has my reading shown, and what is the significance of what has thus emerged? This concluding chapter is organised around these two questions.

I have offered an account of the Gujarat pogrom by unpacking the shared narrative in the texts of the judgments of the Best Bakery case that ran from 2003 to 2012, and in three Bollywood films whose release coincided with this period (2004–13). I have read these texts by developing a novel methodological orientation which I have called the jurisprudential-aesthetic (J-A) approach. This reading has shown that law and cinema, together, are key elements shaping the collective memory of the pogrom. This shared narrative participates in the production, circulation and maintenance of ways of remembering which both condemn the violence and simultaneously facilitate a particular kind of state-making and state-preserving rationality that masks secular law's complicities with religious violence. This rationality is composed by the triad of secularism, legalism and developmentalism.

I locate this inquiry within a temporal and ideological frame called the New India. The first post-pogrom decade is surveyed as a concentrated period of collective memory making. It is in this decade, buoyed by the success of the Hindutva project in Gujarat, that Narendra Modi became India's prime minister in 2014.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.