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When will government elites prepare for natural hazards? Existing research posits that governments will respond to disasters, but rarely have incentives to prepare for them. This Element argues that disaster preparedness can, and does, occur in the context of both motivated ruling elites and a capable state. Ruling elites can be mobilized to lead preparedness efforts when there is a risk that past exposure to hazards will lead to political instability in the face of a future hazard. Where elites anticipate a threat to their rule in the face of a future hazard, due to substantial past exposure and significant opposition strength, they will be motivated to engage in disaster preparedness. The quality and character of these efforts subsequently depend on the government's capacity to coordinate the design and implementation of preparedness plans. The Element tests this argument using a medium-N, country case study approach, drawing on evidence from ten countries in Africa and three in South Asia, as well as subnational analysis in India.
This book offers a major new economic history of India from the reign of Akbar in the sixteenth century to India's post-independence integration into the global economy. Using concepts and theories from economics and economic history alongside extensive new data, Bishnupriya Gupta builds a new framework for understanding the economic impacts and legacies of British rule. She charts India's transition from precolonial economy to colonial rule and evaluates its economic performance from a comparative perspective, particularly in the context of the Great Divergence between Europe and Asia. Finally, she examines India's post-independence economy and the evolution of social and economic inequality through to the turn of the twenty-first century. By taking a long view, the book sheds new light on the persistent effects of historical institutions as well as the impacts of policy-driven changes. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the long-run evolution of the Indian economy.
Thomas Reid was a theist and a philosopher; yet the exact relationship between philosophy and theology in his works is unclear and disputed. The aim of this book is to clarify this relationship along three lines by exploring the status, function, and detachability of theism with respect to Reid's philosophy. Regarding the first I argue that belief in the existence of God is, for Reid, a non-inferential first principle. Regarding the second I argue that theism plays at least six different roles in Reid's philosophy. And, regarding the third, I argue that, despite this, theism is largely detachable from Reid's concept of human rationality and philosophy. What emerges is a picture of the relationship between philosophy and theology in which both inquiries are motivated by natural human curiosity, and both are founded on principles of common sense.
People from different places use different words for things, even everyday things such as carbonated beverages (e.g. soda, coke, pop) or bread roll-based sandwiches (e.g. hoagie, grinder, sub). Regional variation in vocabulary is one of the foci of dialectology, a subfield of linguistics that examines the geographic distribution of specific words, along with distributions of different pronunciations and grammatical constructions. This Element will provide readers with a basic understanding of traditional dialectological study and will demonstrate through examples (audio, text, maps) how Linguistic Atlas Project research has changed and expanded over time. Readers will be introduced to the key concepts of dialectology with a focus on the North American Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) and its materials. This Element will also discuss today's LAP with reference to third-wave sociolinguistics, outlining the ways in which the LAP has changed over time to meet the needs and goals of contemporary sociolinguistic study.
Provenance has been one of the major scientific applications in archaeology for a hundred years. The 'Golden Age' began in the 1950s, when large programmes were initiated focussing on bronzes, ceramics, and lithics. However, these had varying impact, ranging from wide acceptance to outright rejection. This Element reviews some of these programmes, mainly in Eurasia and North America, focussing on how the complexity of the material, and the effects of human behaviour, can impact on such studies. The conclusion is that provenance studies of lithic materials and obsidian are likely to be reliable, but those on ceramics and metals are increasingly complicated, especially in the light of mixing and recycling. An alternative is suggested, which focusses more on using scientific studies to understand the relationship between human selectivity and processing and the wider resources available, rather than on the simple question of 'where does this object come from'.
Equality is a global factor of prosperity in democratic societies. In this Element, thirty years of newspapers and magazines form the basis of an intersectional study on how different social actors are described in Czechia. A bird's eye perspective points to the news being very white male-oriented, but when scrutinising further, some results differ from previous studies, giving insights on linguistic othering and stratification that may be a threat to equality. The methodology can be used for most languages with a sufficient amount of digitised, annotated and available texts. Since more and more text is being gathered to form datasets large enough to answer any question we might have, this Element helps uncover why we should be careful about which conclusions to draw if the words put into the data are not adapted to the relevant register and context. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
What is the metaphysics of gender about? Metaphysics is the study of what there is and what it is like. On this conception, questions in the metaphysics of gender would be about the existence and nature of gender. That is, the metaphysics of gender would be about whether alleged gender categories such as being a man, a woman or an agender person are real features or kinds, and if so, what their nature is. In recent years, the metaphysics of gender has received a lot of attention and has shifted from being a rather marginal part of metaphysics to being a growing area of interest. Moreover, growing attention to the metaphysics of gender and the social domain have given rise to fruitful methodological questions about what metaphysics is about and what are the best methods to pursue metaphysical inquiries. This Element offers a survey of recent discussions of these questions.
Over the course of the twentieth century, states engaged in cooperation through international organizations at unprecedented levels. However, the twenty-first century has featured the emergence of next-level forms of cooperation: international organizations working together. This pattern is especially apparent among economic international organizations, which often pool resources and expertise to jointly implement programs in member state territories. Cooperative Complexity argues that such cooperation is politically efficient but not necessarily economically efficient; it helps geopolitically aligned organizations enforce their preferred policies but can drive inefficient economic outcomes. Combining a general theoretical model with quantitative, qualitative, and experimental research designs, this book disentangles the complex ties that connect international organizations. In doing so, it reveals how a deeper understanding of the supply side of international finance is critical for gaining insights about the form, effectiveness, and likely future of global economic governance.
Dignity and rights are pervasive ideas. But how exactly should we understand them? Although philosophical theories of dignity and of rights typically proceed independently of each other, this Element treats them together. One advantage of doing so is that we can see a deeper unity underlying the familiar difficulties of standard accounts of dignity and rights (Sections 1 and 2). A second advantage is that understanding how many of the difficulties stem from the reductivist structure of the standard accounts lets us envisage a non-reductivist alternative. Drawing from the metaphysics of kinds and dispositions and from social ontology shows that dignity and rights are fundamental and interdependent normative properties. As pre-conventional properties (Section 3), dignity and rights mark a distinct type of value and function dispositionally, directed to actualization through recognition by others. As social properties (Section 4), they specify the normative status and entitlements constitutive of social kinds.
Once fidelity and equivalence are abandoned, how can successful translation be understood? Risk management offers an alternative way of looking at the work of translators and their social function. It posits that the greater the cultural differences, the greater the risks of failed communication. What can be done to manage those risks? Drawing on the ways translators and interpreters handle intercultural encounters by adjusting what is said, this essay outlines a series of strategies that can be applied to all kinds of cross-cultural communication. Practical examples are drawn from a wide range of contexts, from Australian bushfires to court interpreting in Barcelona, with special regard for the new kinds of risks presented by machine translation and generative AI. The result is a critical view of the professionalization of translation, and a fresh account of democratized translation as a rich human activity in the service of cross-cultural cooperation.
This text provides an advanced introduction to the modeling of competitive financial markets, encompassing arbitrage and equilibrium pricing of financial contracts, as well as optimal lifetime consumption and portfolio choice. Notable features include its coverage of recursive utility in discrete and continuous time and several results not previously available in book form. Each chapter concludes with a set of exercises, with solutions available to verified instructors. Ideal as a graduate-level course text, this book can also serve as a valuable reference for researchers and finance industry practitioners. Readers with a finance focus can use the text to build analytical foundations for a significant component of the economics of financial markets, while readers with a mathematics focus will find a well-motivated introduction to basic tools of stochastic analysis and convex analysis.
Infrared spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between infrared radiation and matter. Its application to the characterization of archaeological sedimentary contexts has produced invaluable insights into the archaeological record and past human activities. This Element aims at providing a practical guide to infrared spectroscopy of archaeological sediments and their contents taken as a dynamic system, in which the different components observed today are the result of multiple formation processes that took place over long timescales. After laying out the history and fundamentals of the discipline, the author proposes a step-by-step methodological framework, both in the field and the laboratory, and guides the reader in the interpretation of infrared spectra of the main components of archaeological sediments with the aid of selected case studies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Monotheism implies a God who is active in creation. An author writing a novel provides a better analogy for God's creative activity than an artificer constructing a mechanism. A miracle is then not an interruption of the ordinary course of nature so much as a divine decision to do something out of the ordinary, and miracle is primarily a narrative category. We perceive as miracles events that are extraordinary while also fitting our understanding of divine purpose. Many miracle accounts may remain problematic, however, since recognizing that a given story purports to narrate a miracle does not determine whether the miracle occurred. This Elementweighs competing narratives. In doing so the understanding of the normal workings of nature will carry considerable weight. Nevertheless, there can be instances where believers may, from their own faith perspective, be justified in concluding that a miracle has occurred.
This chapter reviews the 2-category of small multicategories, including three important special cases. These are pointed multicategories, left M1-modules, and permutative categories with multilinear functors. These variants are related by various free, forgetful, and endomorphism functors that will be used throughout the rest of this work.
This chapter presents the current state of research in multimodal Construction Grammar with a focus on co-speech gestures. We trace the origins of the idea that constructions may have to be (re-)conceptualized as multimodal form–meaning pairs, deriving from the inherently multimodal nature of language use and the usage-based model, which attributes to language use a primordial role in language acquisition. The issue of whether constructions are actually multimodal is contested. We present two current positions in the field. The first one argues that a construction should only count as multimodal if gestures are mandatory parts of that construction. Other, more meaning-centered, approaches rely less on obligatoriness and frequency of gestural (co-)occurrences and either depart from a recurrent gesture to explore the verbal constructions it combines with or focus on a given meaning, for example, negation, and explore its multimodal conceptualization in discourse. The chapter concludes with a plea for more case studies and for the need to develop large-scale annotated corpora and apply statistical methods beyond measuring mere frequency of co-occurrence.
Chapter 3 shifts to the period in which the constitutional debates following the revolution of 1688 gave way to a long period of greater political stability. The Tories were ousted with the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714, after which the Whigs settled into power under the leadership of Robert Walpole. The chapter first shows how the Whig oligarchy was opposed by a new generation of ‘commonwealthmen’, notably Trenchard and Gordon, and by a more conservative opposition led by Bolingbroke, who appropriated many ‘commonwealth’ themes. Next the chapter surveys the success of the Whigs in countering these opponents and cementing themselves in power. After their triumph over the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 the Whigs presided over an outpouring of patriotic sentiment. They were congratulated for repudiating arbitrary power, granting the people a voice in making the laws and guaranteeing their basic rights, and thereby ensuring that Britian was genuinely a free state.
One of the key challenges of regulating internet platforms is international cooperation. This chapter offers some insights into platform responsibility reforms by relying on forty years of experience in regulating cross-border financial institutions. Internet platforms and cross-border banks have much in common from a regulatory perspective. They both operate in an interconnected global market that lacks a supranational regulatory framework. And they also tend to generate cross-border spillovers that are difficult to control. Harmful content and systemic risks – the two key regulatory challenges for platforms and banks, respectively – can be conceptualized as negative externalities.
One of the main lessons learned in regulating cross-border banks is that, under certain conditions, international regulatory cooperation is possible. We have witnessed that in the successful design and implementation of the Basel Accord – the global banking standard that regulates banks’ solvency and liquidity risks. In this chapter, I will analyze the conditions under which cooperation can ensue and what the history of the Basel Accord can teach to platform responsibility reforms. In the last part, I will discuss what can be done when cooperation is more challenging.