In the early modern period (1500–1800), shipping and trade within Europe were the domain of individual merchants and small companies organised on a temporary basis. Outside Europe, however, new financial and commercial institutions such as permanent joint stock companies came into existence in order to limit the risks. These large institutions played an important role in inter-continental trade and shipping, albeit that their role in Asia differed from that in the Atlantic, where small companies as well as individual merchants remained the dominant form of organisation. In addition, privateers played an important role in the Atlantic economy in times of war while piracy could flourish in those parts of the overseas world where the Iberian trade circuits bordered on those of France, England and the Dutch republic. The conclusion points to the fact that a direct link between the overseas expansion of Europe and its industrialisation might be difficult to construct, but that the creation of long distance trading companies created the institutional environment that must have facilitated Europe's rapid economic growth after the middle of the eighteenth century.

In this article, I summarize the justification for Ukrainian state sovereignty, in spite of Russia’s claim of the non-existence of such sovereignty. The Russians invaded Ukraine claiming their right to justify their interests. The occupation of Crimea by Russian forces and their declaration of its annexation to Russia was an act of aggression disapproved of by the United Nations (2014). I also outline the nature of the limited war between Ukraine and Russia that is managed by ethnic Russians living in the Donbas region and Russian emissaries.

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

Using water for body treatments has an especially long tradition in many cultures and, is deeply intertwined with Roman and Ottoman culture. However, it is clear that today it is not possible to attribute bathing – not even a specific type of bathing, such as the hammam steam bath – to one particular culture (ignoring the obvious problems associated with trying to delineate clearly between such blurred constructs as a specific culture or as a discrete entity). Thus, the ‘Turkish bath’ is a widely used term introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century or applied to various different manifestations. The term reflects the European perception of Turkish bathing culture, primarily connected with bathing within a hammam complex or – as the Turkish term goes – a hammami. Bathing in the hammam-style is rather a Roman cultural practice, an element adapted and integrated in Ottoman culture and readapted thereafter into modern Western culture. It is often believed that these practices are rooted in the cultural history of the present state of Turkey (although ancient ‘Turkish bath’ architecture famously exists in Greece or Albania, too1). Furthermore, the geographical or architectural nexus between mosques and hammams and, also, the temporal order of Islamic culture (in which visiting a hammam before various ritual occasions is required) have often suggested seeing the Turkish bath as a religious custom.

Innovation has become a leading slogan for world economies, politicians and science policy-makers alike. It is the driving force of Western consumer societies, which have come to expect the new to be replaced by the newest. However, in contrast to mere fads and fashions, the consequences of relentless innovation are real. They manifest themselves in changes in lifestyle, in the ways societies function and in profound changes in outlook and perception. This paper will ask how innovation became so central and which mechanisms sustain it in science and technology, art and individual life. One consequence to be further explored is the relative loss in importance of the individual creative act, with implications on how we view creativity, knowledge production and even the concept of the individual. Another question to be raised is that of the multiplicity of the new: despite the seeming diversity and multiplicity of option, is there also convergence or a process of synchronization at work?

In spite of all their assets and resources, global cities (to be understood as a concentration of global capital players along with a large diversity of other presences) have disorder wired into the urban space itself. There are contrasted understandings of public disorder and of its links with globalization. Some disorder is a necessary step in the adjustment of change. Urban space is then a political resource for all kinds of grievances, given coverage by the media and by the internet. The police are an essential piece in their own interaction with protesters. The ritualized nature of public confrontations should be underlined. France offers a good illustration of this phenomenon with its approach to order maintenance. Police officers’ ability to use or not use force, to distribute social status and to categorize their opponents in dealing with order reveals that the police’s role lies at the root of political order and the claims a state makes upon its people for deference to rules, laws and norms. Recent uprisings unveil the role played by urban space and by the empowerment it provides for people assembled together to make claims. Civil societies’ capacity of resistance to decisions or processes perceived as harmful should not be downplayed. New forms of religious terrorism however mark a new chapter in the links of globalization and disorder. Lots of unknowns emerge and we need to understand and accept unpredictability and even embrace it in order to make sense of it in the future. My assumption is that some current forms of public disorder are not just a repetition of past disorder and that we see new patterns emerging.

The obesity epidemic is now widely recognized as a major threat to health in many different countries. Some surgical therapies for obesity are efficacious and indicate that signals from the gastrointestinal tract are capable of exerting beneficial long-term effects on food intake and body weight. The development of non-surgical therapies targeting this system depends on understanding how food, and the absence of food, in the gastrointestinal tract signals to those parts of the brain that regulate feeding behaviour. What can be called gastrointestinal surveillance systems include both nervous pathways linking the gut and brain, and some gut hormones. Nutrient sensing mechanisms within the gastrointestinal tract determine the release of satiety hormones such as cholecystokinin (CCK), or appetite stimulating hormones such as ghrelin, and offer potential therapeutic targets. It seems that CCK and ghrelin both act on the vagus nerve that links the gut to the brain. Examples of interactions between different factors regulating this pathway are discussed. It is argued that sufficient is now known to indicate that this signalling system can provide new targets for the treatment of obesity.

The article argues that the question of this Focus about national models versus local aspirations must be supplemented with the question of a European dimension. The question is whether a European social model is conceivable in parallel to or beyond the local, the regional and the national models. The article argues that the question of prosperity in Europe must have a reasonable dimension of political redistribution of the fruits of economic growth. The concept of prosperity does not only have a bearing on the economic but also on the social. The article critically discusses the concepts of model and path dependency. Model is seen as a stereotype emerging in the dynamics between reflection on Self and imagination of the Other. Path dependencies are seen as trajectories laid out towards the past for a better understanding of the present, as ex post mental constructions, but they have no or little prognostic value. The argument is for a soft version of path dependency as a heuristic tool as opposed to hard versions with an ambition of prediction. The problem with the concept as such is that it is inscribed in a long tradition of ideals of predictability in social sciences based on a structural instead of a constructivist view of history and society.

What are the reasons for the rapid economic growth of regions and their later decline? Why does the development of a certain region create under-development in another region within a national or global sphere? A central paradigm for explaining such phenomena is core–periphery relations, and the case study presented in this paper is the port city of Thessaloniki and its regressive and peripheral status within the regional (Macedonia and the Southern Balkans), national (State of Greece), and international (the capitalist world- system) spheres during two main political periods: (i) the final decades of the Ottoman regime in Macedonia (1870–1912); (ii) the first quarter of a century in which Thessaloniki integrated with Greece (1912–1936).

The essay discusses the public opinion surveys on the rise of China in the United States, Asia and Latin America since 2010, conducted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Duke University’s collaborative research team headed by the author. It examines the world public recognition of China’s growing influence, their attitudes toward China’s influence, and reactions to the ‘China Model’ and impressions of China’s political, economic, social, and cultural development. These assessments of China’s domestic issues or internal behavior show not only the amount of information and knowledge that the people in various countries know about China, but the intrinsic value judgments and ideological biases that influence their perceptions of China. The essay argues that the rise of China is a complicated phenomenon with a multifarious nature, including material dimensions, such as military power, economic development, and technological innovation, as well as ideational dimensions, such as perception, understanding, or prejudice. Public opinion, attitudes and perceptions of China’s rise are the outcome of dynamic interactions and assemblage of factors, a synergy of material interests, ideational and emotional reactions, and values, ideologies, principles, unraveling themselves against a highly volatile, precarious and contentious geopolitical backdrop, in which the interests of nation-states and individuals became all intertwined and inseparable.

This paper considers the forms of life of old age and the opportunities presented by these forms of life (i.e. optimal ageing) as well as corresponding research programmes into gerontology. Ageing and old age are usually viewed more as a biological, medical and socio-economic problem and less as a form of life that can be optimized and cultivated. Viewed from this perspective, the gerontological research programme is the programme of interventionist science. This, of course, includes natural scientific research, which today is organized along very specialized disciplinary lines. The point to grasp is that the gerontological research programme is an integrative programme, and thus something pursued in an interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, manner. This possibility is supported by the fact that there is apparently no uniform genetic programme that could explain the ageing process and prevent differential ageing. In the introductory part of the paper, a differentiated culture of ageing is discussed, followed by a descriptive part, in which various research programmes are presented. The conclusion takes up some ideas on the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a future science of ageing.

My study draws on the construction of a pro-European identity in modern Romania, a process set in motion by two main engines: a political one (the export around 1848 of the Great French Revolution, in a ‘tamed’ version, to Eastern Europe) and a cultural one (the emergence of Paris as the capital-city of European modernism). Born at the periphery of the continent, the Romanian identity project puts on display a series of insightful dimensions: a logic of homogenization, a centripetal pull towards centralization, linguistic standardization and unity, against any centrifugal forces of cultural difference, a top-down dynamics and, finally, an imaginary self-colonizing drive. As illustrated by the Romanian case, the paradigm of European nationalism opened up new ways of linking nation-building to the needs of modern societies and the interests of professional elites.

In September 2003, in a referendum, Sweden said ‘no’ to the euro. This might have shocked the European political establishments, but for Swedish observers the result came as no surprise. Swedish ordinary citizens were already sceptical of the whole EU project when Sweden applied for membership in 1991; thereafter, Sweden was the only member country with a EU-negative majority in its delegation to the European Parliament. For once the dominant Social Democratic Party in Sweden, otherwise so superbly skilful in forming opinion, had not anchored its EU-policy among the voters. Instead, the politics leading to Swedish membership were a rather Machiavellian process that – in the light of the assumption of politics as rational action – reveals a fascinating internal political game between central figures in the Social Democratic Party.

This article presents a personal perspective on why it is interesting and important to test all kinds of fundamental laws and search for as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions using laboratory-based non-accelerator techniques. Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits.

This paper begins from a definition of the modern polity as characterized by the mutual embedding of politics and media. It sketches the consequences of this state of affairs for 20th century notions of citizenship, arguing that unprecedented knowledge goes hand in hand with more or less complete inefficacy on the part of most citizens. This is the more marked since the ownership of media, defended by those at an advantage as a matter of freedom from partisanship and favour, is now more concentrated than ever before. This bodes ill for citizens whose only foreseeable recourse is to keep up the good but slight work of criticism and intellectual independence.

Stem cells are capable of regenerating tissue cells. They have an important potential use in a wide range of therapies, especially as an alternative to organ transplantation, with the advantage that they can be derived from the patient and thus avoid rejection. Embryonic stem cells are potentially capable of forming all kinds of cells. Their use is controversial however, because they are derived from early embryos and because, if they were to match the patient, they would have to be obtained using the same techniques that could, in theory, be used to produce cloned individuals. This article discusses the uses and problems of stem cell research and therapy.

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the most significant thinkers of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy. His work, notably the two-volume, 1200-page Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West, 1918/22), had a profound influence on the intellectual discourses of the time in Germany and beyond.1 Yet, despite the high esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries, his thought has been seriously under-researched. In English, only four major studies have appeared in the last 70 years.2 This is all the more surprising in that the historical period in which he wrote has been extensively covered by both English- and German-language scholars and that some of the thinkers who drew critically on his ideas, such as Heidegger and Adorno, have become household names in Germany intellectual history.

With the Meiji Restoration the first steps were taken in the third quarter of the 19th century to set up a national system of education in Japan. European educational theories were influential. Samuel Smiles became a reference for moral principles and Western heroes from Socrates to Florence Nightingale were exemplars. The articles explores the complex relationship of Western ideas with indigenous Japanese culture.