Institutions play an important role in the management of multilingualism and can have a defining impact on language use. By granting more or less official status to certain forms of expression and language varieties, institutions legitimize some forms and varieties as more desirable targets of linguistic accommodation than others, which can affect speakers’ dominant language environments and influence the selection process of language change. This chapter outlines a socio-political approach to language standardization and interprets selected language policy and planning measures in terms of common mechanisms and outcomes of language contact in three western European states: France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Using the same historical timeline, it proposes a comparison of the circumstances under which national identities emerged in early modern and modern times, state boundaries were expanded through conquest, and more or less cultural homogeneity was achieved and enforced through language use. It is argued that even though ethnolinguistic diversity decreased considerably over time, different institutional responses to multilingualism led to different state-specific compromises that continue to shape language policies and planning in each of the three states today.

African per capita income levels have fallen significantly behind other world regions during the long twentieth century. But despite the outward appearance of economic stagnation, African economies underwent profound transitions. This chapter contrasts African patterns of recurrent growth and contraction, and persisting specialization in primary commodity production, to deeper changes in factor endowments, economic geographies, and institutions governing states and markets. It discusses the periodization of growth cycles in relation to global market forces and colonial and postcolonial economic policies, and questions how the deeper currents of change have affected the capacity of African societies to outgrow poverty.

This chapter documents the long-term trend of economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa region between 1870 and 2010, and analyses both the proximate sources (labour, physical capital, and technology) and underlying sources (geography and institutions) of economic growth. The chapter puts together novel empirical facts at the country level on the long-term trends of key variables in economic development, including GDP per capita, democracy, population, fertility, mortality, migration, labour force participation, human capital, physical capital, and technology. Geography, in particular the abundance of natural resources, shaped the path of economic development in the region through the emergence and persistence of undemocratic political institutions and coercive labour institutions. This is the case for the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Libya, Algeria, Iran, and Iraq. By contrast, countries that are less rich in natural resources witnessed more diverse political development paths, although their upheavals mostly resulted in (presidential) dictatorships.