The importance of simple descriptive data was recognised by William Farr, whom we mentioned briefly in Chapter 1 for his seminal work using the newly established vital statistics register of England in the nineteenth century. As we discussed in Chapter 1, this descriptive epidemiology, concerned as it is with ‘person, place and time’, attempts to answer the questions ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’. This can include anything from a description of disease in a single person (a case report) or a special survey conducted to measure the prevalence of a particular health issue in a specific population, to reports from national surveys and data collection systems showing how rates of disease or other health-related factors vary in different geographical areas or over time (time trends). In this chapter we look in more detail at some of the most common types of descriptive data and where they come from. However, before embarking on a data hunt, we first need to decide exactly what it is we want to know, and this can pose a challenge. To make good use of the most relevant descriptive data, it is critical to formulate our question as precisely as possible.

Almost by definition of risk, rare events play a crucial role. We tackle this problem by presenting some basic tools from extreme value theory (EVT). From a statistical point of view, the workhorses are the block maxima method (BMM) and the peaks over threshold method (POTM). Besides giving the mathematical formulation, we exemplify both approaches via simulated examples. Once these tools are in place, we can provide estimators of the relevant risk measures such as high-exceedance probabilities, quantiles and return periods. In a crucial part of the book, we then estimate these quantities for sea-level data at Hoek van Holland near Rotterdam. We obtain estimates, including confidence intervals, for a necessary dike height withstanding a required 1 in 10 000 years storm event. Further applications concern financial data and data from the L’Aquila earthquake. For the latter, we present dynamic models for earthquake aftershocks. After an excursion to the world of records in athletics, we present the signature application of EVT through the story of the sinking of the MV Derbyshire. We show how an application of EVT techniques has saved many lives at sea.

The sixth chapter examines the relationship between coutumiers as texts that describe custom, and custom in practice. The difficulty with discussing this is that the coutumiers only begin to be cited in court records at the very end of the thirteenth century and very rarely even then. This was not unusual for the lay courts of northern France in this period, which cited ‘custom’ and not lawbooks or specific precedents. I discuss the relationship between the coutumiers and representations of practice – as filtered through its documentary record-keeping – in two ways. On one level, this chapter shows how at least some people were thinking about court cases that they presided over, took part in, witnessed or heard about. On another, this chapter demonstrates how the coutumier represents practice differently from other remaining records and how coutumier authors used what they saw in practice to extract principles and articulate general rules. Through the coutumiers, we can see how individual actors reshaped specific cases and transactions into general principles, and those general principles into a body of customary law.

For most West Central African rulers, land was central to subsistence agriculture, meeting their population needs as well as guaranteeing access to future generations. Chapter 6 traces the discussion about land ownership, examining legal changes and the centrality of paper culture for its commodification. The chapter begins by stressing the role of twentieth-century jurists and colonial officers in defending the idea that no notion of possession and individual ownership ever existed in Africa, while simultaneously creating the narrative that individual property had always existed in Europe. Despite earlier evidence that demonstrates a clear perception of occupation and jurisdiction rights among local rulers and West Central Africans, jurists, missionaries, and later, anthropologists and historians claimed that such rights did not exist, emphasizing the centrality of wealth in people, not in land, as forms of accumulation and wealth. In many ways, ethnographers, jurists, and scholars provided evidence to support colonial claims and ideologies that non-Europeans were incapable of apprehending and protecting the basic concept of ownership. This has had lasting consequences on the scholarship on wealth and accumulation in Africa. The refusal to recognize West Central African possession rights sustained colonialism and legitimated occupation and alienation of land and other resources.

Chapter 3 focuses on the strengthening of the bureaucracy and written culture that, by the early nineteenth century, created an ersatz historical proof and solidified territorial and political claims. After two centuries of conquest, by the turn of the nineteenth century, new forms of official records, such as land registries, deeds, and inventories, and the expansion of surveys and reports led to an association between individual ownership, written registration, and property recognition. As in other colonial experiences, paper records represented authenticity and legitimation in the eyes of colonizers and also brought changes in the perceptions of governance. Ndombe, Kilengues, Kakondas, and Bienos embraced written evidence and paper power as providing proof of ownership. The existence of the paper created a new reality, that is, the idea that occupation and possession could be proven, that an individual was a landowner, a farmer, and a respectable resident of the colonial town. The establishment of written records and venues for petition such as courts allowed colonial subjects to make use of the colonial law and bureaucracy to strategically survive the new legal order and claim rights.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.

The discipline of “diplomatics” – originating in the seventeenth century to systematically test the authenticity of medieval documents – has more recently been adapted to the study of digital records and their systems. In establishing the necessary elements for the long-term preservation of authentic records, archival diplomatics provides one possible (and powerful) analytic framework and methodology for analyzing the trustworthiness of records, including those to be found in blockchain and distributed ledgers. Regardless of the type of blockchain and distributed ledger system under examination, each relies upon trust in the ledger and in the records the ledger contains. Yet each type of blockchain and distributed ledger system still has limitations when judged against archival diplomatic standards of records’ trustworthiness, which demands the accuracy, reliability, and authenticity of records. By gaining an understanding of the elemental requirements for trust in records (and in record systems), there is hope that the designers of blockchain and distributed ledger systems might continue to improve the evidentiary quality of blockchain records and recordkeeping.

The setting of the city within the environment of Mesopotamia, on a branch of the river Euphrates, was without special advantages amid more ancient cities with older fame. Sumerian and Semitic Akkadian were very different languages integrated into the urbanized written culture, whereas Amorite immigrants from the west were tribal outsiders who often assimilated in the cities. Water management by canals, sluices, and flood control, and the extension of land for agriculture and settlement were duties of kings reflected in early myths. Merchants travelled abroad, west to the Mediterranean, north into Anatolia, east across the river Tigris into Iran, where they encountered the rival civilization of Elam, and south down the Arabian Gulf. They brought in precious metals, stones, timber, and plants. After 1,300 years, Babylon became a ceremonial centre without indigenous kings, but foreign kings still came to have their claim to rule legitimized in a city where the bearing of arms was prohibited. King-lists and chronicles underpinned Babylonians’ understanding of their own history; prayers, songs, epics, technical manuals, rituals, records of divination, and astronomy as well as archival and administrative texts were written on various media, of which only clay, being inorganic, survives. Temples, a palace, a harbour, city walls, and gates characterized urban space.

The Conclusion argues that the historical parallels we identify in Irish, Russian, and Ethiopian famine relief are neither incidental nor trivial. Their understanding may be improved if one views humanitarian efforts as an outcome of moral economic considerations, and this approach is consistent with the recent recognition of the links between humanitarianism and capitalism. Our moral economy approach sees practice as central to humanitarian history. This should be a transdisciplinary endeavour, informed by a wide range of debates and observations, including donor psychology, humanitarian logistics, and critical accounting. Our perspective, with a focus on fundraising appeals, allocation, and accounting, is of relevance to current humanitarian policy and practice, which is briefly sketched, and we hope it will inspire future research and practice.

After a brief introduction to issues that plague the realization of a theory of quantum gravity, I suggest that the main one concerns a quantization of the principle of relative simultaneity. This leads me to a distinction between time and space, to a further degree than that present in the canonical approach to general relativity. With this distinction, one can make sense of superpositions as interference between alternative paths in the relational configuration space of the entire universe. But the full use of relationalism brings us to a timeless picture of nature, as it does in the canonical approach (which culminates in the Wheeler–DeWitt equation). After a discussion of Parmenides and the Eleatics's rejection of time, I show that there is middle ground between their view of absolute timelessness and a view of physics taking place in timeless configuration space. In this middle ground, even though change does not fundamentally exist, the illusion of change can be recovered in a way not permitted by Parmenides. It is recovered through a particular density distribution over configuration space that gives rise to records. Incidentally, this distribution seems to have the potential to dissolve further aspects of the measurement problem that can still be argued to haunt the application of decoherence to many-worlds quantum mechanics. I end with a discussion indicating that the conflict between the conclusions of this paper and our view of the continuity of the self may still intuitively bother us. Nonetheless, those conclusions should be no more challenging to our intuition than Derek Parfit's thought experiments on the subject.

The administrative documents preserved in archives tell stories which are shaped by their institutional and governmental context, and are as deceptive and full of invention as more self-consciously literary works. Medieval archives contain a vast repository of historical narratives which, despite their fictional components and bureaucratic manipulation, nevertheless provide vivid insights into everyday life. The rhetorical conventions of such bureaucratic documents as pardons, petitions and appeals represent forms of historical literature which are cultural productions of equal significance to the chronicle or the epic poem. But, unlike court poetry or chronicles, the archives tell us a great deal about the life of ordinary people. In the wake of the discussion of the archive by Foucault and Derrida, the archive has been seen as a symbol of power and a means of control, but often the archive is the chief means by which non-elite groups find their voice.

Operetta not only transferred across borders but also from one media platform to another, a characteristic of industrialized production termed ‘intermediality’. A stage show was a multilayered communication medium that connected to other media, such as sheet music, records, film, and radio. The term ‘remediation’ refers to a change from one medium to another, and there were various ways in which the music of operetta might be remediated. For example, it could be turned into sheet music for private pleasure playing the home piano, or, reemerge as a military band medley for the enjoyment of the public spending a leisurely afternoon in the park. Player pianos and piano rolls, which had been produced all around the globe, faced a period of decline in the1930s, as attention turned to radio and records. The arrival of radio effected a change in music dissemination and made the collection of performing rights imperative. Operettas provided the subject matter of a number of classic films of the silent era, and sound film operetta was also in demand in the 1930s, giving rise to the new genre of screen operetta.

It is clear that the productions in the West End and on Broadway of The Merry Widow marked a distinctive new phase in operetta reception. The massive success of The Merry Widow opened up a flourishing market for operettas from Vienna and Berlin. This was confirmed by the huge success of Straus’s The Chocolate Soldier in New York (1909) and London (1910). The Berlin operettas of Jean Gilbert were soon in demand in the West End and on Broadway. Continental European operetta entered a marketplace dominated by musical comedy. The first major blow to the operetta market, especially in the UK, was the outbreak of the First World War. After the war, many creators of operetta were eager to escape to the comfort of historical romances. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, many people were prepared to pay for operetta, and an assortment of theatres and ticket prices enabled a broad social mixture to do so. In addition to critical-aesthetic reception, theatrical productions were open to moral concerns. The chapter ends with reflections on the reasons for the decline in productions on Broadway and in the West End post-1933.