No account of the ‘rise of the modern British state’ would be complete without an appreciation of the ways in which local institutions, constitutional principles and precedents, laws – and ultimately governance – evolved. Prior to the twentieth century, locality defined the overwhelming majority of British subjects’ lived constitutional experience: the shire rule of Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, medieval corporations and county corporates, fourteenth-century Quarter Sessions, the empowered Elizabethan parish, and then the explosion of ‘ratepayer democracy’ in the nineteenth century featuring municipal corporations and county councils, Poor Law unions, and ad hoc statutory bodies (including school boards, public health authorities, and improvement committees) of all kinds.

In this chapter we discuss case studies from research on Arabic which employed various methods of social stratification. These include class-based socio-economic stratification, social network analysis, regionality, life-mode, and the community of practice construct.

This chapter establishes the core principles of this study and defines its key terms. It problematises and deconstructs the relationship between the German ‘people’s community’, the Volksgemeinschaft, and the concept and practice of Total War in East Prussia. By establishing the mentality of the native population towards the war, this chapter assigns agency to those who would eventually become the main victims of late-war intra-ethnic violence. Subsequently, the chapter addresses the impact of the Party and the Wehrmacht on the behaviour of civilians, using as case-studies the construction of the Ostwall and the establishment of the Volkssturm in the second half of 1944. Finally, it examines how East Prussians viewed their roles within the late-war community of Germany and how they established the potential to break with the ‘traditional’ values of the National Socialist state.

This chapter assesses the emergent mindset and the city’s insular nature by providing an analysis of the propaganda created in Königsberg during its siege. As the idea of Volksgemeinschaft steadily lost its appeal, propagandists struggled to convey their message to the fortress’s population. By drawing attention to the efforts of local propagandists, this chapter examines the impact of the Wehrmacht ‘on the ground’, and discusses the need to forge a Kampfgemeinschaft, based on Königsberg’s ‘battle’ rather than on Germany’s ‘struggle’. Rather than encouraging the population to leave the city, the fortress command instead propagated a false sense of safety. An assessment of the themes portrayed in local media reveals how, in a fractured Germany, local authorities presented their message and how they sought to link it to the larger regional picture of events. A martial narrative came to dominate Königsberg’s propaganda while the unfolding events were consistently explained by drawing parallels to the city’s Prussian past, offering an alternative to the National Socialist rhetoric. The population’s reluctance to leave the city until the very end is a sombre testament to the propagandists’ success in downplaying the dangers to which all were exposed.

The European Neolithic was a period of enormous social and economic changes affecting lifeways and population size, as well as beliefs and world views. By its closing stages in around 2500 BCE central and western European communities had been transformed from mobile or semi-mobile hunter-fisher-gatherer groups to settled populations reliant on farming and herding. The extent and significance of violence within and between communities during this period has long been debated, although attempts to resolve this issue have tended to generate more heat than light. However recent years have seen a growing corpus of evidence for violent assaults recognised among human remains from throughout Neolithic Europe. Viewed in aggregate, this line of evidence casts considerable doubt over notions of the period as a time of relative peace and stability. This chapter draws together the skeletal evidence for violence-related injuries from across Neolithic Europe and discusses these in terms of both overall prevalence and regional variation as well as the extent to which variations in demographic distribution are discernible. These patterns are considered in regard to the changing social contexts in which they occurred, with particular attention given to the role of population expansion, resource competition and the rise of social inequality. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Neolithic in the development of organised violence among human societies.

Building on the themes of regionality in Chapter 4, and of empire in Chapter 3, this chapter focuses on Aquae Sulis’s place in the social, religious, and artistic networks of Britain, Gaul, and Germany specifically, and on how to put the site’s locally specific practices in dialogue with broader trends. It explores the significance of artistic connections seen in smaller iconographic works such as the ‘altar’ blocks, which can be linked to Viergöttersteine from the Rhineland, and the relief of Mercury with a local goddess, which is part of a regional cluster centred on Gloucester, and uses a series of case studies, in particular the ‘curse tablets’, to delineate the ways in which provincial religious knowledge may be characterized as a series of increasingly localized concentric circles of practice.

The English language has been present in South Africa since the end of the eighteenth century. Although regional varieties were established as part of the nineteenth-century development of South African English (SAfE) as its own variety, the general consensus has been that since the mid-twentieth century the ancestral ‘settler’ variety of SAfE has shown a high degree of regional homogeneity and only a limited set of regionalisms. This chapter investigates more recent developments in this regard, drawing on an acoustic analysis of data from upper-middle class male and female speakers of General SAfE from the three largest urban conurbations of South Africa: Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. The focus is on vowel quality and the results include (1) greater centralization of KIN in Durban (2) a Cape Town-centered process of TRAP and DRESS lowering accompanied by STRUT backing (the so-called Reverse Short Front Vowel Shift in SAfE) (3) clearly diphthongal variants of PRICE in Johannesburg and Cape Town in comparison to Durban and (4) backed and lowered variants of GOAT in Johannesburg and Durban as compared to Cape Town. Overall the results suggest a growing degree of regional differentiation in South African English.