The historiography on South Asian overseas migration in the colonial era has focused extensively on the history of indentured labour. This was a system of recruitment of workers on a fixed contract of three to five years with a single employer, at the end of which they could re-indenture, find other employment or have their passage paid home. These contracts were prominently used by private employers to hire plantation labour in sugar, rubber, tea and coffee plantations following the abolition of slavery and by rural Indians to escape from poverty and/ or discrimination. They were also used in government public works departments, in railway construction and in the military. Those who signed such an agreement (known as a girmit in north India) described themselves as girmitiyas. Although guaranteed food, shelter and employment, and subject to periodic inspections, those in the hands of private employers overseas could be exploited as they were often working in remote locations and were legally not free to leave until their contract had expired or they (or their family) had bought their way out of it. Although never allowed in Sri Lanka or Myanmar, and superseded by other forms of migration by the beginning of the twentieth century, more has been written about South Asian indentured labour than any other form of historical migration from India, partly because it was subject to government regulation and is therefore unusually well documented in colonial archives.

Within the literature on indentured labour, most of the writing has revolved around migration statistics and the debates between anti-slavery campaigners, planters, British imperial officials and, latterly, the complaints of Indian nationalist politicians, leading up to the effective abolition of indentured overseas labour contracts by 1920. The voices of the migrants themselves are not so often heard, nor those of the many other Indians who were not on contracts of indenture who migrated at the same time. A classic text, Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery, drew its inspiration from the early campaigns against indentured migration launched by the anti-slavery movement in Britain. However, in recent years, a new scholarship has been emerging, especially from within the diaspora – most prominently in South Africa – which sheds light on the highly varied social lives of migrants.

This chapter traces the history of the essay against the backdrop of changing theories of distraction in the long eighteenth century. As the population of urban centres grew, readers’ seemingly waning attention spans had to counter a barrage of auditory and visual stimuli. Everyday diversions were compounded by literary ones: falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing the periodical essay to compete with a dizzying array of prose fiction, poems, sermons, and histories. Focusing on a series of prominent eighteenth-century and Romantic essayists, particularly Samuel Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb, we argue that the essay form is powerfully shaped by its engagement with the wandering mind. Debates over distraction that began in the Enlightenment continue to shape the genre today, as modern essay forms – New York Times essays, blogs, Twitter feeds – continue to structure themselves around assumptions about short attention spans.

This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Stirrup Rider Empires, from 600 to 1200. While being a major advance in horse riding, the stirrup just offers a short term for the intermediary phase of Rider Empires. Expansion of Islamic Caliphate was the towering event. It surpassed the Xiongnu area record. Apart from Tang, Tufan in Tibet, Liao, and Seljuk, all other medieval empires remained of modest size. In population, Song in 1125 briefly reached 38% of the world population – the largest percentage any empire has ever reached. The Caliphate altered the language mix throughout North Africa, introducing the Arabic. The Seljuks did so from Central Asia to Anatolia, introducing Turkic. The Caliphate clashed with Tang in Central Asia in 751. The forces of an empire reaching to the Atlantic Ocean confronted for the first time those of an empire that reached to the Pacific. Neither realized the momentousness of this skirmish. Western Europe developed feudalism, a maddeningly complex multistranded hierarchical order, which does away with single territorial authority.

In their report on the ‘social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India’, the Sachar Committee (2004–2006) noted:

The members of the committee thus hinted at the importance of context in defining women's role vis-à-vis their community. They suggested that Muslim women are more likely to act as guardians of community identity—either out ‘of their own volition’ or ‘because of community pressure'—at a time when large sections of India's Muslim population feel discriminated against. By adopting ‘visible markers’, women come to embody a community identity to be protected from external interference. In this type of context, any attack against women's visibly Muslim markers quickly comes to be seen as an attack upon the entire community. The recent row on the hijab ban in Karnataka (2022) is a good case in point.

Projecting women as guardians of community identity reinforces, in turn, the notion of the ‘Muslim woman’. Be it in the media or in political discourses, Muslim women in India and elsewhere are often projected as a homogeneous category—‘oppressed and often shrouded in a stifling burqa’. These images then feed into equally homogenising notions of Islam. To counter these (mis)representations, scholars have for a long time challenged the monolithic conception of the Muslim woman. In her anthropological study in Delhi's Zakir Nagar (near Jamia), Nida Kirmani stresses the need to examine how gender and religious identity ‘continuously form and re-form along with various other identities’, thus highlighting the ‘contextual nature’ of these identities. Before her, already, several scholars insisted on the need to take into account socio-economic factors, such as education or employment, in order to understand the living conditions of Muslim women in India.

Although LGBTQ+ affirmative counseling is promoted through mental health professional guidelines, standards for training counselors in affirmative practice remain inconsistent and underdeveloped. In this chapter, we propose an adaptive strategies model for LGBTQ+ responsive counselor training and supervision, along with practice guidelines for educators that are grounded in professional standards, current research, and allyship development. Additionally, we review common training challenges and best practices to support LGBTQ+ trainees and promote allyship behaviors among all trainees.

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

Emergency provisions allow governments to intervene swiftly, but also create opportunities for political capture. We analyze how this tension plays out in the largest federal republic in the world, India. Article 356 of the Indian Constitution (known as president’s rule) allows the union (federal) cabinet to dismiss a functioning state government and dissolve the elected state legislature, if the federally appointed state governor recommends the dismissal due to political crises, natural disasters, riots, and so forth. Using an original panel dataset of Indian states from 1952 until 2019, we find that emergency provisions allow for political capture increasing federal dominance in India. We find that: (1) the likelihood of invoking Article 356 is almost exclusively determined by the political strength of the parties in majority/coalition governments at the state level; (2) emergencies like riots and natural disasters are not significant predictors of invoking Article 356; and (3) judicial safeguards added in 1994 significantly reduced the imposition of Article 356.

Ecosystem structure and functioning is the focus of much ecological research because many ecosystem properties such as production, energy flow, nutrient cycles, and stability lie at the core of understanding ecological processes. Net primary production (NPP) is primarily influenced by climate and nutrients. On a global scale, NPP in terrestrial biomes tends to be greatest near the tropics, where the combination of constant and moderately high temperature and adequate rainfall promote plant growth. NPP in marine biomes peaks at about 40° S latitude, which is associated with large areas of upwelling and high nutrient availability. On a regional and local scale, the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus influence terrestrial, marine, and freshwater production. Ecosystem structure is based on the interactions between producers, consumers, detritivores, and decomposers. A substantial but variable amount of energy is lost with each transfer from one trophic level to the level above, which has the effect of limiting food chain length (FCL). In some aquatic systems, longer food chains are associated with CO2 export from the water into the atmosphere, and with the biomagnification of toxic substances.

If equipped with an additional operation of multiplication of vectors by other vectors (to give yet other vectors), an operation that is well-intertwined with the existing linear and topological structures, a Banach space becomes a Banach algebra. Such an additional operation is naturally defined in the space of continuous functions by pointwise multiplication. In the space of integrable functions on the positive half-axis, however, the role of multiplication is most naturally played by convolution. We use this additional algebraic structure in the discussed space to study the McKendrick–von Foerster model of population dynamics. The existence and uniqueness of the renewal equation that is a key to the model turns out – surprise, surprise! – to be the result of the completeness of the underlying space.

Anthropologist Richard Leakey sent Jane Goodall to Gombe (now Gombe Stream National Park) to study chimpanzees in the wild. As an anthropologist, he was keenly interested in human behavior, and believed that chimpanzees would provide a window to understanding it. It took Goodall six months of crawling around in the woods before any chimpanzees would allow her to get close enough to observe them. But her persistence paid off, as she was able to document chimpanzees showing some very human behavior including tool making, cooperative hunting and war making. Partway through her career, she elected to devote the rest of her career to environmental activism and education, and Gombe research was continued by a growing community of researchers including her student, Anne Pusey. Pusey was fascinated by mother–infant relationships, by developmental changes in juveniles as they matured, and by how chimpanzees manage to avoid breeding with close relatives. Other researchers at Gombe studied the relationship between rank and reproductive success, and how disease was influencing survival rates in three different populations in the region. Unfortunately, life table studies indicate that disease and a lack of immigrants into the region are threatening the viability of this iconic group of chimpanzees.

As the globe has experienced increasing population shifts from rural peripheries to towns and cities, urban expansion has become one of the most complex challenges. The fabric and form of every city is continually restructured to cater to the arrival of new entrants and aspirants. Whether urban communities have been favoured or disadvantaged by such modifications, they remain inherently associated with their unique urban identity and its place-relationship. This is because the identity of a city (with its urban morphology) becomes history once it is altered, and the placerelationship remains perpetual and preserved in the emotional memories of its urbanites. The mnemonic and emotional elements of a particular location have long played essential roles in understanding the history of socio-demographic dimensions of urban environments. The South African experience has been no different.

The socio-spatial systems of South African cities reflect the history of apartheid and its plethora of consequences for various disadvantaged groups. Thus South African urban history has been a vital aspect for understanding the contemporary shapes and forms of its cities. The changing form of the central business district (CBD) of Durban, one of South Africa's major urban nodes, for example, has captured the attention of scholars from various disciplines. It has become a focus for researchers due to its remarkably rich history and diverse culture.

The historic distinctive trait of the Durban city centre was that it contained two CBDs: a white one at the core and an adjacent Indian business sector. From the late nineteenth century, it was in this precinct (currently renamed after Yusuf Dadoo, an anti-apartheid activist) that many indentured and passenger Indians in Natal inexorably planted their footprints. Previously a legislated Indian Group Area, this precinct formed a fundamental economic and commercial component of the Indian CBD and served as an important contributor to the urban economy during the apartheid era. It also served as an incubator for numerous Indian entrepreneurs and business houses, many of which have still retained their operations there to this day. The presence of multifarious Indian businesses not only brought about a sense of belonging but also gave this complex a cultural vibrancy. Often called a ‘home away from home’ for the South African urban Indian population, the complex encapsulated a rich cultural ambience with great recreational and institutional significance.

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.