This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

Abstractions and effective rainfall are discussed, interception, infiltration, phi index, initial and constant loss, deficit and constant loss, infiltration equations, infiltration models of HHorton, Philip, Holtan, Green-Ampt, Smith-Parlange, effective rainfall estimation by NRCS curve number method, surface storage, time dependent infiltration, initial abstractions, and soil moisture accounting, infiltration measurements.

We designate as an empire a state that stands out by area and population, as compared to most neighbors. The same population–technology interaction that enables world population to grow also enables states and then empires to form and expand, mostly by brutal force. Empires form where people are. The joint population share of the top five empires reached 50% of the world population by the year +1, and it did so on just 10% of the dry land area. The areas of top empires expanded in three phases, dependent on message speeds but also skills in delegation of power: Runner, Rider and Engineer Empires. The Rider age produced a new type of nomadic “area empires,” with low population density, in contrast with standard high-density “people empires.” The areas and populations of people empires tend to follow a square root relationship: Their share of world population is the square root of their share of dry land area.

This short chapter motivates the questions being dealt with in the rest of the book: although states of emergency are very frequently called, we know very little about their effectiveness. We also know very little about the factors that lead to the inclusion of emergency provisions in a country’s constitution, about the factors that make politicians rely on these provisions, and so forth. This book deals with all of these questions – and more. The chapter contains an outline regarding the remaining 14 chapters.

This chapter examines how attitudes are formed. Attitude formation is explained as a function of prior beliefs and information. This process is viewed through two complementary lenses: the static process and the dynamic process. The static model thinks of attitudes as a combination of ratings and rankings. We term this the multi-attribute model – a commonly used approach in psychology and economics. The dynamic model concentrates on how humans process information, where things like words, symbols, and memory networks take on practical significance. Ultimately, both models have many applications for the practitioner.

It was a balmy April morning in Tampa Bay, Florida, as I sauntered along the promenade to attend the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry–International Indian Film Academy Awards (FICCI–IIFA) business forum hosted by the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business. There was nervous energy and general anticipatory chaos in the conference room, where a panel on Bollywood’s global collaborations was about to start. As we were waiting for things to commence, I cornered Santiago Corrada, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Visit Tampa Bay and a host of this panel, for a conversation. He smiled at me and fidgeted with his hands as he produced brief responses to my questions about the event, which I pegged to a general American nonchalance towards Bollywood. It had been twenty minutes since the designated start time for the event, and the impatience was showing. People shuffled in their seats and paced in and out of the conference room. A sudden collective clamour in the room alerted me to the arrival of an important speaker. Bollywood star Anil Kapoor walked in with his usual swagger, and Corrada’s nonchalance vanished. Swiftly angling through the chairs, he zealously shook Kapoor’s hands. He was, it appeared, star-struck.

The panel comprised the who’s who of corporate India, the Indian film and entertainment industry, and its US collaborators. The panellists included the director of the global consultancy firm EY, the executive director of the Tampa Hillsborough Film and Digital Media Commission, the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, the CEO of the Film & Television Producers Guild of India Limited, film producers, and, of course, Anil Kapoor. These business forums featured a range of topics from ‘opportunities in Indo-US commerce’ to ‘healthcare and technology partnerships’ anchored around the 2014 IIFA Awards, Bollywood’s Oscar-style award show celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema. The IIFA forums were a spectacular and particularly generative space of global flows where all major stakeholders in India’s industrial landscape and beyond were amply represented. The attendees included Indian and American diplomats, key figures from the Indian-American diaspora, as well as individuals from the Indian and US film and entertainment businesses.

World population growth has proceeded in two steeper-than-exponential phases, with an intervening standstill from 1– 400 CE. Our interaction model of population, technology, and Earth’s carrying capacity projects to a peak of 11 billion people by 2100. Yet, our impact on Earth’s biosphere may undo our very existence. Then projections in this book, such as a single world state by 4600 CE, become moot. Over 5000 years, the number of states has fallen and top empire sizes have increased exponentially but also in three phases triggered by breakthroughs in message speed: Runner, Rider and Engineer Empires. This approach can lead to a non-Eurocentric periodization of history, with cut-off dates at 3000 BCE, 600 BCE, 600, 1200, and 1800. Various relationships connect world population and top empire and major city sizes, but they have tended to fail since 1800, as the world becomes a single, rapidly interacting system. A distinction of Talkers, Doers, Regulators, and Followers serves to characterize the internal structure of empires. An initial human self-domestication (slavery) seems to be later followed by self-taming. Lists of world history events put the midpoint of history around 1500 CE.

James Watson, the Nobel laureate, Harvard professor, and head of the Human Genome Project, said to Time Magazine in 1989, “We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.”

He was no doubt trying to find a cute way of saying that scholars used to try and predict the future astrologically, but now science is allowing us to do it genetically. But is genetics really like astrology in that way (although presumably more accurate)? Is the future really predictable from genetics? Of course, there are many genetic diseases known in humans – though relatively few of them are fully penetrant, meaning that if the gene is there, so is the disease. But most features of the human genome aren’t like that at all.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

The implementation of apartheid in South Africa centred to a large extent on the control of residential location. One of the cornerstones of apartheid and one of the few areas in which the policy has been effective was in the provision of separate residential areas for the different race groups. This spatial segregation and segmentation of residential areas for whites, Coloureds, Indians and Africans expressed the impact of apartheid most acutely. The Group Areas Act (GAA), 1950, was one of the key instruments used to reinforce the ideology of apartheid and emphasised separate residential areas, educational services and other amenities for the different race groups.

The major impact of group area dislocations has been borne by black communities, particularly Coloureds and Indians. According to Johannes T. Schoombee, ‘the actual legislative model taken for group areas has been the string of legislative measures starting in the 1880s directed against “Asiatics” [particularly Indians] in the Transvaal and later, Natal’.

Indians represent the smallest proportion of the four population groups in South Africa, numbering about one million. Yet, proportionately, the impact of the GAA ‘has been borne most heavily by the Indians, with one in four of them having been resettled’. Indians ‘suffered the most from the implementation of the GAA, either through removals or the inadequate provision of living space’. This was especially so in the port city of Durban, situated on the east coast of South Africa, where indentured labourers from India first disembarked in 1860 and who were followed by traders (or passengers who paid their own way) in the mid-1870s.

This chapter is a continuation of my earlier historical research on the GAA in Durban. The focus of the chapter is on opposition to the GAA and resistance to forced displacement. The reasons for the failure of resistance is also analysed. The chapter is divided into three sections. The background and context are presented in the first section. Opposing the GAA is the theme of the second section. Resisting forced displacement is discussed in the third section, and the sub-themes include the approaches of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC), the Natal Indian Organisation (NIO), the ‘All-in-Congress’, and the 1958 proclamations and mass action.

The data for this chapter were derived from a variety of primary documentary sources, ranging from official central and local government records and newspaper reports to memoranda prepared by political and civil society organisations.

The extraordinary popularity of essays amongst British readers in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of the idea of the professional author – an historical convergence that reflects both the popularity of the genre with writers of the age and the prominence of the essay as a discursive space in which the idea of literary professionalism could be imagined. Throughout the century, essay writers repeatedly emphasised not just the spirit of polite sociability evoked by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, but more self-ironically, the ways that their digressive and miscellaneous style and everyday focus resonated with the pressures of commercial modernity. In doing so, they articulated a version of literary professionalism that grounded its value in precisely the sorts of apparent limitations that authors were embracing as a basis of the essay genre.