Opening with an analysis of Instagram, Chapter 2 is concerned with how to think about postdigitality. Touching on multimodality, time-space-place, and responsive loops, this chapter highlights the contrast between digital life and postdigital life, unravelling the many dimensions of postdigitality. It concludes that postdigitality represents a world of symbiosis, whether that be of body and mind, physical life and screen life, representation and non-representation, immersion and connectivity, or interaction and convergence. These combinations are what lends digital media its unique power to move across time, space, and place. To explore these ideas, Chapter 2 analyses data which has been processed through ATLAS.ti to produce a list of postdigital keywords used by crescent voices.

Setting sail from Gujarat across the western Indian Ocean, Chapter 2 disembarks on Mauritius, an island of sugar plantations located between South Asia, Africa, and Australia. At the heart of the chapter is Bel Ombre, a sugar plantation owned by a Gujarati merchant from the port city of Rander and the site of his residence in the late nineteenth century. In Gujarat, old merchant homes erase the wider oceanic context of plantation capitalism, slavery, and indentured labor. An emphasis on family itineraries displaces economic profits and proscribed intimacies. To track these points of contact in the late nineteenth century, the chapter analyzes colonial records of plantation ownership in the notarial records in autopsies, letters of helps, and other documents from the Protector of Immigrations records in the Mauritius National Archive in order to understand the broader context of racial capitalism that shaped life in Gujarat’s ports. The chapter argues that plantations – paradigmatic sites of colonial capital – were intimately connected to Gujarat’s havelis. In doing so it provides a critical understanding of family and belonging beyond the endogamous merchant family.

This introductory chapter presents the book and its most important arguments; it also provides brief overviews of the arguments of each chapter.

This chapter explores the major auction landscapes before 1914 and also describes the defining elements of the fin-de-siècle European market: integration, free trade, and cosmopolitanism. Examining societies’ approaches to artwork acquisition unveils contradictions and frictions within a milieu united by an international collecting class. France contended with an international, yet conservative, nationalist art world, while Germany’s bourgeoisie tried to control the world of luxury and consumption. In contrast, Britain grappled with questions about free trade and the preservation of art that challenged its laissez-faire tradition. It is precisely these tensions, which directly reflect the challenges posed by the commercialisation of art, that provide a framework for analysing the impact of the war. By emphasising the shared features of an integrated trade sphere, this chapter paints a balanced portrayal of a European market, where art mirrored the complex integration of both socioeconomic and cultural frameworks.

Contrary to previous research that has seen the Mesopotamian mountain wilderness as a dangerous chaos-region, this chapter analyses the human–wilderness relations in the Old Babylonian Sumerian narratives of Ninurta, Inanna, Lugalbanda, and Gilgameš, arguing that they are not only about dominion and destruction, but about access to sacred power and fertility, cultivating respectful relations with wild others, fascination, wonder, awe, and appreciation of wildlands.

Before the categories of Latino/a or Hispanic were adopted in academia and literary criticism in the United States, Latinx writers were often (mis)placed within a wide and ambiguous “Spanish” literary scene. This chapter explores how this tendency also extended to Filipinx American writers. It centers on José Garcia Villa’s early years in the United States, in particular the semi-autobiographical short stories in Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933), wherein he reflects on his experience as a young Filipino American writer and finds continuities between the Philippines and New Mexico.

The Islamic Republic of Iran prides itself on the extent to which it has codified Islamic law, and it bases its entire legal system, not only constitutional or family law, but ostensibly all realms of law, on legal codes in which Islamic notions of justice have been codified into positive law. The chapter first provides a brief survey of the various uses and connotations of the concept of rule of law. After offering an overview of the evolution of the modern legal system in Iran, it reviews the main elements of the 1979 constitution and its 1989 amendment. It then discusses three central concepts through which Islamic law as codified has been reformed and revised. The chapter then presents the main outlines of the legal and judicial system of Iran, before offering an overview of the chapters of the book. The chapter closes with reflections on the main challenges to the rule of law in Iran today.

This chapter scrutinises the British Longitude Act of 1714 and its immediate aftermath. It shows, first, the extent to which the wording of the Act drew on precedents from the previous century. Second, it argues that the Act was never intended to create a ‘Board of Longitude’ as a formal, standing committee with regular meetings. Rather, it nominated a number of individuals – by name or by virtue of their official role – seen fit to judge potential ideas. This is a powerful example of the way in which longitude legislation was revisable and open-ended. With this in mind, the chapter shows that the Act did indeed foster considerable activity and discussion around longitude matters over the next two decades. This activity was marked by considerable continuity in the persistence of schemes already being discussed before 1714: eclipses, lunar distances, artificial timekeepers, magnetic variation and dip, signalling, and dead reckoning.

This chapter starts from the observation that, as far as the competitive allocation of some types of limited rights are concerned (licenses, financial grants), both EU and national legislators have not developed the relevant legal principles into more or less detailed rules yet, contrary to other types of limited rights (public contracts, sale of public assets). The central question this chapter seeks to answer is whether and to what extent these differing approaches can be rationalized. Given that a general theory is lacking, the chapter undertakes a bottom-up explanatory problem analysis of the various arguments that seem relevant for the decision of legislators to develop the principles into more or less detailed rules. The purpose of this analysis is to give a better insight into the contextual application of the various aspects that seem relevant whenever legislators consider and decide where to position the legal framework on the sliding scale between a principle-based only system, on the one hand, and a fully detailed rule-based system on the other.

This chapter begins with a reflection of the Find My iPhone app, employing it as an example of how physical and digital place can exist simultaneously and in interconnected ways. Afterwards, it turns to explaining the notion of physical-digital place as parallel universes, subsequently unravelling this idea through strands taken from across crescent voice interviews. The emphasis of this chapter is on place, or more specifically the intermingling of physical and digital places, whereby the commitments, practices, and imaginaries of screens can shape one’s understandings of place and allow one to form a consciousness that is a kind of home. By employing notions of the ‘digital home’, social imaginaries, digital twins, and a postdigital concept of community, this chapter unsettles the binary between digital and physical spaces, employing Dezuanni’s definition of community to help get at the ways that online spaces feel like home. It explores these ideas primarily through crescent voices and their experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic, an event which lent more prominence to practices such as digital twins.

Focusing on the period from the early 1760s to the resolution of the John Harrison affair in 1773, this chapter argues that it was only in this period that the ‘Board of Longitude’ came into being. This was largely in response to the debates surrounding the sea trials of Harrison’s fourth marine timekeeper (H4) and two other longitude schemes – Tobias Mayer’s tables and method for lunar distances and Christopher Irwin’s marine chair for observing Jupiter’s satellites. The transformation into a standing board manifested in regular rather than sporadic meetings and the appointment of a secretary to keep the Board’s papers in order as the Commissioners, for whom astronomer Nevil Maskelyne would become a central figure, sought to defend their decisions over the allocation of monetary rewards. The debates with Harrison, which focused on questions of adequate testing and the judging of trials, disclosure and replicability, and accusations of self-interest, would see the Board harden its stance through the use of legislation to ensure resolution. The Harrisons and their supporters, by contrast, sought to bolster support through lobbying and publication of their claims.

This chapter provides a classification of interests in public procurement, an analysis that also forms the basis of the classification of interests in limited rights that is used for the balance of interests analysis throughout this book. It then deals with the specific question of how these different interests are balanced in procurement procedures, both at the EU level and by the Member States, in the context of competitive tendering. This analysis focusses mainly on three key interests, namely value for money, effective implementation of industrial, social and environmental policies, and efficiency of the procedure, but also touches on others by examining how they are balanced against these three interests. The review shows that this balancing exercise is a complex task influenced by, for example, the complexity of procurement and differences between Member States. It is suggested that while solutions reached in procurement should not be copied uncritically, both because of their flaws and (in some cases) controversial nature and because of the differences in context with other limited rights, the wealth of detail and experience in public procurement rules provides useful lessons and options for other fields.