Early examples of deadpan theatrical performance in Australia are heavily mediated by English and American theatre cultures and do not readily map onto nascent discourses on Australian humor or Australian comic character types such as the laconic bushman or the larrikin. Early examples of deadpan performers and productions in Australia do, however, participate in projects of colonial institution-building. This chapter considers early colonial deadpan performance as part of transnational genteel culture. Drawing on digitized newspaper accounts of performance style, it examines the reception of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore (1878) in 1879, when comic actor and budding theatre impresario J. C. Williamson paid the British D’Oyly Carte Opera Company £300 for the sole rights to stage it in Australia and New Zealand. By comparing Williamson’s production with three other unauthorized productions of Pinafore that ran nearly simultaneously, it shows how style signified on the colonial stage at a moment that shaped international theatre production and management practices.

This chapter approaches emporia as settlements organized to afford new forms of interactions in the context of their landscapes. Such an approach reveals how their spatial patterns were manifested through social norms and institutions, which in turn governed communities and their ability to handle interactions between strangers. I show how communities in emporia used simple, effective devices such as road networks and plot systems to define social rights and obligations in ways that were both similar to and different from our concept of urban places. The physical structure of housing plots or ‘yards’ served to premediate and resolve disputes. I argue that this feature reflects legal provisions for strangers as much as it does practical concerns for space. The chapter also demonstrates the limitations of a focus on the dense waterfront neighbourhoods. Defying a traditional ‘strongbox’ concept model of urbanism, the physical structure and activities of the emporia were in fact dispersed over a much wider landscape. The arguments draw upon insights from settlement and landscape archaeology, together with theories of agency and structuration.

The conclusions argue that artificial intelligence, despite its disruptive nature, does not undermine the essential role of innovative entrepreneurship within capitalism. While AI reshapes entrepreneurial processes and competitive dynamics, the persistence of entrepreneurial space depends primarily on institutional arrangements and policy choices. Preserving a dynamic and socially valuable form of capitalism in the AI era ultimately hinges on human agency rather than on technology itself.

This chapter charts the evolution of green theorising within International Relations (IR) and situates the Middle East as integral to both the development of global energy regimes and efforts to create global environmental norms and institutions. The chapter shows how green IR theories build upon the study of global environmental politics, political economy, political ecology, and environmental security. The case study of the Yemen conflict highlights how an ageing offshore oil tanker, the Floating Storage and Offloading Safer, became a flashpoint in conflict dynamics between non-state armed actors, international organisations, and regional powers, given the risk of a massive oil spill into the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The case study emphasises the usefulness of moving beyond conventional units of analysis in IR, such as states, to consider the role of multinational firms and voluntary systems of environmental compliance, as well as shifting analysis to ecological scales, such as watersheds and seas, to fully grasp the cumulative impacts and diverse sources of marine oil pollution. The chapter shows how green theories have questioned fundamental assumptions within IR and opened new avenues of research inquiry.

Liberalism is a foundational school of thought in International Relations with a well-established and rich intellectual heritage dating back to the seventeenth century. It seeks to address core problems in world politics, including the appropriate scope of state authority, the conditions underpinning international cooperation, and the maintenance of international stability. With liberal scholars most notably contributing to debates on the causes and limits of cooperation. Liberal scholars have made their most influential contributions by examining questions such as what enables or constrains cooperation between states, with many claiming that political, economic, and social integration between states leads to more peace and less war. However, liberalism emerged from Western historical and philosophical contexts, and while liberal scholars claim that it is universally applicable, its assumptions can be criticised for not reflecting non-Western experiences. This chapter evaluates liberalism’s applicability to the Middle East by applying liberal theory to the analysis of cosmopolitan law, examining in particular the impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on interstate relations. Thus, it applies liberalism to answer the following questions: do SEZs lead to greater economic integration between states in the Middle East? And is there any observable pacifying effect on political relations between trade partners?

This first chapter explores the legacy of colonial credit as antecedent of nineteenth-century finance. The traditional credit systems were the lifeblood of circulation and property during the 300 years of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the New World. They were highly segmented in both colonial Spanish America and Brazil, and are comparable to those of early modern Catholic Europe, preceding the modern integration of credit and monetary markets. The increasing use of bills of exchange during the colonial era reflected the development of interregional systems of mercantile credit. Also of great interest was the creation of mining banks in Peru and Mexico in the eighteenth century. At the same time, the credit transactions supplied by hundreds of ecclesiastical institutions were of great importance for urban real estate proprietors and rural landowners throughout both Portuguese Brazil and Spanish America. In sum, the principal objective of our first chapter is to identify key aspects of the role of credit and finance in the performance of the colonial economies of Spanish America and Brazil, and to suggest how loans and debts wove complex networks of relationships between many economic and social actors before the outbreak of the wars of independence.

This book focuses attention on the antecedents, birth and relatively late development of modern banking in Latin America. The novelty of the chapters that follow is to offer a panoramic overview of the trajectories of banks and credit markets across a significant number of nations in this extensive region over a long time period. The approach is chronological, but each chapter pays attention to a distinct theme that can allow the reader to grasp key problems that refer to the process of creation and expansion of banks in order to grasp the successes as well as the failures of different financial regimes and enterprises during successive phases from the end of the colonial regimes down to 1914. We maintain that the economic history of the nations of this vast region should not be viewed simply as a story of failure, but rather as an expression of a prolonged and sometimes unstable process of slow capitalism during what we describe as the long nineteenth century.

The political independence of the Latin American nations did not usher in modern capitalism since economic stagnation and the repressed nature of financial markets were evident from the 1820s and 1830s in most countries. This chapter focuses on the role of credit and finance during the first half of the nineteenth century in the new states. Liberal constitutions and laws were put in place but did not produce the desired economic results since fiscal reforms did not prove successful. Attention is directed to the experience of the earliest banking entities. We begin with Brazil, where a first bank in Latin America began to operate in 1808, followed by a brief summary of history of the first commercial bank in Argentina and of an early investment bank in Mexico. Nonetheless, the collapse of imperial rule, the wars of independence and extensive civil conflicts created persistent fiscal and monetary difficulties. So much uncertainty affected decision-making by both economic and political actors, reducing the availability of credit, making it more expensive and risky. Political stability and institutional transparency were required to spur early capitalism but economic and political instability created many obstacles in postcolonial Latin America during the first half of the century.

This chapter focuses on how to evaluate and improve the performance of health systems. It frames performance as a relative concept: how well a system attains its goals compared to what is achievable under given circumstances. It examines how health system architecture, including vertical and horizontal integration, influences performance. We also argue that improving performance requires strengthening key system components and propose four priority areas (the “LIST” elements): leadership, institutions, systems design, and technologies. Finally, the chapter argues that health systems must be accountable for determinants they can influence, even if external, and stresses the importance of rigorous assessment methods to inform evidence-based policy and effective reforms.

Institutions are considered as ‘rules of the game’ in this chapter, which is informed by two approaches taken to the analysis of institutions in natural resource governance. The first approach centres on viewing co-management itself as an institution. This section draws on common property theory and Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable common property regimes. The section also considers insights from literature on ‘institutional fit’ as a response to scale mismatch to identify lessons for co-management. The second approach is concerned with investigating which institutions shape co-management and how, from formal, bureaucratic institutions of policy and legislation to informal, socially embedded institutions, such as customary systems, kinship ties and gender norms. Critical institutionalism suggests that bureaucratic and socially-embedded institutions may interact through processes referred to ‘institutional bricolage’, with implications for how co-management evolves and performs.

This chapter explores the experiences of Romani women (Gitanas) in the Spanish Atlantic empire through the lens of inquisitorial records from the seventeenth century. Centering the 1668 trial of María de la Concepción in Veracruz, it investigates how Gitanas navigated the complex religious, social and political landscapes of colonial society. By comparing inquisitorial cases from both Spain and New Spain, the chapter argues that colonial governance was less rigid than its peninsular counterpart, creating spaces in which Gitanas could engage in love magic, healing practices and other ritualized forms of knowledge. Operating in liminal zones across ethnoracial and class boundaries, these women provided services to a wide range of clients. Their practices functioned as both survival strategies and subtle forms of resistance against imperial and ecclesial authorities. The chapter demonstrates that Gitanas leveraged their ambiguous social position to subvert normative boundaries of ethnicity, gender and class, particularly by facilitating relationships that unsettled colonial hierarchies and exposed the permeability of imperial control.

Why do some countries grow while others remain mired in poverty? This chapter investigates global inequality and the role of institutions in shaping growth. It shows that markets alone cannot guarantee shared prosperity. Effective governance and adaptive institutions are critical for channeling growth into opportunity. Through case studies and empirical data, it contrasts inclusive and extractive models of development.