This chapter examines why emporia emerged at a certain time, and in a specific global situation. It examines the historical trajectory of the North European societies with a focus on the dynamics of maritime networks. I show how the adoption of sailing ships and deep-water sailing changed social strategies and patterns of interactions, and how this process is reflected in material culture. I argue that the growth of peaceable — as well as martial — maritime interaction, so often identified with the Scandinavian Viking Age, formed part of a wider change. I show how the widespread adoption of deep-water sailing, and of sail-powered ships, affected a plethora of norms, practices, and strategies that underpinned societies and changed their material culture. I approach these as a combinatorial technological evolution, in the sense of economist W. Brian Arthur. I demonstrate that changes were not a matter of sudden innovation, but rather a larger process in which existing patterns were recombined, modified, and scaled up. In this way, new technologies and new social worlds were able to emerge in tandem.

Abstract: By adopting a Mediterranean perspective in the study of Greek religion, we observe both shared nomoi and a wide diversity of practices. They imply a whole set of ‘ingredients’, such as names, objects, settings, and mainly relationships. According to places (such as Delos or Massalia) and times (Archaic colonization or Hellenistic networks), opportunistic strategies emerge on different scales from local to global. A Mediterranean approach makes us more sensitive to the dialectical relations between social forces, durable structures, and changing environments.

Abstract: This chapter reviews the meaning of ‘deserts’ both in modern and ancient terms, while emphasizing the uniqueness and complexity of local conditions within the deserts in close proximity to the Mediterranean. It argues that although geographically speaking arid spaces may not seem sustainable environments for inhabitation, exchange, and contacts, local conditions vary considerably, and larger deserts such as those of North Africa, the Near East, or the Arabian Peninsula must be analysed carefully. In fact, archaeological work in the past two decades has effectively shown the extent to which the deserts were thriving in Antiquity.

This chapter uses a variety of original quantitative and qualitative data to document and describe how capacity facilitates local community protection. The authors define capacity as an organizational resource, encompassing networks, expertise, and human and material capital focused on public, as opposed to internal, operations. In local Catholic churches in the Philippines, public capacity may take the form of ministries focused on social welfare, election monitoring, or ecological affairs. The chapter traces levels of parish capacity to long-term embeddedness in local communities, and influence from members of Catholic religious orders, specialized elites with histories in the Philippines of mobilizing in public affairs. Parishes with high levels of public capacity are better able to access local state elites with discretion over the use of violence and disseminate information and moral messages to members through credible networks.

This chapter explores Aurangzeb’s princely career between his birth in 1618 and his accession to the Mughal throne in 1658. In it, close attention is paid to the decades-long efforts by Prince Aurangzeb to position himself for a successful bid to become the next Mughal emperor. This chapter examines the slow growth of Aurangzeb’s personal household, his networks of support, his efforts to gain military and administrative experience, his attempts to raise money for himself, and his campaign to build his own public image. This chapter draws heavily on his personal letters, a source that has been infrequently used by other historians because it comprises two massive volumes and is in highly stylized Persian.

Chapter 16 examines what it means to be a primary mathematics teacher in a professional context. It considers the attributes of effective mathematics educators, the requirements for professional accreditation, and the value of professional learning and engagement with mathematics education networks. You will also reflect on your preparation for the LANTITE and how to continue developing your identity as a confident and capable mathematics educator.

Our modern sense of what the poetry of the 1800s is and means has been heavily determined by the standards proposed in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads. However, during the 1800s, the ‘Preface’ was a controversial, oppositional proposition. Rather than being seen as the ‘breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’, poetry was more commonly perceived to be a social form of networked writing that was tightly aligned with performances of politeness, privilege, affiliation, and discernment. This essay explores three 1800s publications that sought to regulate poetry as a social world: the Poetical Register (commenced in 1801), the Edinburgh Review (commenced in 1802), and Lord Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). These works serve as exemplars of the contradictions inherent in attempts to delimit poetry during a decade in which its forms and manifestations were becoming increasingly popular, diverse, and contested.

Network and collective choice models are foundational tools in Behavioural Data Science, offering deep insight into how individual decisions scale into system-level outcomes. These models underpin everything from public health planning and traffic optimisation to social media influence and climate action coordination. Yet, as they become more integrated into decision-making architectures – especially under the regulatory framing of the European Union’s AI Act – questions of bias, equity, explainability and accountability become unavoidable. This chapter argues for a responsible approach to network and collective choice modelling, grounded in legal foresight, social ethics and behavioural realism. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical foundations and methodological advantages of these models, it then unpacks critical concerns: selection and confirmation bias, representational fairness, algorithmic opacity and privacy loss. Special attention is paid to the risks of amplification of systemic inequality and marginalisation through flawed modelling assumptions. The chapter draws on real-world applications to show how stakeholder co-design, model interpretability and participatory governance can mitigate harm. By weaving legal obligations under the AI Act with behavioural science principles, this chapter offers a pathway to designing socially beneficial, transparent and context-aware models of collective decision-making in digital systems.

Chapter 4 is the first of the four analytical chapters anchored in the qualitative interviews, and focuses on the topic of women’s representation in the MENA at the national level. The chapter presents an overview of women in parliament from independence to the present day, covering the right to vote and stand for office as well as the number of female parliamentarians per country following the most recent elections. The analysis then moves onto barriers to women’s representation, beginning with the pre-nomination stage and the role of factors such as patriarchy and violence against women. The subsequent sections detail different paths to parliament in the pre- and post-Uprisings eras. Among the topics covered are internal party culture and electoral rules, as well as the background characteristics of the women who make it in politics. The final part of chapter 4 is dedicated to the factors behind success at the campaign stage and once in office with particular reference to the importance of extra-party networks, access to finances and qualifications, as well as the issues of discrimination and self-discrimination at the time of portfolio allocation.

Indigenous boarding programs have long been framed as a response to the structural barriers faced by First Nations students from remote and regional communities in accessing secondary education. For many First Nations families, boarding schools represent a double-edged sword: an avenue for opportunity that also perpetuates colonial systems of dislocation and assimilation. This chapter critically examines the lived experiences of Indigenous students in boarding schools, foregrounding the voices of those most impacted – students, families and communities. It interrogates the systemic and cultural challenges faced by these students while celebrating the strength, adaptability and agency of First Nations peoples. Through an Indigenous lens, the chapter seeks to move beyond narratives of ‘success’ and ‘opportunity’, calling instead for culturally led and self-determined ways for boarding to support students who live away from home for schooling.

Social network ties represent an important and complex confluence of sundry social processes and their consequences. It is an enduring fact of life that the more socially connected a person is, the better off they are. This goes for well-being, for health, for social stature, for popularity and prestige, for social mobility, and for access to material resources. Social connections give people power. They plug people into a switchboard of opportunities and resources, making them part of a resource-rich social system. Social connections liberate people from the stringencies of what might otherwise be stultifying conditions of everyday life. They create trust and produce the capacity for collective action to deal with local and regional social problems. They help people live longer lives. And social connections generally make life more fun, and richer, in every sense of those terms. It is a bundle of benefits that cannot be unwound. This introductory chapter lays out the primary motivation behind this book, which is an attempt to understand whether everyone has equal access to these valuable social resources, and whether they are so potent as to substitute for other valuable resources, such as wealth and prestige, in shaping people’s life chances.

Because social capital is an inherently multidimensional concept, its study calls for a detailed analysis of a wide variety of social resources, ranging from intimate personal relationships with friends and family to linkages to the broader community via involvement in clubs, groups, and other organizations. Research on this topic usually focuses on particular aspects of social capital, often drawing on just one data source or measure. This chapter describes the wide range of measures we interrogate in our analysis and the numerous data sources upon which it is based, including sources such as the General Social Survey (GSS), the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI), the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), and nearly two dozen other data sources – some nationally representative, some more regionalized, including an analysis of urban elites’ networks in a large city. This chapter clarifies the conceptualizations of social capital implied by this data coverage. It also lays out the steps we take in analyzing these data, including different types of descriptive analysis, heavy reliance on tables and figures, and a parsimonious and uniform approach to multivariate analysis.

The overarching question that guides this chapter is: Are social ties, and the resources they represent, equally distributed throughout society? That is, are these connections so free and abundant that they transcend the relentless constraints that people face in obtaining other forms of capital? In particular, do people from disadvantaged backgrounds enjoy the same level of access to such ties as wealthy people? This requires close examination of factors such as people’s connectedness to friends and family; the number of such ties they have and how often they engage them; how much turnover and instability there is in people’s networks; the internal wiring of the networks in which they are embedded, and how that relates to dense connections and brokerage potential; the status and wealth of their contacts; involvement in exchange processes; and connections to community organizations. This chapter navigates the thicket of findings regarding the distribution of these various forms of social capital by first walking through analyses of personal, micro-level connections, and then proceeding upward to more macro-level, organization-oriented indicators. This set of analyses reveals some latent, surprising, and fateful truths about how universally bountiful and reachable these valuable social resources really are.