This vignette explores the role that Full Interpretation, Last Resort, and Effect on Outcome play in constraining and shaping a trigger-free, non-deterministic computational system in which operations such as Merge and Transfer apply freely, as entertained in Chomsky’s recent work. A “minimax” view of economy emerges which has the potential to account for major properties of clausal syntax, including the basic categories, uninterpretable features, and their patterns of distribution.

Chomsky introduced the Minimalist Program in 1993, but some fundamentals of it were present in the GB approach, e.g. economy of representation; “Full Interpretation,” which requires that every element of PF and LF receive an appropriate interpretation; and the idea that movement is a “last resort.” An NP is moved only when required to escape violation of some principle. Very important was the reinstatement of the generalized transformations of Chomsky (1955), and extension of the device to be the sole structure-building operation, even the source of movement. There is but one syntactic operation – Merge, combining two objects. Movement is the same basic operation but with one of the two objects internal to the other. Another innovation was Inclusiveness: outputs consist of nothing beyond properties of items of the lexicon (lexical features); i.e., the interface levels consist of nothing more than arrangements of lexical features. No new objects are added in the course of computation. This excludes such familiar devices as bar levels and indices. In this chapter, I survey these developments, and their implementation in early Minimalism.

In Chapter 5, the development of industrial power and its influence on government reveals the strong impact of technological determinism, which favors the protection of industry as an inapt proxy for human well-being.

Chapter 7 focuses on subsistence and prosperity in the Homeric world. It treats farmers and shepherds, sailors and traders, smiths and craftsmen, and the blurred boundary between commerce and raiding. By tracing how wealth is made, displayed, and lost, the chapter argues that the poems preserve a practical memory of work, vulnerability, and the precariousness of material security.

The introduction takes the author’s hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a perspective. At the head of the Ohio River, Pittsburgh drew international observers who wished to study industrialization in the nineteenth century. Its rivers, coal, natural gas reservoirs, and oil fields catalyzed a fossil-fuel boom. The introduction illustrates the formation of a new idiom in the lyceums and lecture circuit of the industrial heartland and energy frontier of the Ohio River Valley, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1851 lectures to Henry Adams’s account of a journey on the Pennsylvania Railroad in The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and of what Adams called “energies quite new.” This chapter provides an overview of energy and economy as contingent ideas. It shows how they raise basic questions about personhood and agency. “Burning Ideas” details a historiography shaped by Pittsburgh’s productive forces, explains the book’s dialectical approach, and concludes with chapter summaries.

Hobbes is sharply criticizing the phenomenon of dueling. He is famous for the claim that the fear of death is the strongest passion and that the security provided by the state is the decisive source of its legitimacy. He is, therefore, often regarded as the founder of liberalism with a new, security-oriented, or bourgeois mentality and made responsible for a decline of honor in early modernity. The chapter aims to critically discuss and enrich this decline-of-honor hypothesis. Hobbes’s redefinition and devaluation of honor is important – but it is only one part of the story. The other part is a subliminal morality of natural honor that is in tension with the security-oriented morality. The chapter discusses different explanations for this tension and offers a complimentary one: The subliminal morality of natural honor might be a part of Hobbes’s goal to get the power-seekers on board, to pacify them, and to turn them to the economic realm. The chapter thus contributes to the differentiation of the decline-of-honor hypothesis, sheds light on the complex and puzzling role of honor in Hobbes’s political philosophy, and offers a starting point to reflect on the role of honor in contemporary liberal democracies.

Chapter 4 continues the discussion of why same-sex marriage happened in Cuba, proposing additional contributing factors related to Cuba’s post-Soviet economy, including foreign investment and tourism. In particular, it argues that same-sex marriage is not merely a sign of decreasing homophobia, but of a transformation in sexual identity categories.

We estimate the short-run effects of Brexit border disruption on the UK economy. We estimate relationships for the UK where Brexit effects are identified by the dates of Brexit events, the referendum and the exit from the single market. We find evidence of short-run effects of Brexit: temporary effects on GDP, exports and imports (slightly negative), and on inflation and interest rates (slightly positive). These effects are consistent with modest disruption from introducing a border with the EU, a border due to be made barrier-free and seamless by the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Previous work using other countries as comparators is vulnerable to difficulties in isolating the Brexit effects among numerous other shocks. We also survey earlier modelling work on the long-run effects of evolving policies of free trade, UK-sourced regulation and liberalised immigration. Models of long-run trade suggest the emergence of substantial gains.

Sterling depreciated by around 10 per cent on a trade-weighted basis immediately after the vote, raising prices faced by consumers by an estimated 2.9 per cent in the two years after, with a consequent effect on reducing real living standards. For firms, the referendum and its aftermath of political instability increased uncertainty and raised barriers to investment. We focus mostly on the longer-term consequences. We start by outlining, briefly, the key economic claims and forecasts made at the time of the referendum. These matter not just for historical purposes but because ‘consensus’ estimates and assumptions made by key policymakers, notably at the Office for Budget Responsibility, have changed little since then. We then present some of the basic data on UK economic performance over the period and draw comparisons with similar countries. We then consider in more detail what has happened to trade and business investment, the key routes through which any economic impacts are likely to have been transmitted. We briefly review claims that big regulatory changes might have had positive effects.

The story of a trader introduces the historical actors who made and transformed Mexico City during the seventeenth century. A tour of the landscape situates their lives in an American metropolis – a capital and commercial city sustained by working people. A discussion of residents’ economies underlines the focus on individuals and their economic goals. An overview of the city’s governance explains how and where people acted politically. A demographic profile confirms that this history is about people from all over the world: Native Americans; free and enslaved people from Africa and Asia; colonists and migrants from Europe; and all their descendants. Their experiences, their urban history, affirm archival reconstruction as a way to chart change over time from the perspective of people who made a living doing essential work, selling food, transporting goods, providing care, and valuing silver, the city’s money.

Chapter 11 explores Gao’s strategies for defending Huainan, maintaining its economic and financial viability, ensuring its local administration, and pursuing external relations. Huainan was one of the wealthiest and most populous regions in the empire. “Great Bounty” outlines Gao’s policies of economic, agricultural, and commercial administration. “Commodity Taxes” discusses his role in southern China’s financial administration and his approach to using monopoly taxation for funding Huainan’s government. “Border Defense” details Gao’s actions as commander-in-chief and military governor responsible for building and funding armies capable of securing Huainan. “Inked Edicts” refers to the emperor’s privilege of appointing prefects and other provincial officials by personal edicts, a prerogative delegated to Gao Pian and other military governors in 881. In “Friend or Foe,” Gao engages in diplomatic exchanges with external actors to prevent attacks on Huainan’s borders and join forces with potential allies. After Huainan’s military and fiscal decoupling from the government-in-exile, Gao gains full powers over the region’s administration.

The Introduction places the fall of the Tang and the trajectory of Gao Pian in historical perspective and surveys external and internal factors that challenged the cohesion of the empire. The first half of the Tang had been a phase of vigorous imperial expansion, until the An Lushan rebellion weakened the Tang’s capacity to project power beyond its borders and initiated the rise of regional autonomy that culminated in the empire’s territorial dissolution. The section “Tang and Its Neighbors” reviews the empire’s external relations with Tibet, Nanzhao, and the Korean peninsula. “Internal Fault Lines” pinpoints the conditions testing the late empire’s viability: border wars, socio-economic distress, geographical imbalances, internal insurrection, and government factionalism. “A Broken Compact” highlights the breakdown of vassal allegiance to the Tang sovereign. “The Historical Record” draws attention to the bias of official historiography as regards issues of allegiance and details the range and types of alternative sources used in this book. “The General’s Scribe,” finally, explains how Gao Pian’s Korean secretary Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn, author of a previously neglected key archive on the period, arrived in Tang China.

Wollstonecraft, like most philosophers of the enlightenment period, had a deep trust in the power of reason to change the course of human history, and thought that religion, provided it was not dogmatic and allowed for dissent, was a crucial element of what it meant to be a good human being. Yet she was also an applied philosopher who engaged with revolutionaries proposing social and political reforms. In this chapter, I look at how her work was shaped by the political acts that took place around her, and how it in turns attempted to help shape the new social and political frameworks that were developing at the time – the French Revolution, which she commented on in her Moral and Historical View of the French Revolution.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Commission as a technology regulator, outlining the development of the EU’s technology policies and laws, from their beginnings in the late 1970s until the late 2000s. Reflecting on the limited interventions of the Commission during the period referred to as one of ‘Eurosclerosis’, and the beginnings of distinct technology policies and positive acts of integration around technology in the 1990s. It explores how during its development, EU technology policy was marked by a distinction between economically oriented developments, such as around intellectual property rights, and security-related ones as in the case of cybercrime and cybersecurity. However, in the period of the late 2000s/early 2010s and the EU ‘polycrisis’ of financial crisis, legitimacy crisis, and populism crisis, and concerns over the power of the private sector in technology governance, the groundwork was laid for seeing technology control in terms of interlinked economic and security goals, a growing distrust of ‘Big Tech’, and concerns about the need to externalise the EU’s rules and values, including through the Brussels effect.

Chapter 7 considers the developments that have taken place since the beginning of the von der Leyen II Commission, identifying how there has not only been continuity in the EU’s approach to technology control and its links to digital sovereignty but also an expansion and reinforcement of the approach. Faced with increased instability and geopolitical threat, the linkage of security and economy has become even more explicit for the von der Leyen II Commission, with the Competitiveness Compass taking an approach that appears to be a more assertive form of regulatory mercantilism, in which the element of defence is specifically incorporated into the EU’s rationale for action, with an expansion of technology controls including the development of an explicit push for defence technology industrial policy, the increased control over external dependencies and supply chains through its Preparedness Strategy, and an AI policy for Europe that includes significant investments for AI gigafactories.