For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.

This chapter examines the organisational structure of the ecumenical synods. First, a new interpretation of their organisation is proposed. Whereas earlier scholars have argued for a (con)federal structure consisting of a leading group in Rome and quasi-independent local branches in the provinces, the sources indicate that the ecumenical synods were much more uniformly organised, with a central headquarters in Rome, local headquarters in certain cities and mobile delegations travelling along the agonistic circuits. Next comes an overview of synod officials and a discussion of the finances of the two associations. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the relationship between the synods and the emperor. Whereas several other scholars believe that the synods were a tool with which the emperor kept the agonistic world under control, it appears that the synods had more agency than was earlier assumed. Finally, this chapter analyses other agonistic associations in the Roman empire and their relationship with the ecumenical synods.

The first half of the second century ad was marked by an important event in the history of the ecumenical synods. They both acquired headquarters in Rome: the thymelic synod seemingly settled in a precinct on the Campus Martius and the xystic synod occupied a part of the great bath complex of Trajan on the Oppian hill. This chapter analyses the reasons for this shift and its consequences. The establishment of the Capitolia in ad 86 played a key role, as well as the desire of the synods to be closer to the imperial court. Furthermore, this chapter argues that the move to Rome strengthened centralising tendencies, as it had become easier to take central decisions for the whole agonistic circuit in close consultation with the emperor. Special attention in this chapter is given to the xystic synod’s headquarters, which is documented in a series of inscriptions found near the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. Recent archaeological excavations on the Oppian hill have furthermore led to the conclusion that the synod was indeed settled in the bath-gymnasium complex of Trajan.

Constitutionalism in the decolonising world was not merely an adoption of a set of norms pre-fabricated in the West. A materialist analysis of the Indian constitution argues for the socio-historical specificity of the post-colonial constituent project. Externally the goal of decolonisation was not just political freedom but also economic sovereignty. Internally an under-developed and unequal society posed a persistent danger of unrest for the new regime. Across much of the post-colonial world the solution was a project of planned state-led development and social transformation. The post-colonial constitution was designed to facilitate and realise this goal. These projects demanded the primacy of sovereignty over property and, hence, the constitution differentiated from metropolitan norms privileging property and constraining state interventions. It was a constitution by and for administrators and planners who were the vanguards of Third Worldism. Sans a popular mobilisation, however, a top down project of transformation through constitution failed. As the fortunes of planning declined and the Third World was ‘liberalised’, lawyers supplanted the administrators as the primary custodians of the post-colonial constitutions. Projects of planned transformation gave way to social rights litigation.

Chapter 7, ‘One of Geometry’s Nicest Applications’, relates the digging of the Deep-George draining tunnel (1771–1800), named after George III, King of Great Britain and Hanover. During the planning phase, surveyors designed this engineering project with a previously unknown level of detail. Jean-André Deluc, Fellow of the Royal Society and reader to Queen Charlotte, visited the Harz mines three times as the operations were under way. Deluc’s geological and meteorological inquiries led him to perform barometric experiments in these mines. He relied on practitioners’ data to test and calibrate his instruments, marvelling about their precision in the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Sçavans. Scholars and amateurs – from Goethe to Watt – but also merchants and their wives rushed to visit the project. Year after year, journals reported to the public how the various sections of the tunnel connected seamlessly. In the late eighteenth century, the two worlds of natural scientists and mine engineers were meeting one last time, this time around common issues of precision, data gathering, and instrumentation.

Chapter 5, ‘“So Fair a Subterraneous City”: Mapping the Underground’, focuses on map-making and the visualization of the underground. It argues that these developments were deeply linked to broad changes in the political structure of mining regions. Drawing mining maps and working on them became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, gradually replacing alternative tools such as written reports of visitations, wood models, or annotated sketches. In Saxony, Captain-general Abraham von Schönberg (1640–1711) put his weight and reputation behind the new cartographic technology, hoping that its acceptance would in turn help him advance his reform agenda. At-scale representations were instrumental in justifying new investments, while offering technical road maps to implement them. Johann Berger (1649–1695) spent years producing a monumental cartographic enterprise, the Freiberga subterranea (1693) to support his patron’s ambitions. As surveyors finally realized the old dream of ‘seeing through stones’, the administrations rapidly seized their skills to reform and police their subterraneous cities.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing rise of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany serve to this day as a “warning from history.” The precise lessons to be drawn from this episode remain controversial. Did the first German republic collapse from a lack of popular support or from institutional weakness? These questions were far from the minds of Republican elites. Arnold Brecht and Hans Staudinger regarded problems of stability as primarily administrative. Territorial reform and the creation of public–private partnerships were their creative attempts creating some much-needed breathing space for the young Republic. These initiatives tell us much about the reasons why elites overestimated the robustness of their own institutions. At the same time this ill-founded confidence was necessary for such administrative experiments. Paradoxically, assuming stability can be important in encouraging elites in new democracies to engage in necessary reforms. The administrative rationale also had a dark side, however. It led to a myopic focus on technical detail while ignoring the larger political context and in particular, underestimating the systemic threat from political extremism.

Assuming that effective governance refers to the state’s regulatory powers over private natural and legal persons, it is fair to say that it has been the poor cousin of constitutionalism. Liberal constitutional thought has been largely preoccupied with the need to restrain executive power rather than to justify it.1 That was true first of its focus on royal prerogative power, later of its antagonism toward rule by executive decree or legislation, and into the twentieth century of its uncertain aversion to regulation. Those theorists and public lawyers that resisted that narrative of ‘constraint’, predominantly on the social democratic left, would for the most part choose the language of democracy as their contrarian justificatory framework.2 The contest has similarly played out across the twentieth century in British constitutional thought through an argument between parties who align themselves, roughly put, with one of two supposedly competing principles at the core of the British constitution: the sovereignty of Parliament and the rule of law.3 None of the parties to that dispute are concerned to make the case for executive power per se.

Nearly a million people dead and counting. More than 77 million infected, a little less than one-fifth of the total infections worldwide.1 The United States has had more deaths than any other country, and its COVID-19 death rate of 276 per 100,000 people is the highest among the world’s wealthiest nations.2 Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are hospitalized and die at significantly higher rates than whites.3 Some bright lights exist too, one being the speedy development of vaccines and their deployment in 2021 – although there, too, both the national government and the states have sometimes stumbled.4 Another is legislative enactment of major fiscal measures which sustained individuals and businesses in the face of economy calamity.5 Still, by many public health measures, the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a governmental failure.

Today we face a long-run crisis of democratic legitimacy. Our increasing human interdependence is steadily increasing the numbers of “collective action,” or “free-rider” problems. Those problems in turn require increasing amounts of state coercion. Yet, in part precisely because state coercion is growing, that coercion is becoming less legitimate. As the demand for legitimacy increases and the supply decreases, every ounce of legitimacy becomes more precious.

A long-run response to this crisis requires many changes, including major restructuring to decrease inequality.

A relatively modest, but perhaps practicable and far-reaching, change in our thinking would make recursivity, meaning mutually responsive and iterated communication between representatives and constituents, more central to both the ideals and the practices of the representative system. In the aspirational ideal of recursive representation, representatives in the legislative, administrative, and societal realms engage in ongoing back-and-forth communication with their constituents. That recursivity allows each party to listen and learn, facilitating mutual influence and mutual adjustment. Because the process is more respectful of each citizen than the current system, the outcomes are more likely to reflect citizens’ needs. The resulting coercion should be both more defensible normatively and experienced as more legitimate.

This chapter examines the place within the court of the imperial secretaries and the workers in their bureaux. It first considers social connections between the servile workers in the bureaux and court domestic staff. Following this, the major imperial secretaryships are examined: the offices of ab epistulis, a libellis, a cognitionibus, a commentariis, a memoria, a studiis, a censibus, and a rationibus, as well as their late third-century equivalents. Some individuals holding these offices demonstrably had close relationships with the emperor or courtiers. But we lack the evidence to conclude that the secretaries and their bureaux formed an ‘outer court’ with a clear spatial relationship with the emperor’s domestic realm, or that they had an institutionalized pattern of social or professional contacts with that realm. The chapter also examines the structural relationship between the court and the imperial treasuries (the aerarium and fiscus), highlighting the reciprocal flow of funds.

This reassessment of guardianship terminology interrogates how medieval writers described the administrative, governmental, tutorial and emotional responsibilities of a boy king’s guardians. Analysing the vocabulary used to describe child kingship in royal documents, letters, chronicles, annals and various other sources rapidly reveals the inadequacies of the terms ‘regent’ and ‘regency’ before the fourteenth century at the earliest. Those writing while a boy was king, or in the years immediately after, made a sharp distinction between the conception of royal rule, on the one hand, and the duties, actions and responsibilities of those supporting the child ruler, on the other. This chapter interrogates, in turn, how writers distinguished between the terminology of royal rule, government and administration, education and nurture, and legal wardship and protection. Although ideas concerning the guardianship of minors prominently influenced representations of child kingship, this was only one aspect of a much broader conception of a child’s rule and the protection they and their kingdom required.

Babylonia held a crucial position in a network of overland and naval routes, connecting Arabia, India, and the Graeco-Bactrian empire with the Levant, Syria, and Anatolia via the Fertile Crescent in the west. This network enabled the royal administration to combine the functions of trade and communication with settlement politics, the melioration of agriculture, and the supply of war zones. In this latter role, the Babylonian economy might have played an important part in Seleucid warfare, despite Babylonians never being actively involved in military campaigns. A new Graeco-Babylonian elite with particular demands, the dynamic development of settlements, the network of trade routes, communication, mobility connecting the western parts of the empire in the Aegean with the east, and increased monetization may have provided the conditions for some economic growth in Hellenistic Babylonia. Nevertheless, Babylonia had already been a very productive and economically dynamic region in the Achaemenid period. There were certainly great continuities from the Persian and Seleucid empires, and one may wonder whether the efforts of the early Seleucid kings to improve lines of communication, temple economies, and monetary exchange aimed at regaining the levels of prosperity that had already been achieved before Alexander’s conquests.

Chapter 2 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the crucial role of cities in building empires, defined as states that conquer and rule multiple cities and their hinterlands. It also argues that empires decisively influenced the size and shape of cities. While it acknowledges that camp- and village-dwelling peoples could conquer large empires, it argues that imperial regimes always required capital cities to administer empires over long periods. It illustrates these arguments with references to cities throughout the world: imperial capitals, administrative and monumental structures of many kinds, city walls, provincial capitals, armies and army camps, roads, canals, settler cities, and the infrastructure of imperial borders, including the Great Wall of China and the limes of the Roman Empire.

The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

Chapter 14, “The Administration of Constantinople,” examines how the city was governed in the period between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the organization of the office of the City Prefect or Eparch. Aspects of continuity and change between the early and late city governance are observed.

The competence framework for prescribers states that they should be able to accurately complete and routinely check calculations relevant to prescribing and practical dosing. Prescribers should know about common types of medication error and how to prevent them. The incorrect application of dosing equations is considered a major contributor to preventable adverse events associated with the prescribing of medicines. Anyone required to check calculations performed by others must be competent to perform such calculations independently. A complex calculation is any process requiring more than one step in the preparation and/or administration of a medicine to a patient. Throughout the chapter there are useful tips on how to reduce the risks associated with complex calculations. This chapter includes information on units of measurement, units of amount and various methods used to calculate drug concentration, dose and rate of drug administration. Also included are simple pharmacokinetic concepts and calculations specific to palliative care. At the end of each section there are sample calculations (with answers) allowing readers to test their calculation abilities