In several jurisdictions, antitrust or competition laws are deemed as having a political content, at least from a historical perspective. A link is further made between antitrust and democracy. The focus is put on separation of powers-type arguments explaining and supporting the adoption of antitrust or competition laws in the United States, in Germany, in Japan, and in the European Union.

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.

In 1941, Iran watched its neutrality violated as Allied forces launched an amphibious attack on its borders. The invasion was described as a justified and necessary incursion on a country accused of harboring a German fifth column and of accommodating a small community of Italian and Japanese nationals. The offensive also proved the most efficient way of opening and controlling supply lines to the Soviet Union. America also deployed a large contingent of troops and several advisers. While Iran remained a hub of espionage during the war, the impact of the occupation had a serious impact on the daily lives of Iranians, who grappled with food shortages, imposing foreign soldiers in their communities, and a typhus epidemic. Iran emerged as a relatively small, but vital, player in the international conflict. However, it suffered tremendously, as the war generated domestic instability and unrest.

World War II is widely understood as the endpoint of the progressive narrative of ’World History’. The conventional critical narrative of Australia’s post-war literature, however, identifies a dominant mythopoeic tendency of quest, often bound up with narratives of colonial discovery and settlement. Through this lens, Australian literature of this period appears to be driven by the outmoded teleologies and linear imperatives that underpinned the obsolete narrative of World History. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the apparent retrogression of Australian literature appears more complex. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) provides a blistering critique of the Bildungsroman in the context of colonialism and the failed quests of Patrick White’s eponymous hero in Voss (1957) and of Stephen Heriot in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958), which do not repeat the narrative of European discovery so much as expose and exhaust its operations. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, published in 1980 but set in the period immediately after World War II, makes this process explicit and provides, inter alia, a framework for reconsidering the Australian post-war novel as a reckoning with World History that links the practices of colonialism with the catastrophe of the war.

This chapter explores how the strategic value of bird islands increased in the interwar period, even as their economic value dwindled. The Marcus Island Incident helped spark Japanese interest in offshore guano mining for use as phosphate fertilizer, and Japanese-managed mining operations began to pop up on islands throughout the East and South China seas. They were only intermittently profitable, and were abandoned during economic downturns. But they triggered diplomatic disputes first with China (over the Pratas and Paracel groups) and then with France (over the Spratlys). Over time military planners began to conceive of the islands as potential airstrips or submarine refuelling stations. Japanese companies, often competing with each other for rights to the islands, exploited these visions by portraying themselves as useful adjuncts in the defence of Japan’s ‘maritime lifeline’. By the late 1930s the Japanese Navy was directly bankrolling civilian enterprises as cover for military operations.

Even before the war there were signs that many remote island settlements were struggling, but the outbreak of the Pacific War heaped death and devastation upon those few remote island communities that remained. By the end of 1942 it had become clear that the conflict would be fought on an island-by-island basis across the Pacific, as US forces scrabbled to gain a purchase on any scrap of land from which they might launch aerial bombing raids on the Japanese mainland. Many islands were transformed into military garrisons and one, Iwo Jima, became the site one of the most brutal battles of the war. After 1945, Japan was stripped of the vast majority of its island possessions, with Okinawa, the Bonins and Micronesia placed under indefinite US occupation. Those islands that remained under Japanese rule were transformed from stepping stones of colonial expansion to sites of anxiety about territorial loss, demographic decline and the vanishing of tradition. It was within this context that new ways of thinking about deserted islands began to emerge – not only as sites for economic development but also for the conservation of valuable but threatened nature.

In 2013 China Central Television aired a news bulletin with a provocative headline: ‘Japan is snatching our islands using the pretext of environmental protection!’ This fiery denunciation was a reaction to the announcement by the Yamashina Institute that a new variant of Steller’s albatross had been discovered nesting on the disputed Senkaku (Ch: Diaoyu) Islands. Might this accusation by Chinese state media might have a kernel of truth to it? This chapter begins by exploring the politics of heritage preservation in Okinawa under US occupation, before showing how nature conservation on the Senkaku became tangled up in the sovereignty dispute over the islands in the 1960s. Shortly before Okinawan reversion to Japan, the naturalist Takara Tetsuo helped stoke a nationwide panic about Taiwanese fishermen ‘poaching’ seabird eggs on the Senkakus. Later, in the early 2010s, Japanese nationalists led by Tokyo Mayor Ishihara Shintarō used nature conservation as a pretext to lobby the central government to take harder line on the dispute.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.

This chapter discusses the economic dimensions of war. It begins with the classic guns vs. butter framework from economics, whereby spending on the military trades off with spending on other priorities. It builds on this concept to discuss the three main ways that governments finance wars, through increased taxation, borrowing, and printing money. It also examines the market for warriors – how governments gather citizens into the military as soldiers – comparing conscription and volunteerism systems. Next, it discusses the market for weapons, how the private sector produces weapons for the government, and the consequences of different market structures for weapons production. Among other concepts and issues, it explores the fundamental problem of sovereign finance (that government borrowers cannot be forced to pay off debts), the "commercial peace" proposition that trade between states breeds peace, and the economic consequences of war. It applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether access to credit helps state win their wars, and a case study of the development of the US taxation system as a means to fund US participation in the World Wars.

In French colonial history, we can read the world wars as a single conflict. The Great War and World War II broke the French empire as it existed in the previous century. The empire contributed substantially in blood and treasure to victory in 1918, though mobilization for that war deepened existing colonial tensions and created new ones. Shifting dynamics pointed to a renegotiation of basic colonial bargains. An ostensibly new colonial doctrine, the mise en valeur, sought to make the empire a more cohesive economic and political unit. Anti-colonial movements became stronger and more articulate throughout the interwar period, though repression and military force had little trouble preserving imperial authority, for the time being. The defeat of 1940 upended imperial relationships. How could the Vichy regime rule an empire when it had very limited authority even in the Hexagon? Yet Free France promised only continued, if reformed, imperial rule. This situation made questions of collaboration and resistance at least as complicated in the empire as in Europe. By 1945, it became clear to the attentive that the French empire would either have to expire or become something else.

This chapter deals with Shanghai – once East Asia’s biggest Jewish community. It emphasizes the diversity of the Jewish community, which emerged with the arrival of Baghdadi Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, was invigorated by the arrival of Russian Jews in the early twentieth century and then more than tripled with the influx of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe on the eve of the Pacific War. The chapter tracks the origins of the Jewish settlement in the city, examines the reasons for its rise and decline and explores the emergence of a new community of Jewish professionals and ex-pats during the last three decades.

This chapter explores the Jewish community in Japan and its ups and downs since its emergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century until today. Although a small community of usually no more than a thousand souls, it has been a home for diverse Jewish groups and a large number of talented individuals. The chapter traces its emergence, its growth following the Bolshevik Revolution, its ordeal during World War II, and its postwar recovery.

This chapter explores the role India’s Jews played in the armies of the British Raj and subsequently in the armed forces of independent India. By the late nineteenth century, soldiery was one of Bene Israel’s primary occupations but of no other Jewish group at the time. With World War I, other Jewish groups in India began to enlist, and this tradition became even stronger after India's independence. The chapter also investigates the barriers against this service and the achievements in this field Jews have had nonetheless.

This chapter explores the life of Jews in Indonesia before and after its independence. Emerging in the nineteenth century, the local Jewish community thrived in small and remote settlements under the rule of Dutch colonialism and reached its apex in 1941 with the influx of European refugees. Many of the Jews were detained during the Japanese occupation and following the country’s independence, the vast majority of them migrated to other countries. Since the Reformation era (1998 onward), however, Indonesia has witnessed the emergence of new Jewish identification whose leaders and motives the chapter examines.

This chapter deals with the large-scale evacuation of Ashkenazi Jews, perhaps as many as 1 million, to Central Asia following the German onslaught in 1941. It examines the encounter between the newcomers and this seemingly alien Asian region along with its native inhabitants, including the Bukharan Jews. This chapter also analyzes the cultural repercussions of the evacuation and its literary responses, especially the postwar writings of Grigory Kanovich and Dina Rubina.

After the Great Depression and World War II, a compromise between industry and labor made economic growth a priority, with the assumption that growth would reduce inequality. The ideal of democracy inspired liberation movements across the globe and was invoked to justify most governments. Concerns with biodiversity and with environmental risks to human health were merged in the modern environmental movement. The idea of sustainable development incorporated environmental concerns into the push for economic growth. Uncertainty in scientific analysis was codified in the concept of risk, and risk analysis became an important form of policy analysis. Neoliberal policies promoted unfettered markets to promote growth. But growing concerns with the impacts of population and economic growth led to a call for sustainable development, with the twin goals of improving human well-being and reducing stress on the environment. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals articulate this idea and demonstrate its complexity.