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

This paper explores how algorithmic rationality may be considered a new bureaucracy according to Weber’s conceptualization of legal rationality. It questions the idea that technical disintermediation may achieve the goal of algorithmic neutrality and objective decision-making. It argues that such rationality is represented by surveillance purposes in the broadest meaning. Algorithmic surveillance reduces the complexity of reality calculating the probability that certain facts happen on the basis of repeated actions. The persuasive power of algorithms aims at predicting social behaviours that are expected to be repeated in time. Against this static model, the role of law and legal culture is relevant for individual emancipation and social change. The paper is divided into three sections: the first section describes commonalities and differences between legal bureaucracy and algorithms; the second part examines the linkage between a data-driven model of law production and algorithmic rationality; the third part questions the idea of law production by data as a product of legal culture.

The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included in broader examinations of the Hellenistic World. This book proposes a more dynamic comparison, with a particular, though not exclusive focus on the interaction of the royal centers with local populations and elites. Both political entities are approached as multiethnic empires whose resemblance and entanglement are sufficient to make comparisons meaningful. In the process of comparing them, differences and connections become more salient and better explained. We aim to explore the different structural capacities for, and levels of, integration that were either aspired to or achieved by the kings and populations of each 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.

The Persian invasion in the early seventh century weakened Roman rule in Egypt, particularly the wealthy governing class. Only a decade after the Roman recovery of Egypt it was again invaded, by a two-pronged Arab army that took control of the country and, after a siege, of Alexandria. In many ways Egypt after the Arab conquest continued as it had been, with local elites and administrations running things on behalf of the small occupying force. If anything, elite power and rural dependency were reinforced by the new taxation system. Coptic language and literature flourished, with the gradual erosion of Greek as an imperial language, and the anti-Chalcedonian church of Egypt developed a distinct Coptic cultural and religious identity. Over time, however, a series of pressures and developments led to a wider use of Arabic in administration and in daily life, a decline in Coptic, and eventually to widespread conversion to Islam.

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the background to Roman Egypt, starting with Egypt’s experience of foreign rule under the Kushites, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. The impact of the three centuries of rule by the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who took over after the death of Alexander the Great, is explored; many traditional Egyptian institutions remained in place, most importantly the great temples. Many Persian administrative innovations were also kept, but the Greeks brought in their own financial practices. Substantial immigration from the Greek world and the Levant changed the population, and Greek largely displaced Egyptian as a language of power, even though Egyptian society was substantially multilingual. Periodic revolts show that foreign rule was not universally accepted, but many Egyptians became part of the Ptolemaic administration and served its economic goals, which depended heavily on exporting wheat. Romans began to settle in Alexandria in the last decades before the Roman conquest.

The reorganization of the empire and administrative reforms of the emperor Diocletian at the end of the third century brought changes to Egypt, particularly in taxation and coinage, now more similar to those elsewhere in the empire. Alexandria suffered yet more damage in the revolt of Domitius Domitianus, and rebuilding took many years. The civic elite reached its peak of influence in this period, but by the fifth century its lower and middle ranks were losing ground to the wealthiest, and new fortunes were being founded on salaried careers in the imperial administration. The Christian church became a major institutional power after the end of persecutions, developing a large network of churches, clergy, monasteries, and then charitable institutions such as hospitals. A Christian educational culture and Coptic literary culture began to develop, as well. At the same time, there were signs of a rebirth of a visible Jewish community in Egypt.

This chapter assesses the significance of a variety of genres of written and material sources for an understanding of political culture in Byzantium, including narratives and chronicles, encomia, orations, ceremonial handbooks and lists, monuments, silks, coins, archival documents, lead seals and letters. It distinguishes between narratives produced at the centre of Byzantine political life and those produced by outsiders: the former not simply windows into Byzantine political culture but integral elements of that culture, projecting the norms and expectations of the governing elite; the latter offering alternative perspectives, valuable for plugging chronological gaps but also as correctives to the propaganda that characterises so much Byzantine historiography. Few administrative records survive from Byzantium, especially compared to the Latin west, although legions of lead seals point to archives once far richer. Our surviving sources, particularly speeches, suggest that only in the later period were alternatives to the prevailing political order countenanced, and even then, despite a loss in territorial reach, the emperor’s court still formed the focal point of political life.

The early Islamic empire may have been the largest by land, but military reach should not be mistaken for highly centralised administrative structures: these only developed as the empire fragmented but were replicated in the tenth-century successor states, where the position of vizier gained increasing political influence. Nor should imperial success be mistaken for a stable elite, as newcomers – notably court scribes and religious scholars – challenged the military. The Abbasid caliphs’ fortunes varied with their military, fiscal and administrative structures, but they remained necessary legitimisers of other political structures, too sacred to depose. However, it was the ʿulamaʾ who established and elaborated ideological structures that long outlasted the first Muslim empires. After the mid-thirteenth-century upheavals, the ad hoc reach of Turco-Mongol and Arabo-Berber trans-regional leaderships formed an ‘archipelago’ in a ‘sea of semi-independent regions’ characterised by violent, volatile and complex power relationships. Eventual stabilisation ended centuries of political turbulence, centred around the great early modern empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals.

Possession of land, noble lineage and martial prowess was, in theory, a sine qua non for participating in the Latin west’s politics. Yet forms of political organisation diversified: by the late middle ages, urban leaders and the ‘commons’ had forced their way into many political communities, with access to commercial wealth playing an ever more important role. Monarchies, principalities, ecclesiastical polities and city states alike relied on written procedures underpinned by elaborate laws. Legal knowledge and access to the ruler’s court became foundations of elite hegemony – alongside military power which was itself changing, as war taxation and the means of raising armies grew more complex. Education allowed some to rise through administrative service or the law. Despite the attempts of aristocratic military elites to shore up their hegemony, the political culture of most of Latin Christendom was flexible enough to let merchants, lawyers and scholars join or partner those elites in ways that would have been unimaginable in the early middle ages.

Chapter 3 traces the nature and trajectory of the Trump administration – especially given he was a president who came into office without any political, government, or military experience whatsoever. While for a time there were several “adults in the room,” for example Secretary of Defense James Mattis, in relatively short order they disappeared from the administration. This left the federal government in the hands effectively of only those who were reliable and relentless Trump loyalists. Trump’s extraordinary need for, insistence on, almost slavish personal and political loyalty meant that turnover in the administration was inordinately high which, among other things, explains why it was so poorly equipped to cope with the pandemic.

An overview of various kinds of sources shows the extent of script usage during the Old Kingdom well into the fifteenth century BC to have been relatively modest. There is evidence for some monumental and administrative use as well as for texts as aide-mémoire. The existence of an extensive chancellery with an organized tablet storage system cannot be proven. With the shift to writing in Hittite, however, came the recording of foundational texts (e.g., Anitta Text, Zalpa Tale, indigenous Anatolian myths), bolstering a sense of common identity of the young kingdom. In the same period the old so-called Palace Chronicles may have developed into the Hittite Law collection. On the whole, the Central Anatolian Hittite kingdom was still very much an oral society.

How the Hittite kingdom broke up still eludes us. Current archaeological thinking envisions a deliberate abandonment of the capital Hattusa by its elite. Evidence of migrations pushing eastwards from the west, recent interpretations of the Sea People’s movements in a similar direction, and the emergence of three Great Kings in Hittite fashion after 1200 in inscriptions from the eastern Konya plain (Kızıldağ, Karadağ), at KarahÖyÜk near Elbistan, and several inscriptions from the Malatya area further east may hint at where they went. Did they try to settle down and continue at Tarhuntassa, Karkamish, or elsewhere in that region? Using the fall of Ugarit around 1190 or, as some claim, the end of Emar in the late 1180s as termini post quos for the end of the kingdom one might argue for an awareness of a still existing Hittite kingdom into the early twelfth century bc but we do not know whether that was at Hattusa or already elsewhere.