Just as there are determinants of health of individuals and communities, there are determinants of health system organization and performance which we term structural determinants. This chapter focuses on a set of such determinants considered key in understanding and strengthening health systems in low- and middle-income countries (L&MICs). These determinants include politics and governance; the economy, livelihoods and poverty; climate change, environmental degradation and natural disasters; social and organizational culture; wars and conflicts. Each of these determinants has its own set of issues. For example, with regards to politics and governance, it is intersection of the form of authority, institutional arrangements, political values, citizen participation, corruption, and informal governance channels that determine health system performance. While the influence of structural determinants on health systems is acknowledged, there is still limited attention to integrating work on structural determinants in health system thinking, policies and practice. This chapter argues for a multi-pronged strategy to address this gap: focusing on tackling inequities; removing misconceptions about health determinants among health workers; easing the path to health system work on health determinants; engaging concerned communities; evaluating innovations to address health determinants; and strengthening intersectoral collaboration.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

Although the theatre industry developed mainly from the nineteenth century onwards, Parisian theatres in Molière’s time already had some aspects of modern commercial entertainment – developing strategies to generate additional income and revenue through private performances, for example. This chapter examines how companies competed to position themselves as leaders in the Parisian market. It assesses the seasonal programming and level of success of the plays that were performed, examining the knock-on effect of increased competition on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the 1660s, and shows the spending and investment choices of Molière’s troupe. As a commercial enterprise, the troupe aimed to attract Parisian audiences while continuing to please the court. It paid, therefore, particular attention to its facilities and services in the capital, and travelled outside Paris to participate in court festivities. The company had to juggle its duty to the King, for whom sumptuous and expensive entertainments were a means of showing his power and influencing other European courts, and to its bourgeois Parisian clients, who provided it with a regular income and could not, therefore, be neglected. In this respect Molière proved to be a wise man, becoming a wealthy entrepreneur of spectacles.

We provide food for thought on some pressing questions about health inequalities – why some of us maintain good health into old age, and the inequity of infectious and Non-Communicable Diseases, both very relevant now to COVID-19. We use historical perspectives and modern examples to discuss the population explosion, social determinants of health and how development over the first 1,000 days influences later health. Some ideas are likely to be quite novel to the reader, such as the risk of disease being increased by ‘mismatch’ between our developmental environment and where and how we live later. This takes the story across the globe, from high- to low-income countries, where early development is often less healthy but economic progress is changing environments fast. Can young people in such settings escape, or has the anvil on which their bodies were forged in early life left them with unalterable inequalities? We ask who needs to ‘own’ these problems and why solutions to them have been slow to emerge. The wider, global perspective, sets the scene for the final chapter which focuses on what we can all do as individuals now that we know some of the secrets of our first 1,000 days.

India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was ever the case, and at no time more so than in the India that existed from 1200 to 1750, before the European intervention. In this absorbing and richly illustrated second edition, the authors take the reader on a journey across the political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes of India from the Ghurid conquests and the Delhi Sultanate, through the rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara and their successors, to the peripheries of empire, and finally, to the great court of the Mughals. This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a literary, material, and visual culture which was uniquely their own and which still resonates in today’s India.

Chapter nine commences with the increasing demand for textiles, especially cottons, as Europeans established several trading enclaves including in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, all of which became important to the EIC. We turn next to newly ascendant groups who increasingly contested Mughal control of north India, especially to the Sikhs, a multiethnic religious community with strong martial orientations. Next we explore differences in various regions’ economic experiences as the empire weakened. While the imperial heartland’s economy was hit hard, other regions witnessed greater prosperity. The final section deals with Bengal where developments had significance for the subcontinent’s subsequent history, for it was there that the English first obtained an extensive foothold within the internal affairs of the erstwhile empire.

Studies of trade are predicated on the antithesis between ‘personalised exchange’ (the Network) and ‘arms-length exchange’ (the anonymous Market). As regards ancient trade, the putative incongruity between the two has informed the view of the supremacy of personalised exchange, and the concomitant absence of market exchange. In historical analyses, furthermore, trade networks are appraised solely for their role in the distribution of raw materials and commodities. This chapter challenges these views. Focusing on a formalised kind of network, the association, it first charts the diffusion of traders’ associations to, and their integration in the economic life of, eastern Mediterranean commercial centres. Then, it investigates the mechanisms that enabled associational networks to act as fighters of trade constraints, distance-shortening entities, bridge builders between state/fiscal concerns and private profit, co-determinants of routes and prices, and as producers of knowledge and trust. Formalised networks, it is concluded, helped trade to break out of its lone-peddler mode and to amalgamate with a wider organisational world, whose newly fashioned business behaviour approximated that of the firm. In all this, this chapter is in alignment with the more recent trend among social scientists to consider networks as integral parts of market models of the economy.

This chapter analyses the concept of technological progress in Greek antiquity. It briefly surveys the historiography of technological progress, in particular Moses Finley’s view and its links with his view of the ancient economy, and more recent reactions to Finley. The chapter charts the idea that technology has helped humankind develop from a semi-brutish state to a more civilised condition in some classical Greek sources, including Greek tragedy, and focusses on the case-study of ancient accounts of catapults, which include a history of discovery and of cumulative improvement. The last section is devoted to the ambiguous morality of technological progress.

This essay examines how the antebellum economy was depicted in American literature from about 1820 to 1860. The first section borrows from the “New Economic Criticism” to provide an overview of the way American writers tended to represent the emergence of a new form of economic selfhood in America, one based both on credit and speculation and on market notions of “success” and “failure.” The second section takes its cue from recent scholarship in “Transnational American Studies” to suggest a possible future for economic criticism, one that attends to the way American literary selfhood was imagined during this period in relation to global networks of trade and exchange.

This essay reads Lydia Maria Child and Henry David Thoreau against the grain of the usual literary taxonomies in order to consider the degree to which two key preoccupations animated their respective work: first, What constitutes a good life and how might people of limited or moderate means achieve it within a volatile and unforgiving US economy? And, second, How might individuals conceive of and act on their responsibilities to suffering others, especially enslaved Americans, and what should one’s disposition be toward injustice more generally? With attention to their overlapping inquiries into frugality, self-improvement, economic instability, and social injustice, I argue that Child and Thoreau are crucial authors for understanding both the mid-nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries.

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter. Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to the extent that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in which they discoursed about their school. It inspired generations of jurists in their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings, etc., and that continues to today. Its story presents an interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large community across centuries. Embedded in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the time, it argues that Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical requirements.

The second part of the book, entitled “Time”, concerns matters that relate to specific temporal issues, linked either with the subsequent legacy of the Tour or with events that occurred close in time to its composition. Chapter 5 attempts to show how students of history have enlisted the book for a variety of purposes, especially within the last hundred years. They include eminent writers in almost every branch of the discipline, markedly different.in outlook and interests. Social, political, economic, cultural, urban and transport historians are among those who have made the most frequent raids. The work has proved invaluable to generations of writers, its text adduced by historians of the family, old age, women, religion, shopping, weather, landscape, cartography, leisure, travel and tourism, infectious disease, antiquarianism, archeology, gambling, the Navy, Civil War battlefields, dialect, folk customs, industrial archeology – the list could be greatly prolonged. The evidence collected here confirms the Tour as a truly central work for our understanding of Britain at a crucial stage of its transition into modernity.

The final chapter brings together the main findings and arguments of the book, identifies its broader implications, and formulates some ideas for future research. Building upon insights from political ecology, it suggests that a useful way forward is through reframing questions away from assuming fatalistic relationships between nature and conflict, and starting to ask questions that illuminate the broader social/political/economic dynamics involved. By considering how different environmental injustices play a role in shaping contemporary conflicts, international law scholarship may also expose and challenge the utilitarian/instrumental view of nature that underpins the field. If environmental ‘scarcity’ and ‘abundance’ are not external factors leading to conflict, but the outcomes of socio-economic processes, often linked to historical grievances and unequal power relations, entirely different notions of justice, peace, and security are needed.