Romantic relationships occur within a larger social, political, and historic context. Although family historians have attended to the changing social meaning and role of romantic partnering across historical time, few scholars have considered that the psychosocial meanings individuals attribute to historic events may shape romantic relationships dynamics. In this chapter, we consider how linkages between historic events and shifts in the socio-political environment of the United States may influence romantic relationships. We begin by reviewing the work of family historians before discussing theories and concepts relevant to examining romantic partnering within a historical context. We provide illustrative examples to highlight the overlap between cohort and historic effects across relationship initiation, maintenance, and dissolution. We conclude by reflecting on the conceptual and empirical challenges and possibilities associated with examining relationships from a historical perspective.

Expertise implies that people are usually good problem solvers in their area of expertise but expertise doesn’t necessarily imply that they are creative. Creativity requires that the solutions are not only correct but also novel and useful. New solutions, such as using dental floss to hang objects on a wall, are needed in daily life when typical solutions are not readily available. One approach to studying creativity is to observe creative people such as artists, sculptors, jazz musicians, and actors. Another approach is to conduct controlled experiments such as evaluating the effectiveness of examples in producing creative products. The Geneplore model of thinking provides a helpful framework for dividing creative thought into generation and exploration phases. Broad states of mind – exploring the environment rather than exploiting accumulated knowledge – contribute to producing novel solutions. In contrast, anxiety can have a negative impact of creativity. Across many diverse content domains from the arts to the sciences, rated anxiety was greater for activities that required creativity.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Chapter 1 considers the historical links between physical and social mobility among Kenyans, arguing that becoming ‘someone’ has long been entangled with migrating ‘somewhere’. In doing so, it underscores the shifting centrality of kinship ties to individual and collective well-being against the backdrop of historical and ideational change. It examines the role played by education, which itself is closely entangled with Christian missions, in shaping people’s imagination about what their futures might hold. To understand why families began to look beyond Kenya to secure their futures, it also considers the political, economic, and social uncertainty of the 1990s and early 2000s and the ensuing crisis of social reproduction.

Chapter 4 provides a rich ethnographic analysis of everyday transnational practices of relatedness, including calling, texting, visiting, and sending remittances. It begins by considering power and affect in moral economies of transnational kinship, along with various communicative means of staying in touch across space, to illuminate the factors, contexts, and modes that inform the ways in which kinship dilemmas are experienced. What follows is a look at interactions and exchanges in which kin draw on the discourses and logics of ‘tradition’ and born-again Christianity to negotiate what being related means and entails. In considering specific familial dilemmas, I show how they call into question ideas of migrant personhood and who is materially responsible for whom, illuminating the moral, affective, material, and existential stakes of these transnational practices.

Much migration research takes as its point of departure the migrant and the act of migration. In contrast, the Introduction foregrounds migrants and their families, treating migration projects like those at the heart of the book as domains of interaction between those who move and those who stay. It introduces and situates key concepts and topics, including ‘moral economies of transnational kinship’, imagination and distance, Christianity, and generation. The Introduction also discusses migrants’ arrival in the United Kingdom and the immigration context at the time, as well as the methodology used in conducting multi-sited fieldwork. It concludes with an outline of the book’s six chapters, which consider moral economies of transnational kinship from multiple perspectives and angles, from multiple social and geographic locations.

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

Chapter 2 focuses on the migration stories of two generations of Kenyans, situating them within wider family and social histories. Although only one person in a family typically moved, I argue that their migration is better understood as family migration, rather than economic migration. While economic gain and social possibilities are related, they are not the same. Rather, these migration projects marked the convergence of individual and familial aspirations, thereby re-centring kinship as a means of realising the futures of both those who moved and those who stayed. The imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin are important to this discussion and reveal how the United Kingdom was a largely imagined place at the time of migration, though not an arbitrary migration destination. Alongside this focus on place and space, the chapter begins to explore the role of time and temporality in the self- and life-making projects of migrants and their families.

In a flurry of activity that peaked in the late 1950s, a cohort of activists from the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania participated in a global landscape of anticolonial activism. They travelled to hubs like Delhi, London, Cairo and Accra, navigating Cold War internationalisms as students, exiles and political representatives. They formed committees, manned offices, published pamphlets, launched newsletters and corresponded with international organisations. And yet, often, their committees collapsed, they struggled with stationery shortages, their pamphlet manuscripts were rejected, their newsletters were prevented from reaching readers and they were let down by organisations. The introduction asks how to understand this story against a historiographical backdrop that narrates global anticolonialism through the violent hotspots of international decolonisation. It proposes a microspatial perspective and the conceptual framework of an anticolonial culture, arguing that this regional cohort, by some measures marginal, can help us understand the limits of transnational activism in the unfolding of decolonisation.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

The treatise On Generation and Corruption (GC) consists of a general account of generation and corruption (offered in the first book) plus an elemental theory (advanced in the second book). This introduction explores the relation between these two pieces. The upshot of this exploration is that the unity of the treatise is stronger than it is often thought. Far from being a suboptimal amalgam of various pieces, the treatise is the best and most efficient way to fulfill the promise made at the outset, where an account of the nature and causes of generation and corruption is announced, including how they differ from other natural processes such as alteration and growth.

GC II 9 resumes the task announced already in GC I 3: explicating generation and corruption so as to account for the fact that these processes are ontologically distinct from alteration. Aristotle identifies the causes of generation and corruption with a view to explaining their contribution in bringing these processes about. First, the chapter discusses the material cause and identifies the kind of matter that functions as a cause of these processes. Rather than presenting matter as merely passive the chapter paints a picture of it as contributing to the causation of generation by supplying the capacities without which form would be unable to fulfill its forming function, and as contributing to that of corruption by its readiness to both lose properties and gain others. The chapter goes on to censure Aristotle’s predecessors for failing to point to an efficient cause of generation and corruption, even though they claim that identifying such a cause is a principal motivation for their theorizing. Though largely critical, this discussion is carefully calibrated to unveil essential features of the efficient cause and in that way prepare the account for this cause in GC II 10.

Providing the healthiest and safest environment in the first 1,000 days of life is the greatest gift which parents can give to their children. We return to the theme of control over our lives to ask who is in control of this gift, and whether today’s medicine and public health hold the answers. We explore the dilemmas facing today’s governments and the decisions that individuals make in terms of personal responsibility when maternal and child health are not prioritised by health policy-makers. We discuss sexual and reproductive rights, why women’s health has not been prioritised – especially during the pandemic – and reasons for high maternal mortality in some countries. We offer an optimistic close to the book; a call to action. We explain that, while planning for parenthood is important, the actions needed do not have to be sustained over a long period. We emphasise the many opportunities which adolescents and young people can seize as the parents of the future. This hope can generate the resolve to make the first 1,000 days of life as good as possible for the next generation. Knowing the secrets of our first 1,000 days is a vital part of this.

Contemporary technologies for offshore electricity generation and transmission enable sea uses of types and at scales that could not have been envisaged when the text of UNCLOS was agreed. The chapter considers whether UNCLOS is able to accommodate the offshore renewables revolution. It focuses on offshore wind energy, which is likely to see massive growth during the next three decades as the world decarbonizes. The review finds that UNCLOS does not always make adequate legal provision for them. Support will be needed from national laws, interstate agreements, and resolutions and guidelines of international organizations such as the International Maritime Organization to fill gaps in the law, clarify uncertainties and to meet challenges posed by offshore wind’s growth. Further regulation by states of offshore wind will also be needed to address the environmental effects of relevant development in line with duties for marine environmental protection, and to answer difficult legal questions raised by the pursuit of development that may itself cause significant environmental harm to address the environmental threats posed by climate change.

Changes of social order in societies in remote times up to the present time have had a major impact on the use of address systems and their change, as has language contact due to population movements whether forced or unforced. There are several important factors influencing these changes involving processes of (de)grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. Indeed, there is a series of extra-linguistic variables associated with pronominal address including social position, relative authority, group membership, generation, age, sex, kinship, genealogic distance, mood, social context, and language variety. It is precisely these features which turn second person pronouns into social markers. This chapter has a threefold objective: first, to shed some light on the complex architecture of address systems which Romance languages have developed over time out of their shared Latin heritage; second, to familiarize readers with some of the different kinds of address systems conventionalized in Romance; and, finally, to foreground the processes of language change which led to the great variety of systems present in the post-Latin varieties today.

Margaret Cavendish thought of her work as her “childe,” perhaps compensating for her own lack of biological children with her conceptions of nature. In her early works, she claimed that she was too modest to examine the nature of procreation, but later investigates the ideas of both ancients and moderns about the physical and metaphysical aspects of generation. She criticized William Harvey’s biology and understood the possible sexual implications of Robert Boyle’s experimentation with the air-pump. Her developed natural philosophy, that everything was composed of matter in motion, allowed her to advance a non-sexed and non-gendered account of generation. The unitary asexual substratum of matter could allow a man to become a woman, or a woman a man; such gender fluidity was possible because of the diversity of matter and its capacity to change due to particular circumstances. Consequently, Cavendish could be both sexes and none, constructing natural philosophy and generating imaginary worlds. We are left with the question of whether Cavendish thought that gender and even sex are social and cultural constructs, thus anticipating the modern examination of these categories.