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How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.

In Blood Relations, Janet Adelman confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With her distinctive psychological acumen, she argues that Shakespeare’s play frames the uneasy relationship between Christian and Jew specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adelman locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, she demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this startling psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock’s daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, Adelman offers in Blood Relations an indispensable book on the play and on the fascinating question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.

In late-sixteenth-century London, the commercial theaters undertook a novel experiment, fueling a fashion for plays that trafficked in the contemporary urban scene. But beyond the stage's representing the everyday activities of the expanding metropolis, its unprecedented urban turn introduced a new dimension into theatrical experience, opening up a reflexive space within which an increasingly diverse population might begin to \"practice\" the city. In this, the London stage began to operate as a medium as well as a model for urban understanding. Practicing the City traces a range of local engagements, onstage and off, in which the city's population came to practice new forms of urban sociability and belonging. With this practice, Levine suggests, city residents became more self-conscious about their place within the expanding metropolis and, in the process, began to experiment in new forms of collective association. Reading an array of materials, from Shakespeare and Middleton to plague bills and French-language manuals, Levine explores urban practices that push against the exclusions of civic tradition and look instead to the more fluid relations playing out in the disruptive encounters of urban plurality.

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic. Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.

Commercial actors play a vital role in society, yet there is growing evidence that they are responsible for escalating levels of avoidable ill health, planetary damage and social and health inequity. These problems are now referred to as the ‘commercial determinants of health’ (CDoH), recently defined in a Lancet Series as “the systems, practices and pathways through which commercial actors drive health and equity”(1). One element of CDoH is the role of health harming industries in driving non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the burden of which is increasing. It is estimated that tobacco, fossil fuels, ultra-processed foods and alcohol cause an estimated 40-80% of global NCD deaths.1 Yet despite the urgent need to address these corporate harms, progress in national NCD policy implementation has stagnated, particularly in relation to these products(2). The situation in England mirrors the global, with national policy (other than tobacco), inadequate(3). Instead of the population level actions most likely to be effective and equitable, policy has focused on promoting individual behaviour change, generally requiring high levels of individual agency and likely to increase inequity(3). In this national policy vacuum, local governments, including those in England, are beginning to act. While local powers are often limited compared to national government, there is often potential to, inter alia, ban advertising of high-carbon or unhealthy products; use planning and licensing regulations to reduce outlet density and create healthy (eg alcohol- and junk food-free) public spaces; harness polluter-pays levies to charge businesses for the clean-up of waste; or adopt a well-being approach to the local economy and use social value procurement to spend public money for local benefit. Barriers to local action include resource and capacity constraints, corporate pressure against regulation including a persistent framing emphasis on individual responsibility and, despite growing interest in the CDoH, a lack of systems-based, solutions-focused and locally salient evidence. To address these gaps, Population Health Improvement UK (https://www.phiuk.org/about) through its research theme on Local Health Global Profits (LHGP)(https://www.phiuk.org/local-health-global-profits) aims to take a systems approach to understanding and addressing the commercial and other structural determinants of health and equity at local level in England. To enable shared learning across countries in Europe this workshop will present the background to and work of LHGP. Through 4 presentations and a 20 minute discussion, it will draw on audience experiences to help advance efforts to understand and address the CDoH. (1) Gilmore et al (2023). Defining and conceptualising the commercial determinants of health. The Lancet. (2) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(23)00042-6/fulltext (3) https://www.health.org.uk/reports-and-analysis/reports/addressing-the-leading-risk-factors-for-ill-health Key messages • Local authorities can play a key role in addressing the commercial determinants of health by implementing upstream policies that promote health, equity, and sustainability at the community level. • Despite growing interest in systems approaches, their uptake remains low. Supporting local authorities with evidence and strategies is crucial to design and implement effective upstream policies.

This article describes the temporality of eviction in a rubble-strewn site of urban demolition in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), where over 14,000 households are being evicted to create an ambitious \"new urban zone.\" Eviction thrusts many residents into an alternative time-world of enforced waiting, marked by an oppressive sense of being suspended in time. For some residents, however, an alternative temporality marked by indifference and disinterested detachment disrupts the project's timeline and thwarts the temporal designs of planners. Attention to the play of time reveals important social dynamics of everyday urban development and shows that acts of land clearance and reactions to them are more complex than simple battles over land and money. Most significantly, the difference between oppressive, alienating \"waiting\" and empowering, socially productive \"hanging out\"(choỉ) is conditioned by the different ways social actors understand productive activity as an expression of agency played out in time.

\"It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.\" - from The Theory of Money and Credit Originally published in 1912, Ludwig von Mises's The Theory of Money and Credit remains today one of economic theory's most influential and controversial treatises. Von Mises's examination into monetary theory changed forever the world of economic thought when he successfully integrated \"macroeconomics\" into \"microeconomics\" -previously deemed an impossible task -as well as offering explanations into the origin, value and future of money. One hundred years later, von Mises and the Austrian school of economic theory are still fiercely debated by world economists in their search for the solution to America's current financial crisis. His theorems continue to inspire politicians and market experts who aim to raise up the common man and reduce the financial power of governments. In a preface added in 1952, von Mises urges the people of the world to see economic truth: \"The great inflations of our age are not acts of God. They are man-made or, to say it bluntly, government-made. They are the off-shoots of doctrines that ascribe to governments the magic power of creating wealth out of nothing and of making people happy by raising the 'national income.'\" \"The best book on money ever written.\" -Murray Rothbard, economist and historian \"The greatest economist of the twentieth century.\" -Sandeep Jaitly, economist.

This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit or implicit in a text have the same structure, and uncovers various such chronotopes in Homer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Presocratic philosophy and in particular the tragedies of Aeschylus. Mikhail Bakhtin's pioneering use of the chronotope was in literary analysis. This study by contrast derives the variety of chronotopes manifest in Greek texts from the variety of socially integrative practices in the developing polis - notably reciprocity, collective ritual and monetised exchange. In particular, the Oresteia of Aeschylus embodies the reassuring absorption of the new and threatening monetised chronotope into the traditional chronotope that arises from collective ritual with its aetiological myth. This argument includes the first ever demonstration of the profound affinities between Aeschylus and the (Presocratic) philosophy of his time.

Robert D. Hume offers an empirical investigation of incomes, cost, artist remuneration, and buying power in the realm of long eighteenth-century cultural production and purchase. What was earned by writers, actors, singers, musicians, and painters? Who could afford to buy a book? Attend a play or opera? Acquire a painting? Only 6 percent of families had £100 per annum income, and only about 3 percent had £200. What is the “buying power” magnitude of such sums? No single multiplier yields a legitimate present-day equivalent, but a range of 200–300 gives a rough sense of magnitude for most of this period. Novels are now thought of as a bourgeois phenomenon, but they cost 3S. per volume. A family with a £200 annual income would have to spend nearly a full day's income to buy a four-volume novel, but only 12 percent for a play. The market for plays was naturally much larger, which explains high copyright payments to playwrights and very low payments for most novels—hence the large number of novels by women, who had few ways to earn money. From this investigation we learn two broad facts. First, that the earnings of most writers, actors, musicians, and singers were generally scanty but went disproportionately to a few stars, and second, that most of the culture we now study is inarguably elite: it was mostly consumed by the top 1 percent or 0.5 percent of the English population.

This article uses Mbembe's concept of necropolitics as an analytical category to examine the representations of necropower in Squid Game. In the global “organ economy,” organ sellers decide to supply, and brokers then mediate between them and buyers. In contrast, South Korean loan sharks commodify delinquent debtors' organs by forcing them to sign a body waiver as collateral. Recent South Korean dramas have thematized this distinctive systemization of the black economy. Borrowing Lowenstein's “allegorical moment” concept, this article aims to illuminate representations of fluid necropower through children's games as a hinge between reality and the imaginary that invites viewers to dialectically evaluate death problems. The contestations of money and humanity synthetically emerge as necropower constantly moves among different entities: VIPs, a frontman, players, game rules, and money. This article claims that viewers process numerous allegorical moments created by the iconography of necropower and synthetically realize necropolitics and corporeality in Squid Game. Organ extractions and trade in episode two in particular represent “morbid spectacle” and the culmination of mammonism. This article analyzes scenes of death, games, the technique of killing, and esthetics to connect historical examples of the necropolitics that Mbembe draws on and to discuss representations of the organ trade in this recent Korean drama.