This paper is about the reasons why there is so rarely a strong association between the secular trend in real wages and mortality. We classify the reasons in several different categories: epidemiological, sociological, geographical, demographic, technologic, and economic. In addition, we offer some speculations on why there has been an expectation that such an association would exist. We sugges...

The term “natural childbirth” denotes an approach to childbirth characterised by a bias towards physical and mental hygiene in the management of pregnancy and labour. It emerged in Britain in the interwar period, partly as a response to the growing interventionism of mainstream obstetrics. Its appeal since then has rested on the belief that it could provide a holistic approach to maternity care...

Alternative reproduction has become the new frontier in the continuing culture wars over the family. Commentators with longstanding anxieties over non-traditional kinship have turned their regulatory gaze to it, as have more progressive scholars who support non-traditional family formation but nevertheless favor proposals to regulate the “new kinship” and the “new reproduction.” Excavating Ober...

This chapter traces how British and Dutch colonial officials gathered and organized knowledge on Islamic law in the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) and the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia) respectively. Despite clear differences between the legal systems and administrative structures of the two colonies, colonial authorities shared a considerable amount of ...

In the article the motion of photons is reviewed in connection with miscellaneous properties of light. At first we shall be determined at sizes of photons more precisely to present, with what we deal. As the mechanical moment of a photon on coils of a screw line makes h , and the own mechanical moment in 1/α=137.0391 times is less, we can take advantage of the formula Sph=h /137.0391, and mass ...

This essay explores religion’s need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi’s Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand....