The discovery of large quantities of gold and silver in the New World following the voyage of Christopher Columbus had a major impact on the subsequent history of the world economy. These two precious metals together with copper were regarded as the standard and measure of value in all societies throughout history. The sudden increase in the supply of gold and silver greatly increased the capacity of individual countries such as Spain and Portugal to finance wars and imports of consumer goods. The new Spanish coin, the real of eight, became an international currency for settling trade balances, and large quantities of these coins were exported to the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and China to purchase oriental commodities such as silk piece goods, cotton textiles, industrial raw material such as indigo, and various kinds of spices, later followed by tea, coffee, and porcelain. The trade in New World gold and silver depended on the development of new and adequate mining techniques in Mexico and Peru to extract the ore and refine the metal. South German mining engineers greatly contributed to the transplantation of European technology to the Americas, and the Spanish-American silver mines utilised the new mercury amalgamation method to extract refined silver from the raw ores. Although the techniques used in Mexico and Peru were not particularly advanced by contemporary European standards, the American mine owners remained in business for more than three hundred years, and the supply of American silver came to be the foundation of the newly rising Indian Ocean world economy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The functions and territories of academies and universities have never been totally independent from the outside world, nor can we revert to earlier stages of the history of these institutions. Therefore, we have to understand and judge them according to their components in order to find the proper responses to various challenges, and we have to make continuous efforts to be as independent and autonomous as possible in the context of cooperation and the building of collective wisdom. The keywords of this article are personal liberty, political freedom, concentration versus separation of powers, efficiency, meritocracy, common good, and political community.

This introduction briefly deals with the major orientations of this European Review Focus on ‘European crime fiction’. It first specifies what is meant by ‘Europe’ and which type of questions can be asked of crime fiction in view of a better understanding of Europe’s multiple and changing identities. It then presents the various contributions by linking them with the three fundamental questions of (1) circulation of crime fiction, (2) expansion of crime fiction in the broader cultural, social and economic field, and (3) the relevance of crime fiction for a thorough reflection on some properly European aspects of culture and society.

The new research field of synthetic biology is emerging from molecular biology, chemistry, biotechnology, information technology and engineering. This paper describes synthetic biology as a ‘Science of the Artificial’ and identifies structural features of engineering sciences that can be applied to this new kind of biology as opposed to traditional biology. The search for laws already in traditional biology has been difficult. In Synthetic Biology, action and application stand in the foreground and laws increasingly lose ground as a meaningful concept.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, London became an international centre of commerce. The trade in exotic luxury goods played a significant part in this process. In contemporary society, the taste for luxury and the economic, social and cultural changes it embodied were viewed with both fascination and distrust. The new shopping centres where luxury goods were on display were thus accused of corrupting public morality and damaging national trade. The public debate about luxury was in part conducted on the stage of the commercial Elizabethan theatre, especially in the new genre of so-called city comedies that portrayed, parodied and criticized social life in the expanding city. Ben Jonson was a master of this genre and his most famous comedy, Volpone or the Fox (1606), dealt with the contested issue of luxury. In contrast to many previous readings that have interpreted the play in terms derived from later liberal and Marxist economic thinking, this article analyses the theme of luxury in relation to contemporary economic and moral debates. I will argue that the play depicts the main character Volpone’s taste for luxury and the way he acquires it as both morally and economically damaging for an economy such as the English one, which at the time was built on personal debt and credit and therefore heavily reliant on credibility and reciprocal social obligations. However, this lesson is complicated by the fact that Volpone itself was in fact part of the economic relations Jonson criticized, since it was a commodity – and, in the eyes of many contemporaries, indeed a luxury commodity – on London’s thriving theatre market. I argue that Jonson is aware of this contradiction without being able to resolve it. Ultimately, then, Volpone is an ambivalent comedy intended to provoke reflection in the audience about their consumption of spectacular luxury both inside and outside the theatre.

Within written history, Europe is rich in post-imperial situations. In the twentieth century the dwindling empires of this century, born during European colonial expansion after Columbus, gave rise to new post-imperial conditions with a global impact. Europe is no exception. On other continents, empires have also emerged and faded away: Latin-America with the Mayas and the Aztecs, and, notably, Asia where the Chinese Empire has disappeared and re-emerged at different historical junctures. On their way down, European empires have produced what could be labelled a post-imperial stress syndrome, very much like a PTSD, producing certain defensive ideological configurations of parochialism, xenophobia and nostalgic illusions, binding them to a past they have left, but are still chained to, mentally and ideologically. The fall or fading away of an empire is not just an event with a precise date, but a process, which, inevitably, shows cracks before it actually happens. Such frictions anticipating a future reality can only be caught by imagination. This article will concentrate on two such imaginative post-imperial prefigurations before the fact is generally recognized, both concerning the dissolution of the British Empire. It can be argued that, with Brexit, Britain is still trying to come to terms with its post-imperial reality. One such prefiguration will be seen through the eyes of the centre, J.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), the other from the periphery, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958).

Complex dynamic behaviour in terms of chaotic motion, catastrophic events or other seemingly irregular and unexpected features of and in theoretical economic models – aimed at describing real-world phenomena – are nowadays known as a common property of many nonlinear approaches to an understanding of the motion of actual time series, such as inflation rates, unemployment figures, and many other – mainly macroeconomic – economic variables. Since most existing models in economic dynamics are constructed in the tradition of classical mechanics, this result does not appear as a real surprise. However, the real ‘complexity challenge’ for economic theory still persists in identifying the complex structure of economic reality, which cannot be satisfactorily represented by simple deterministic laws of motion, although such ‘laws’ might possess the possibility of very complicated dynamic motion.

The fact that dystopian literature has a great potential for envisioning alternative futures is elaborated in this article in relation to the Finnish/British author Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2013). Itäranta’s gloomy low-fi novel is read alongside contemporary ecocritical theory with a focus on issues of vernacular cultures and knowledges versus ideas of cosmopolitan planetary citizenship. Reflections are made about the profound nature of the concept of borders: cultural, temporal, informational, geographical, political, in the event of massive catastrophes. The article investigates how Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ are played out in a novel, and how the novel in turn poses important questions for ecocritical theory. Thus, the interplay between ecocritical literary theory, on the one hand, and literature, on the other, is highlighted. What can dystopia make visible in contemporary theory?

A defining feature of new nationalisms, with their right-wing populist rhetoric, is the way they exploit the regime of truth prevalent in liberal democratic societies. Their use of the language of democracy, human rights and identity is sometimes hard to differentiate from the mainstream convention. Despite being majoritarian in the way it seeks democratic legitimacy, new nationalist discourse consistently advances demands framed in terms of minority protection. This is done by presenting the existence of ‘our’ nation as threatened by overwhelming forces of neo-liberal globalisation (embodied in the EU, the West or even in ‘the Washington establishment’). By using the Pussy Riot case as an empirical example, this article argues that there is no way of preventing the language of minority protection from being hijacked by ‘predatory identities’ unless one foregrounds the universal dimension of equality and emancipation, as opposed to rights and entitlements associated with particular identities. The key political question today, as always, is how to navigate between the totalitarian disregard of the local and the parochialist concentration on the particular.

This article discusses how Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, has become a target of right-wing populist discourse, locating her at the centre of the landscape of hate. The features of the affective landscape of hate are discussed from the phenomenological and constructivist perspective. The author argues that the landscape of hate constitutes an important part of right-wing populism based on the narrative of national emergency and the language of war and exclusion (othering).

The article discusses uncommemorated sites of violence in the framework of landscape theories. In particular, it asks how the sites of past violence can be understood through the lens of the ‘dynamic’ theory of landscape offered by Tim Ingold in his seminal The Temporality of the Landscape (1993). The ‘dwelling perspective’ he proposes to understand sites as dynamic ‘taskscapes’ allows us to inscribe past violent actions and engagements of local users into today’s meanings of sites of trauma. This conceptualization is further operationalized in relation to George Chamayoux’ philosophical history of manhunts (or more broadly: cynegetic practices, 2012). In the article it has been asked: how can a landscape be ‘pregnant with the past’ – as it is claimed in Ingold’s approach – if the past actions involved tracking, hunting and killing people who tried to escape death in ghettos or camps? How can we ‘read the past’, ‘remember it’ or ‘call back an internal image’ of previous actions developed in the area, if the activity co-constituted an act of genocide? Are we able to read today the past threat of a perpetrator–predator searching for victims, and, if so, with what tools? Can environmental studies help us to understand the uncanny relation to landscapes that connote past manhunts, and violent deaths on killing sites? The author will propose the concept of cynegetic landscapes to approach landscapes of manhunts.

Based on a close study of the Sino-Japanese collaboration in Kunqu Opera The Peony Pavilion (2008), this article proposes a different conception of interculturalism onstage in East Asia in comparison with the prevailing East–West paradigm of intercultural performance and theatre. Some of the interesting questions that are raised and discussed in this paper are: How does the Japanese actor Bando Tamasaburo impersonate a young lady Du Liniang in the Chinese classical play without speaking the Chinese language? In what ways does the Sino-Japanese co-production connect and interweave Kunqu Opera and Kabuki? How has the intercultural performance been mediatized, received as well as perceived in China, Japan and elsewhere? The Sino-Japanese co-production features such important notions of interculturalism as connecting instead of othering, sharing instead of influencing, and complementing instead of exploiting.

Scientific research, a common heritage that laid the foundations of the modern world, stands as a unifying principle of Europe and is, among other values, a binding bridge to all nations. Being an inalienable part of humanity, the striving after knowledge embodied in scientific research is a necessary precondition if mankind is to handle successfully the consequences of globalized economies, a still growing world population with increasing life expectancies and the need for sustainable development. The European Science Foundation, with its flexible structure for promoting European cooperation in research can play an active part in supporting national governments and the European Union in formulating research policies and educational standards and in intensifying exchange and cooperation with the non-European countries.

The paper discusses policies aimed at reducing the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea. Discharges of two nutrients—phosphorus and nitrogen—can be mitigated by measures ranging from sewage treatment to creating or enhancing natural ‘nutrient sinks’ such as coastal wetlands. The latter have been identified as low-cost alternatives to removing nitrogen through traditional, end-of-pipe technologies. Implementation of such projects yields additional benefits through enhancing biological diversity by recovering valuable habitats typical of wetland ecosystems. The paper offers several recommendations regarding policy instruments likely to enhance the cost-effectiveness of the Baltic-wide environmental recovery programme now under way.

The article discusses the proposed enlargement of the European Union by the inclusion of the five Central European Countries, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia in terms of their history. In the past, they have been part of the West at times, but their recent economic history has not been encouraging. What will their prospects be when joining the European Union?

Surface tension effects, due to the accumulation of minor components in the surface, play an important part in the processing and properties of materials. The ‘tears of wine’ is an example of such processes.

The transmission and acquisition of the wisdom of the ancients throughout the Middle Ages is a fascinating phenomenon in which languages served as the primary vehicles for this journey of classical culture. The main route – but not the only one – was located on the Mediterranean coasts and incorporated Asia, Europe and Africa. It was a multidirectional journey.

This paper is intended as an invitation to continue reflecting on and discussing the concepts of learning and teaching, including the concept of educational environment and the conditions for knowledge construction in that environment. The key concept is communication, which I link to different environments, including face-to-face (f2f) environments, net-mediated environments and various mixtures of these types of communication environments. Furthermore, I implicate learning resources in the concept of the educational environment. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to contribute to developing our approach to the nexus between teaching and learning, including the concept of environment and the conditions for knowledge construction. I present a case study, which I analyse using a systems theoretical analytical framework, in order to discuss the relation between learning and the environment, including the idea of the possibility of knowledge transfer and knowledge dissemination. The specific focus is on learning resources in specific programs-on-demand (podcasts) and video-on-demand (vodcasts, from now just podcast) – and the students’ approaches to these learning resources and the environment offered. My point of departure is to contribute to scholarly discussion of learning resources and, in particular, of the use of podcasts and students’ approaches to these learning resources in concrete educational contexts. Finally, I suggest that we take the opportunity to reflect on the challenging task: how can we organize teaching and environments for learning, including the choice of learning resources, in order to provide each student with the possibility of developing the concrete educational qualifications that are required?

By virtue of its outspoken multidisciplinarity, robotics is an extremely popular research field, but is not always exercised by researchers with the broad scientific view required to make breakthroughs. This leads to a very fragmentary research landscape. Robots have their roots in fiction (the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein, Golem, RUR). Their first appearance in the real world came in the early 1960s when Unimation sold their first industrial robots. However, only recently are robots invading people’s daily lives, as service robots, and in health care, as surgery robots, intelligent wheelchairs, and rehabilitation robots, for example. This migration from structured factory environments to cluttered homes is a tremendous step, requiring much more intelligent behaviour. In this paper, the major research questions to be answered will be outlined and illustrated with partial solutions, mainly taken from the author’s own research experience at KU Leuven.