The UN General Assembly, a body including representatives of all UN member governments, serves as the primary forum for defining a better world order through peaceful change. It has endorsed programs of peaceful change at all levels of ambition at different times and on different issues. Much of its activity has focused on the minimalist goal of averting or ending particular wars. On other issues, most notably decolonization, national economic development, and adding environmental concerns to the intergovernmental agenda, it has contributed to incremental change in the states system. Yet the limits on what governments would endorse became clear on issues such as human rights where changes would affect domestic political orders. The end of the Cold War and related domestic-level political changes provided the context for higher ambition, which peaked in 2005 when the General Assembly endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offered a vision of deep peace in which universal respect for human rights, human development, and human security prevail within ecologically sustainable societies. Yet the subsequent spread of authoritarian rule within states and increased geopolitical tensions between major states have reinforced governments’ traditional approaches to states system, reducing the ambition of programs for peaceful change.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

What drove the transformation of Britain’s population, economy and environment so that by 1819 it was arguably the most rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society in the world?

This chapter contrasts with the introduction by focusing on an event that an intersection of different sources (Ottoman, Arabic, English and French sources) document in an exceptional way: the attack of a big caravan on its road from Damascus to Baghdad in 1857. Its aims at plunging readers into the life, business and management of caravans in the mid-nineteenth century – a period that is introduced here as a turning point for life and business in the steppe in the Ottoman realms. Built as an enquiry into the attack and into what the historiography has considered a handicap of overland trade (insecurity) unlike oceanic trade, this chapter illuminates the regional system institutionalised by Bedouin/State/Traders to deal efficiently with insecurity and hazards of caravan trade over long distances.

The conclusion sums up the main arguments of the book on the formative albeit discreet role of caravan trade in the political economy of the Middle East both during and after the Ottoman period. It draws on this history to challenge recent directions in the history of the Middle East by advocating for inner perspectives on connections thanks to the crossing of endogenous documentation (in Arabic and in Ottoman) with foreign sources, more attention for legacy, resilience and slowness in a period of rapid technological and political transformation. The history of caravan supports a new way of considering the Middle East from inside. It also offers insights on the background of debates over past carbonisation and present decarbonisation.

This chapter focuses on the intersection of Islamic doctrines and environmental stewardship, drawing insights from the Holy Qur’an and Prophetic Hadith. Central to this is the narrative of humanity’s role as Earth’s stewards (Khalifah). Verses from the Holy Qur’an present nature and the environment as a divine testament worthy of conservation and protection. Complementing this, the Prophetic Hadith provides actionable guidelines on environmental ethics, encompassing conservation and ethical animal treatment. Together, they advocate for a harmonious relationship with nature, emphasizing conservation, respect, and responsible stewardship. As contemporary societies grapple with escalating ecological challenges and climatic change, these divine teachings lend themselves as a religiously congruent approach to addressing these challenges. Embracing Islamic principles can pave the way for sustainable practices, ensuring a balance between spiritual obligations and ecological responsibilities. In essence, Islamic traditions, with their rich environmental ethos, can guide societies towards a more sustainable and harmonious future.

This chapter explores Hopkins’s responses to the environmental degradation he witnessed in the 1870s and 1880s – from the time of his earliest professional assignments in the industrial north to his final years in Dublin – when the destructive effects of manufacturing industry, mechanization, and urban expansion were becoming increasingly apparent. Drawing on select poems, journals, and letters especially those to his family and friends when he relocates and describes his new surroundings, the chapter compares his views to those of his contemporaries such as John Ruskin and the industrial ‘Lanarkshire poets’ near Glasgow, Scotland. It focuses particularly on the pollution of air and water by mines and mills, and the emphasis Hopkins places on the purity of these elements for the well-being of both human and non-human life. It also notes Hopkins’s awareness of the damage done to whole ecosystems in the name of social and economic ‘progress’.

This chapter concentrates on classroom structures that a teacher can employ, including how the room can be arranged, physically and structurally, to maximise engagement for all students. We will examine the research on learning space architecture, the role of desk configuration, group workspaces, chill-out zones and ideas for wall displays.

Structurally, we explore the use of routines in class for maintaining consistency and predictability. Examples include managing entry and exit to class, transition between learning activities and routines for what to do when students finish work, arrive late or need to use the toilet.

Further focusing on the topics from the previous chapter, this section identifies the factors within a school that potentially impact student engagement. It starts by illustrating the way that affective and cognitive engagement may affect behaviour within a school environment and then illustrates this concept by exploring the potential role of teacher–student relationships, curriculum and instruction, classroom environment, peers, opportunities for choice in areas such as uniforms and student governance, and feeling safe, especially in periods of transition across and within schools. In each situation, the chapter will examine the research for effective practice and connect various approaches to their influence on engagement.

Offering two case studies – the economic transformations of Sohar and Duqm – this chapter grounds the book’s argument about Oman’s global labour market in material cases of spatial transformation and the integration into global value chains through which both commodities and labour circulate. The chapter argues that millennial citizen expectations take shape in these developments, from the interaction of ostensible outcomes of economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities of governing hydrocarbon windfalls. Citizen reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. The chapter further substantiates two points through these cases. First, both neoliberal reform and oil wealth explicitly or implicitly make promises to populations about an improved economic life, which, when unrealised, results in disenfranchisement and discontent. Second, capital needs labour and pursues supplies from the global labour market not only because it is cost effective but deliberately because it is both flexible and controllable. It seeks to avert potential labour disruption and secure seamless operations. Together, these findings show the ways Omani labour organises and the power of labour through the threat of its resistance.

This chapter presents Republican-era efforts to turn the Yangtze River into an engine of developmental nation-building by erecting a Three Gorges Dam. Starting with Sun Yat-sen’s initial proposal in 1919 and closing with the Sino-American attempt in the 1940s, this chapter examines how Chinese and foreign actors pursued this developmental dream.Undeterred by the financial challenges of the project, the dam’s backers argued China could overcome a domestic dearth of capital by working with foreign collaborators. This joint venture would benefit both China and foreigners by not only easing trade with the Chinese interior and creating a marvel of modern engineering, but also because the dam would furnish a gargantuan electrical stimulus to the transformation of China into an industrial powerhouse with a growing demand for foreign products. Although the dam was not constructed in the Republican period, Chinese and foreign actors would continue to pursue the infrastructural fantasy of installing mammoth dams on China’s rivers to fuel national industrialization on both sides of the Taiwan Straits during the Cold War.

The introduction calls for a mutually enriching dialogue between ancient texts and environmental literary criticism, contextualizing the book in relation to ecocriticism and classical scholarship. It also establishes the key terms of the book’s approach – place, environment, and ecology – and distinguishes these from the unreflective use of the concept of nature. Finally, the introduction sketches the contextual background for Vergil’s and Horace’s environmental interests, noting a range of ancient traditions and discourses that took the nonhuman world seriously as a site of interest and inquiry. These include literary forebears like Sappho, Hesiod, Theocritus, and Lucretius; cultural traditions such as the Roman fascination with land surveying and agricultural treatises; political contexts like the expansion and consolidation of a quasi-global Roman empire; philosophical traditions from the Presocratics to Stoicism and Epicureanism; and religious traditions. Reading Horace and Vergil as environmental poets does not mean projecting modern sensibilities onto ancient texts but rather seeing how these authors pursue their own, different interests in place, ecology, and the environment.

As other chapters in this volume show, the EU remedies system is difficult to employ when it comes to EU fundamental right violations. When discussing (im)possibilities of procedural rules and how these encourage or discourage litigation, socio-legal scholars have referred to the concept of legal opportunity structures. In relation to this concept, the EU is a system with closed procedural legal opportunities: rules on directly accessing the CJEU severely limit the possibilities to pursue strategic litigation. At the same time, the EU has opened up legal opportunities as well, by bringing litigants a new catalogue of rights to invoke. In the context of fundamental rights accountability, strategic litigation is used extensively. This begs the question: how are actors (NGOs, lawyers, individuals) making use of the (partially) closed EU system and what lessons can be drawn therefrom? This chapter delves into several cases of mobilisation of the EU remedies system and describes the way in which the actors involved worked with or around EU legal opportunity structures, both inside and outside the context of formal legal procedures. The lessons drawn from these actions can inform future action in this field.