This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.

Chapter 2 analyzes kinship both between employer and servant and between the female attendant and her other family members in service. Ladies-in-waiting usually owed their positions at court and in great households to connections within their kin group, sometimes through active negotiations and promotions that appear in surviving records, but mostly through maneuverings that occurred behind the scenes. The surviving documents allow me to argue that courtier families used kinship ties to build networks of influence. In return, employers gained new servants from connections already known and trusted. Marriages within the household were well rewarded and female attendants often took advantage of opportunities to wed fellow servants and promote their children, siblings, cousins, and even grandchildren into similar employment. This chapter also asserts that the familial networks of ladies-in-waiting paralleled the dynastic networks that made for effective monarchy. Although only one royal body, usually male, ruled the kingdom, a king could not rule successfully in isolation; rather monarchs employed consorts, siblings, and other kin to govern and enhance royal prestige. Similarly, courtier families worked together to promote members of their kin group and parlay influence into rewards.

Because sentences in English have gaps between them, we read more slowly and laboriously when sentences lack explicit linguistic or logical ties between them. Continuity involves using tools to make sentences seem tightly coupled, including transitions, sequencing, and common wording. However, continuity principles also enable writers to showcase important information by placing it in a sentence’s stress position. Similarly, long sentences can prove difficult to read because so little information receives stress, and so much detail can fall into the “dead zone” of sentences where readers’ recall is weakest.

The conclusion outlines continuity and change over the longue durée, whereby continuities outweigh changes.

Literary historians generally explain change by narrating it. Narrative history excels at identifying individual events, authors, and works that exemplify transformations of literary culture. On the other hand, narrative often struggles to represent continuous trends. Since numbers are designed to describe differences of magnitude, quantitative methods can trace a curve and give a more nuanced picture of gradual change. As quantitative methods have become more common in literary studies, it has become clear that many important aspects of literary history are in fact gradual processes extending over relatively long timelines. But there have also, certainly, been moments of rapid change – in some cases initiated by a single book or author. More crucially, readers seem to want the kind of meaning produced by narration. Thus, quantitative methods are never likely to entirely replace a periodized narrative; they merely provide an alternative mode of description.

This chapter reports on trends of continuity and divergence within the heritage generations examined and between heritage and homeland varieties. It discusses the degrees of similarities between the varieties in terms of (a) rates of use of innovative forms and (b) conditioning factors in the constraint hierarchy. The three variables examined are voice onset time (VOT, n=8,909), case-marking on nouns and pronouns (CASE, n=9,661), and variable presence of subject pronouns (PRODROP, n=9,190), each in three or more languages. The similarity in rates and conditioning effects across generations for (PRODROP), examined in seven languages, particularly contrasts with findings for this variable in experimental paradigms. Similarly, findings of little simplification or overgeneralization of the case system in three languages stands in contrast to the outcomes of several previous studies. (VOT) shows a drift toward (but not arriving at) English-like values for only some of the languages examined. For each variable, models are presented and interpreted; a table then details which aspects of the analysis contribute to the interpretation of stability and of each type of variation.

How do children process language as they get older? Is there continuity in the functions assigned to specific structures? And what changes in their processing and their representations as they acquire more language? They appear to use bracketing (finding boundaries), reference (linking to meanings), and clustering (grouping units that belong together) as they analyze the speech stream and extract recurring units, word classes, and larger constructions. Comprehension precedes production. This allows children to monitor and repair production that doesn’t match the adult forms they have represented in memory. Children also track the frequency of types and tokens; they use types in setting up paradigms and identifying regular versus irregular forms. Amount of experience with language, (the diversity of settings) plus feedback and practice, also accounts for individual differences in the paths followed during acquisition. Ultimately, models of the process of acquisition need to incorporate all this to account for how acquisition takes place.

The final chapter investigates the nature of the 1918 transition from Empire to Republic. It opens with the lack of street lighting which persisted in the postwar years and symbolized the slow change from war to peace, and from old regime to democracy. The continuity between the two regimes and the continuation of wartime conditions were both visible in urban space. Prague’s unfinished transformation exacerbated the disappointed expectations of reward for war sacrifices and new life in the republic. Social uncertainty prevailed in the postwar city in an atmosphere of diffuse revolutionary spirit. The discourse of revolution, very present at the time, could refer to either the rupture of 1918 or the changes yet to come. Popular interpretations of revolution at the local level shed new light on 1918 as a turning point in twentieth-century Europe beyond its traditional interpretation as either an aftershock of the Bolshevik revolution or a victory of national self-determination.

The Axis defeat in 1945 ushered in a lengthy American-dominated Allied military occupation in Germany and Japan, which started in a highly punitive mode. The occupation authorities focused on rooting out the purveyors of Nazism and ultranationalist Japanese ideology. The occupiers also sought to eliminate the military and to dismantle or severely restrict industrial capacity. The unintended consequences of these punitive measures were, however, momentous in the medium and long term. In their quest to eliminate the massive concentrations of economic power of monopolistic corporations, American trustbusters redefined the competitive landscape, mostly for the better. And the Allied ban on the aviation industry in both countries caused aeronautical engineers and managers to seek employment in other quarters, above all in the automobile industry. They and the companies they worked for swiftly applied to car manufacturing what they had learned about quality control and efficiency from supplying airplanes to the Luftwaffe and the Japanese military. The result was high-quality mass production, which soon extended to other industries. In Japan, moreover, teams of former aviation engineers and managers were hired by the Railway Ministry, where they applied their stubbornness and can-do attitude in developing the bullet train.

This chapter analyses the first prime minister, Robert Walpole, against Boris Johnson – the prime minister at the time of the office’s 300th anniversary. The two PMs bookend 300 momentous years of history, but what has changed about the office of prime minister? Comparing personal and political, the chapter examines the machinery of government, from patronage in Parliament to departmental power as well as the core driver for the role of prime minister. While the country and office have changed, some core functions and political realities remain the same in the British system.

When evaluating a patient on continuous EEG monitoring at the bedside, the two fundamental questions a reader must ask themselves are: a) is the patient encephalopathic? and b) if so, is this due to epileptiform activity or seizures? This chapter describes a simple method of rapid bedside EEG interpretation using three easy steps. The first step is to analyze the background for continuity, symmetry, voltage, and the presence of a posterior dominant rhythm. The second step involves searching for abnormal waveforms, such as slow or sharp waves, and the third step involves recognizing artifacts. Sharp waves are associated with seizure activity. Finally, the chapter also describes the significance and method for testing reactivity and grading the severity of encephalopathy.

This chapter explores how the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative influences pessimism about ageing. Taking dementia as a situation where anxieties about ageing and continuity of self are particularly acute, it illustrates the pressure emanating from narrativity for life as lived and life as narrated, revealing episodicity as a viable response to this two-fold pressure. Reading life histories of older people, it additionally shows that episodicity is hugely relevant also for how life is pitched retrospectively. Overall, this chapter argues that a stronger focus on episodic self-experience throughout life has the potential to challenge aspects of the decline narrative that nourishes pessimism about ageing.

The immediate reason for which artefacts are not substances is arrived at only by means of the consideration of matter as parts and the focus on the relation of parts and whole, which is undertaken in this chapter. Indeed, artefacts fail to satisfy the substantiality criterion, according to which no substance is composed of parts present in it in actuality (Met. Z 13). I show that Aristotle regards living beings as constituted of parts in potentiality, while he conceives of artefacts as constituted of parts present in actuality. Because their parts are in actuality, artefacts are not as unified as substances, but because artefacts still possess an inherent form, they cannot be downgraded to mere heaps. Thus, artefacts are hylomorphic compounds, but not substances at all.

Even before the century had ended, battle was commenced over how its momentous events would be remembered. During the years 1698–1700 a series of Roundhead memoirs and treatises – the ‘Whig canon’ – were printed. They were devoted to ‘attacking the maintenance of standing armies by the state, inveighing against priestcraft, and asserting the primacy of the ancient constitution’.1 The publisher responsible for the project was John Danby, working closely with the radical intellectual John Toland. For Danby and Toland, these works demonstrated that the revolutionary events of the century had been validated by and were a vindication of England’s ancient constitution (which now needed protection against the encroachments of William III). Fire was quickly returned by the Tory press, which began publishing Royalist memoirs and the like. It was in the midst of this that the first publication of Clarendon’s great History of the Rebellion commenced, with the first volume appearing in 1702. Clarendon’s son, Laurence Hyde, commended his father’s role ‘in preserving the constitution of our government entire’. English government repudiated political violence: ‘the nature of our excellent government hath provided, in the constitution of it, other remedies, in a Parliamentary way’ to preserve the Crown’s prerogative and the liberties of the people. In particular – and this was a topical subject given the rise of politics out of doors in the later Stuart period – the Whig habit of ‘appealing to the people out of Parliament as it were to a fourth estate of the realm’ was shown to be ‘just another way of undermining the ancient and true constitution’.2

The sudden end of the war in 1918 gave rise to high expectations of the forthcoming peace congress. Yet neither the gathering at Paris nor the settlement to which it gave its name marked a new beginning in international politics. ‘New Diplomacy’ proved to be a short-lived blossoming. Old diplomacy, with its focus on the management of relations between states, persisted, though bearing outwardly the stamp of Geneva. Openness and democratic ideals did not lend themselves to peacemaking but rather complicated international relations. Not only was the Paris settlement not ‘a building finished and complete in all respects’, it also did not rest on stable foundations. In erecting it, the peacemakers had undermined the primacy of order; and into the cracks in the new building seeped malign ideas and narrowly defined interests which, ultimately, brought it down.