From 1716 to 1845, Scotland’s banks were among the most dynamic and resilient in Europe, effectively absorbing a series of adverse economic shocks that rocked financial markets in London and on the continent. Legislating Instability explains the seeming paradox that the Scottish banking system achieved this success without the government controls usually considered necessary for economic stability. Eighteenth-century Scottish banks operated in a regulatory vacuum: no central bank to act as lender of last resort, no monopoly on issuing currency, no legal requirements for maintaining capital reserves, and no formal limits on bank size. These conditions produced a remarkably robust banking system, one that was intensely competitive and served as a prime engine of Scottish economic growth. Despite indicators that might have seemed red flags—large speculative capital flows, a fixed exchange rate, and substantial external debt—Scotland successfully navigated two severe financial crises during the Seven Years’ War. The exception was a severe financial crisis in 1772, seven years after the imposition of the first regulations on Scottish banking—the result of aggressive lobbying by large banks seeking to weed out competition. While these restrictions did not cause the 1772 crisis, Tyler Beck Goodspeed argues, they critically undermined the flexibility and resilience previously exhibited by Scottish finance, thereby elevating the risk that another adverse economic shock, such as occurred in 1772, might threaten financial stability more broadly. Far from revealing the shortcomings of unregulated banking, as Adam Smith claimed, the 1772 crisis exposed the risks of ill-conceived bank regulation.

Instabilities are present in all natural fluids from rivers to atmospheres. This book considers the physical processes that generate instability. Part I describes the normal mode instabilities most important in geophysical applications, including convection, shear instability and baroclinic instability. Classical analytical approaches are covered, while also emphasising numerical methods, mechanisms such as internal wave resonance, and simple `rules of thumb' that permit assessment of instability quickly and intuitively. Part II introduces the cutting edge: nonmodal instabilities, the relationship between instability and turbulence, self-organised criticality, and advanced numerical techniques. Featuring numerous exercises and projects, the book is ideal for advanced students and researchers wishing to understand flow instability and apply it to their own research. It can be used to teach courses in oceanography, atmospheric science, coastal engineering, applied mathematics and environmental science. Exercise solutions and MATLAB® examples are provided online. Also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book addresses the concepts of unstable flow solutions, convective instability and absolute instability, with reference to simple (or toy) mathematical models, which are mathematically simple despite their purely abstract character. Within this paradigm, the book introduces the basic mathematical tools, Fourier transform, normal modes, wavepackets and their dynamics, before reviewing the fundamental ideas behind the mathematical modelling of fluid flow and heat transfer in porous media. The author goes on to discuss the fundamentals of the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and other thermal instabilities of convective flows in porous media, and then analyses various examples of transition from convective to absolute instability in detail, with an emphasis on the formulation, deduction of the dispersion relation and study of the numerical data regarding the threshold of absolute instability. The clear descriptions of the analytical and numerical methods needed to obtain these parametric threshold data enable readers to apply them in different or more general cases. This book is of interest to postgraduates and researchers in mechanical and thermal engineering, civil engineering, geophysics, applied mathematics, fluid mechanics, and energy technology.

Attempts by writers and intellectuals in former colonies to create unique national cultures are often thwarted by a context of global modernity, which discourages particularity and uniqueness. In describing unstable social and political cultures, such "third-world intellectuals" often find themselves torn between the competing literary requirements of the "local" culture of the colony and the cosmopolitan, "world" culture introduced by Western civilization. In Zones of Instability, Imre Szeman examines the complex relationship between literature and politics by exploring the production of nationalist literature in the former British empire. Taking as his case studies the regions of the British Caribbean, Nigeria, and Canada, Szeman analyzes the work of authors for whom the idea of the"nation" and literature are inexorably entwined, such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and V.S. Naipaul. Szeman focuses on literature created in the two decades after World War II, decades in which the future prospects for many colonies went from extreme political optimism to extreme political disappointment. He finds that the "nation" can be read as that space in which literature is thought to be able to conjoin two things that history has separated—the writer and the people.

When Agendas and Instability in American Politics appeared fifteen years ago, offering a profoundly original account of how policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda, the Journal of Politics predicted that it would “become a landmark study of public policy making and American politics.” That prediction proved true and, in this long-awaited second edition, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner refine their influential argument and expand it to illuminate the workings of democracies beyond the United States. The authors retain all the substance of their contention that short-term, single-issue analyses cast public policy too narrowly as the result of cozy and dependable arrangements among politicians, interest groups, and the media. Jones and Baumgartner provide a different interpretation by taking the long view of several issues—including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government. Featuring a new introduction and two additional chapters, this updated edition ensures that their findings will remain a touchstone of policy studies for many years to come.

Global Instability: Uncertainty and New Visions in Political Economy presents a series of papers that address the political consequences of globalization for states and their populations, while exploring the issue of alternatives to the model of globalization we are presently experiencing. The focus moves from the world of international agreements to the national and sub-national dilemmas that are posed by attempting to manage a set of global developments within a given territory. The initial chapter, by Daniel Drache, explores a still-born post-war international organization, the International Trade Organization, that offers a different vision of how a globally integrated economy might operate. A number of papers then explore the challenges posed by today's globalization, including currency instability in an environment of financial deregulation, the rights conferred on investors by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the progressive liberalization of trade in services built into the General Agreement on Trade in Services.

Form and Instability: Eastern Europe, Literature, and Post-Imperial Difference busies itself with the work of accounting for this discrepancy between ostensible historical change and the persistence of anachronistic ways of thinking, a discrepancy that remains unaddressed and eludes attention; and it goes on to propose that literature—not simply as an archive of representations or a source of cultural capital but as a critical perspective in its own right—offers a way to apprehend and to redress this problem.Historical situations such as the post-1989 transitions to capitalism and liberal democracy, as well as the “Eastern” enlargement of the E.U., not only entail empirical change; they also call for and provoke intense renegotiations of cultural values and analytical concepts. Through rhetoric, reading, and translation—terms central to this book—literature will be seen to expedite and redirect such re-arrangements. It will be shown to destabilize discursively fixed categories without imposing, in turn, its own fixity. Located at the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study has a twofold commitment: to Eastern Europe on the one hand and to literature on the other. It aims to intervene in the way we conceive of Eastern Europe by seeking to develop a more equitable way of thinking, one that avoids subordinating it to Eurocentric narratives of progress. At the same time, it marshals literature as both object and method of this rethinking, in order to extend existing conceptions of the usefulness and of the proper organization of literary studies. The three terms in the title of this book mark a passage—via literature—from “Eastern Europe” as an inadequate and obsolescent category to “post-imperial difference” as a more accurate, if provisional, account of the region. By way of original readings of particular texts, and by attending to literature as a critical