Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism

The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s provide an exemplary test case for exploring the impact of Greater Britain—the settler colonial empire—on the Victorian novel and political economy. British gold diggers’ nomadism operated in seeming antithesis to the colonies’ explosive growth, which posed a conceptual challenge both to political economy’s stadial model of societal development and to liberal narratives of labor and land—narratives that underpinned concepts of individual character and civil society. Informed by colonial writing and the experience of gold fields, W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) reimagine metropolitan space and subjectivity in settler-colonial terms, helping lay the ground for a deterritorialized, global British identity

Strings after D-term inflation: evolution and properties of chiral cosmic strings

We motivate the study of chiral cosmic strings through a scenario of structure formation which mixes D-term inflation and strings. We then discuss some properties of chiral cosmic strings, and results regarding their evolution and possible cosmological consequences are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the CAPP2000 conference held at Verbier, Switzerland between july 17th and 28th, 200

Translation invariant time-dependent solutions to massive gravity

Homogeneous time-dependent solutions of massive gravity generalise the plane wave solutions of the linearised Fierz-Pauli equations for a massive spin-two particle, as well as the Kasner solutions of General Relativity. We show that they also allow a clear counting of the degrees of freedom and represent a simplified framework to work out the constraints, the equations of motion and the initial value formulation. We work in the vielbein formulation of massive gravity, find the phase space resulting from the constraints and show that several disconnected sectors of solutions exist some of which are unstable. The initial values determine the sector to which a solution belongs. Classically, the theory is not pathological but quantum mechanically the theory may suffer from instabilities. The latter are not due to an extra ghost-like degree of freedom.Comment: 31 page

A formal introduction to Horndeski and Galileon theories and their generalizations

We review different constructions of Galileon theories in both flat and curved space, and for both single scalar field models as well as multi-field models. Our main emphasis is on the formal mathematical properties of these theories and their construction.Comment: 19 page