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The privatisation of railway arches, which has led to big rent hikes and many small-business closures, is an example of asset-based capital in action. Arch Co were able to buy a 150-year lease of the arches because of successive governments' massive programme of privatisation of publicly
owned land. It is jointly owned by Blackstone and Telereal Trillium, two global property companies. Blackstone CEO is Steve Schwarzman, formerly of Lehman Brothers and a Trump ally. Telereal Trillium is owned by the William Pears property group, whose advisor, Lord Griffiths, was one of the
Goldman Sachs executives involved in the Malaysian 1MDB scandal.

This article is an exploration of the interconnected legal ties between Christians and Zoroastrians in the early Islamic era. Drawing from the writings of the Christian authors Ishobokt, Simeon, and Henanisho, Payne describes how East Syrian bishops appropriated laws of marriage, inheritance, and property from Iranian jurisprudential traditions as a means of transferring wealth intergenerationally and extending their judicial authority. Payne thus explores the ways in which the Christians of Iran were influenced by the Iranian legal system and culture and in the seventh century CE.

"A State of Mixture seeks to resolve the paradox of how East Syrian Christian communities flourished in a Zoroastrian political system, the Iranian Empire. If previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted, the present book demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions. The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints' lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story, A State of Mixture helps to explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries"--Provided by publisher

AbstractIn the Iranian Empire (226–636 CE), jurists drawn from the ranks of the Zoroastrian priestly elite developed a complex of institutions designed to guarantee the reproduction of aristocratic males as long as the empire endured. To overcome the high rate of mortality characteristic of preindustrial demographic regimes, they aimed to maximize the fertility rate without compromising their endogamous ideals through the institutions of reproductive coercion, temporary marriage, and "substitute-successorship." Occupying a position between the varieties of monogamy and polygyny hitherto practiced in the Ancient Near East, the Iranian organization of sex enabled elites not only to reproduce their patrilineages reliably across multiple generations, but also to achieve an appropriate ratio of resources to number of offspring. As the backbone of this juridical architecture, the imperial court became the anchor of aristocratic power, and ruling and aristocratic dynasties became increasingly intertwined and interdependent, forming the patrilineal networks of the "Iranians"—the agents and beneficiaries of Iranian imperialism. The empire's aristocratic structure took shape through a sexual economy: the court created and circulated sexual and reproductive incentives that incorporated elite males into its network that was, thanks to its politically enhanced inclusive fitness, reliable and reproducible. In demonstrating the centrality of Zoroastrian cosmology to the construction and operation of the relevant juridical institutions, I seek to join the approaches of evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology to reproduction that have been pursued in opposition, to account for the historical role of sex in the consolidation of the Iranian Empire.