China’s property law framework is underpinned by a series of fundamental laws and statutory reforms that define the ownership, usage and transfer of both urban and rural property. These statutes not only reflect the evolution of property law in China but also highlight the country’s ongoing efforts to balance state control with private property rights, aiming to foster economic development while ensuring social stability and equity. The dynamic nature of China’s property law framework continues to evolve in response to domestic and international economic pressures, requiring continuous analysis and adaptation. Notwithstanding the ongoing signs of progress, Chinese property law faces several challenges that stem from rapid economic development, urbanization, ideological inertia and the legal complexities of transitioning to a market-oriented economy. Rather than a linear transition to private ownership, China’s institutional reform of rural land markets is more complex than orthodoxy economic theory, law and development theory suggests.

In his sermons, Augustine applies his more theoretical considerations of God’s impact on human willing to the concrete, day-to-day challenges of his flock. As he seeks to spur his congregation on in its mundane struggles of will, Augustine develops an account of God’s grace and our willing that is at once starkly realistic about human limitations and hopeful about what God can do in and for the faithful, even in this life. While Augustine frankly forecasts that ongoing wrongful desires, painful curative procedures, and inner turmoil will be the norm, he also emphasizes that love eases these burdens, enabling genuine progress and human contributions. The resulting vision carries, rather than dissipates, the energy generated by the biblical friction between such realistic and optimistic assessments of God’s mercy at work in human life. In this sense, Augustine’s preaching on God’s grace and our willing is charged, never neutral.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.

Despite huge challenges, the world has been transformed over the last thirty years in terms of avenues of accountability for torture. At international level, commissions of inquiry seek to document the truth and ad hoc international and hybrid criminal tribunals and a permanent international criminal court prosecute some of the offenders. Domestic courts are applying international law, including on the basis of universal jurisdiction wherever the crime of torture occurred, in small but ever increasing numbers. The International Court of Justice has been seized to persuade a recalcitrant State to put a former head of State on trial for widespread acts of torture. Other criminal prosecutions of torturers will be mounted in the years that follow.

Through a case study of the ‘speaking machine’ constructed by doctor-poet Erasmus Darwin between 1770 and 1771, this chapter aims to demonstrate that Romantic-era projects on the mechanics of speech were both new and controversial in their potential to undermine the religious, political, and philosophical status quo. It explores how Darwin’s simultaneous investigations of anatomy and machinery are suggestive of a materialist approach to the human, and particularly the speaking, body and how his materialist model of speech production simultaneously allows and is allowed by Darwin’s dual identity as philosopher and physician which informs the interdisciplinarity of his thought and practice. The chapter concludes by making the case that Darwin’s multidisciplinary approach to speech underpins both politicised reactions to his work and his own account of the role that a materialist understanding of speech and the voice can play in the development and improvement of society.

When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

Chapter 6 completes the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (III) and analyzes the impact of Enlightenment thought (French and British) on interpretations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. The chapter explores myths of primitivism and progress, showing how appeals to scientific authority grew at the expense of reference to biblical texts. It then examines the impact of the scientific voyages of Bougainville and Cook. On the one hand, the manner and customs of some of the South Seas peoples evoked the same kind of comparisons with classical antiquity as had been made in the Americas, especially the Golden Age of Antiquity, and appeared to offer confirmation of the myth of humankind in its infancy. So it was not just the Polynesians who interpreted the first Europeans in terms of their own myths; the same was true vice versa. On the other hand, the “enlightened” scientific expedition produced new data on non-European peoples which laid the foundations for rethinking theories of development of humankind, whether through progress or degeneration. Increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century, notions of race became more salient in how non-European peoples were understood.

G. K. Chesterton’s debut novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, promotes what he called his ‘antiquated dogmas’ and ‘dead creeds’. Pitting the vendors of Pump Street against the magnates of Kensington and Bayswater, Chesterton sides with local ownership as against capitalism; slowness instead of speed; evolution for revolution; and tradition not modernity. However, in The Napoleon of Notting Hill Chesterton tests and questions all ideas – including his own. The key takeaway from Chesterton’s novel of ideas is not that some ideas are superior to others but that all social and political creeds are bound to be vacuous (and silly) unless they are based on external, communal frames of reference: on higher, unifying ideals that should underpin them.

Some ideas get less attention than others. And as much as intellectuals may want to believe that an idea spreads, and only spreads, if it gets us closer to the truth, that is not the only reason an idea may be taken up and circulated. An intellectual’s class, caste, gender, nationality, physical location, time period and so forth radically affects whether the knowledge they produce will be read, accepted and passed on. Knowledge creation, in modern science and especially economics, is notoriously focused on western European and North American intellectuals. There seems, in other words, to be boundaries that define who can produce knowledge. I have questioned those boundaries throughout this book, to uncover marginalised economists that are seldomly analysed. The first generation of modern of Indian economists is a good example of marginalised thinkers. They worked within an imperial setting and were treated as inferior, while their addressees, mainly British, were considered superior. The Indian economists were thus producing economic knowledge from the margins. As such, the Indian economists often got – and still get – labelled as copiers of existing knowledge from Europe and North America. The imperialist context created a blindness to original Indian thought. Within the history of ideas, and more specifically the history of economics, studies are predominately about well-known figures such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, while lesser-known figures are rarely cited or analysed. Expanding the history of economics, which this book is only one example, provincialises well known economic theories like economic development and provides perspectives often either ignored or critiqued and quickly forgotten. Relocating Development Economics exposes new ideas not previously taken seriously.

The first generation of modern Indian economists in the late nineteenth century became known as the Early Nationalists, as they began India’s fight for independence. When historians and political theorists analyse them, they often portray them as political scientists and nation-builders who mostly regurgitated existing European economic thinking. Much less has been written on their contribution to economics, despite them being the first generation of modern economists in India. This book shows how they produced original, forward-thinking knowledge on economic development. The intention is not to define development a priori, but to use development as an overarching focus to tease out the concepts, theories, models and policy prescriptions that the first generation of modern Indian economists studied and disseminated, and to bring these Indian economists into the global debate around what progress and development mean. This book places these economists into the history of economics and offers economic historians new sources on the Indian economy at the end of the nineteenth century. The book explores their understanding of how India’s economy evolved, their prescriptions for bringing progress back to India, the economic consequences of imperialism, and a global plan for development. By relocating development economics to another time and space, the book uncovers new variations on the idea of development.

What counts as a significant innovation in human history, and what might we identify beyond the topics included in this book? In our concept of progress are we too influenced by the sense of our own era as the culmination of history, and can we avoid a presentist bias?

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.