Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the next address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Chapter 7 traces Commerzbank’s trajectory of financialisation to highlight how its extroverted strategies differed from those of Deutsche Bank. Commerzbank is a less-likely actor of financialisation as it is a smaller bank and has historically focused on the European SME sector. Commerzbank attempted a transformation without major relocation, and redirected fewer resources to its strategies of liability management (LM). While it established the first German foreign branch in the US in 1971, it never bought a major US or British institution. Commerzbank’s more hesitant approach meant that the bank failed to uphold itself in US money markets several times. The chapter shows that Commerzbank’s significant US immersion only happened during the GFC when it bought the larger Dresdner Bank during the 2008 financial crisis but could not manage Dresdner’s heavy exposure to US RMBS, eventually resulting in a public bailout. Commerzbank’s alternative story demonstrates that the rise of US finance made LM a transformative but differentiated concern for non-US banks.

The changes at play in the contemporary world bring about challenges that are impacting political legitimacy. They make legitimacy at the same time more problematic and more relevant, at both the national and international levels. From this perspective, how these changes and challenges are going to be addressed in the coming years is likely to determine, to a large extent, the evolution of political legitimacy—nationally and internationally. Among the changes and challenges underway, and their associated events and trends, I highlight the following eight: (1) the challenge of integration and disintegration, (2) the economic and financial challenge, (3) the geopolitical challenge, (4) the normative challenge, (5) the technological challenge, (6) the reassessment of globalization challenge, (7) the crisis of democracy challenge, and (8) the governance challenge. I unpack them in turn and, for each of them, allude to their possible meaning and implications for political legitimacy.

This chapter focuses on change of an international order and its sense of legitimacy—in other words, change of the system of an international order and of its legitimacy. Concentrating on the change of an international order and of its legitimacy consists of exploring a type of change that is so transformative that it brings about a change in both how an international order is organized and institutionalized and functions, and how this is justified by the culture of legitimacy that is part of it. As a way to analyze this issue, this chapter addresses three questions: What can be the reasons triggering a change of international order/system and the sense of legitimacy that comes with it? What are the modalities and processes indicating that an international system and its legitimacy are changing? What has shifted—that is, changed—when a new international order and its culture of legitimacy have emerged?

Having looked at how firms develop innovations and bring them to market, and the role of entrepreneurs and states in shaping those processes, we turn now to the question of what innovations do to society. Innovations, after all, do not just concern the firms that create them. We begin at the most macro of macroscopic levels with Perez’s paper on technology bubbles, asking how societies are transformed through successive waves of technological revolution and what happens as those waves flood over society. Staying at the macroscopic perspective with Zuboff’s paper on Big Other, we look at how technological change transforms capitalist dynamics and ushers in both new logics of accumulation and new forms of exploitation. Then, we move to the question that the popular press tends to phrase as “Will robots take our jobs?” as we look at the history and future of workplace automation with Autor’s paper and Bessen’s analysis of the conditions that lead to widespread, as opposed to highly concentrated, societal gains from technology.

Embodied movement within and across national borders has been increasing. Prompted by intensifying local–global unsettling, it has led to a series of tensions concerning the way even the most supposedly cosmopolitan of countries now treat the refugees and migrants. Those who seek refuge have become a problem. In this conflict-ridden world in which the displacement has become endemic – and in this mediated world where the hope of finding a better place to live is held out as part of the dominant global imaginary – countries across the globe are now attempting to manage the global flow of non-citizens. Here the visceral immediacy of human needs and hopes is confronted by the abstracting machinery of state surveillance and management. This chapter explores the tensions between the continuing embodied movement of those who seek refuge and the intensifying abstraction of state engagement with those persons. The chapter takes three liberal democracies as its focus – Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are settler colonial countries which we might expect to be cosmopolitan and welcoming. The history of refugee reception is, however, a movement away from that sensibility.

The intense search for security has, over the past half-century, become increasingly contradictory in the context of the current global unsettling. The techno-scientific search for increased security is now generating circles of increasing insecurity. This chapter is concerned to understand the foundational unsettling of that world space and its consequences for human security in general, including increasing ontological insecurity. The earliest and most dramatic example of this process is the nuclear revolution. With the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilians towards the end of World War II, the search for an ultimate weapon of mass destruction that would end the war created the conditions for escalating insecurity. The chapter documents elements of this process but, more importantly, seeks to broaden the usual emphasis, drawing the mechanics of military security into encompassing questions of human security (see also Chapter 8 on human security). The chapter draws parallels between the areas of nuclear security, anti-terrorist security, drone assassinations, and biosecurity to document the unsettling of the meaning and practice of contemporary global attempts to securitise.

The chapter sets out a framework for understanding the manifold crisis of the human–planetary condition. It argues that this crisis condition goes far beyond the climate crisis. Most critics tend to focus on particular issues or measurable trends rather than the abnegations of human and planetary flourishing. More pointedly, the accumulating literature rarely addresses the grounding conditions of the crisis condition nor its broader consequences for being human. Rarely do commentators set out clear pathways to the alternative possibilities. Accordingly, this chapter explores three main processes as shifting the terms of the human condition: abstraction, reconstitution, and unsettling. First, it suggests that we are materially abstracting social life, fundamentally remaking relations between people, and between persons and their worlds. Second, we are reconstituting the elements of nature and culture, including our own nature and the dominant forms of social life. And third, we are relativising the deepest structures of human practice and meaning in such ways as to change the nature of our social being. This confluence adds up to a great unsettling of the human condition.

This chapter brings the book to a close by reflecting the complexity of contemporary local–global relations, focusing on questions of positive relationality, sustainability, productivity, and vitality. It responds to the compounding crisis of our time, a manifold crisis which encompasses processes of ecological, economic, political, and cultural unsettling. The argument presented here is that a manifesto for positive local–global relations needs to confront the contemporary human condition in all its interconnected crises and wonders. It needs to be able to project into the future as well as provide guidance for present activities. And it needs to remain a heuristic and negotiable framework for continuing dialogue over principles rather be fixed as a set of edicts or targets. Rather than providing a blueprint for change, the chapter presents manifesto making as a method. Nevertheless, it presents a series of fundamental principles that are suggestive for rethinking the present human condition.

A new economic model begins to emerge. After the turn of the century, the worldview made of free markets, globalization, and liberal democracy met multiple crises. While the political pendulum swings back toward government control, economists and independent agencies should promote balance, mitigating the tendency toward the extremes of public opinions divided into opposite camps. The tendency toward a stronger presence of the government in the economy must be controlled; the perimeter of open and competitive markets should not be restricted to the point at which they lose their creative force. In this book we reflect on these developments through the prism of one of the most ancient and fundamental societal institutions: money. Money is a mirror of society; it reveals the drivers, contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, and failures of society at large. We build on two convictions. The first is the value of history, to tell us what money is, what purpose should it serve, and how best it should be designed and governed. The second is that the fundamental purpose and requirements of money do not change through time or space. What changes are the manifestations of money. Technology is part of this process and should be used to serve money’s purposes better.

The First World War marked a shift from liberalism and internationalism to a period characterised by nationalisation, ethnicisation of citizenship, and economic protectionism. The art market’s history aligns with these narratives, highlighting the fragmentation of a European trade zone and the disruption of a transnational trade equilibrium. The war prompted significant structural transformations in these markets, with Germany seeing a surge in art investment as a hedge against inflation. In Britain, art sales were driven by tax obligations and national service investments. Conversely, the French market struggled, facing stagnation and a focus on preserving existing collections due to the threat of destruction. Neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland maintained stable art markets, fostering avant-garde movements and serving as hubs for buyers and sellers. The year 1914 catalysed structural transformations in these markets, highlighting how modern warfare altered art’s perception, value, and trade.