This section draws on previous chapters to compare Zimbabwe to other resource-wealthy states in Southern Africa, particularly Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia. In all these states, resource sector policy has been essential to these states’ historical and institutional development. However, this chapter looks at how, even given many advantages and a level of development that was once ahead of these states regarding state capacity and democratization, Zimbabwe has fallen distinctly behind these other states. An overview of the resource sector shows that timing matters as other resource sectors are far more institutionalized than Zimbabwe and, while often leaving much to be desired, have not led to the same level of institutional and political decline. While these other states have had many of the same challenges and have had extreme difficulties, Zimbabwe has nonetheless been at the far end of the bell curve when it comes to resource curse dynamics.

The final chapter generalizes the theoretical development from other chapters of this book to states in different regions. Venezuela, similar to Zimbabwe, has also experienced many similar dynamics: hyperinflation, decline of the formal sector, and while at one time having a similar if not better level of development to other countries in its region, has now fallen distinctly behind. However, similar to ZANU-PF and the large diamond production after 2006, the PSUV in Venezuela also had a source of funding to perpetuate its rule after 2012: alluvial gold. Eritrea also has some similarities to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, as they have produced and continued to discover a large amount of resource wealth in a single-party dominant political system. Nonetheless, Eritrea may have avoided some of the extreme pitfalls of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The rapid increase in Zimbabwean diamond wealth and the resulting “opaque” institutions provide lessons for states with a large amount of resource wealth. This study illustrates that different types of resources offer some commonalities but also distinctly different challenges for the institutional trajectory of states and overall capacity.

This chapter examines the development of the “mode of exchange” in Zimbabwe’s diamond sector. Before 2006, Zimbabwe’s small diamond production mostly went to Western Europe. During an extensive boom in diamond production from 2006 to 2010, many diamonds were smuggled out of the country amid foreign sanctions and a decline in the formal sector. Since 2010, the formal sector has bounced back, and many diamonds have been sold to the United Arab Emirates. Since 2016, Western Europe has once again become an export destination. However, in all periods, smuggling around the formal economy has persisted and had significant consequences for state capacity and institutions, which are examined in this chapter. This also traces the mode of exchange for other resources, particularly gold and lithium, which have been increasingly important. However, the drastic increase in diamond production that started in 2006 has uniquely impacted the Zimbabwean state. It provided an outlet to ZANU-PF during the economic collapse and increased political scrutiny, especially after the contested 2008 election, and contributed to the party being able to survive politically.

Farmers sought relief from the 1893 recession by lobbying for an increase in the money supply from newly mined silver. Railroads sought relief by reorganizing their debt, through extended maturities and combinations of smaller roads with larger ones. The specter of bimetallism in the US added to the financial uncertainty following the Panic of 1893 for European investors who became increasingly worried that US debtors would pay them with silver instead of gold. A slow-motion run on the US Treasury’s gold began and then gained steam. Morgan’s own business was not insulated from the turmoil surrounding the Treasury’s gold reserves.

This chapter explores the ongoing and novel merging of gold mining with organized crime, highlighting the relation of drug trafficking, land grabbing, and other related sectors to deforestation. The recent gold-mining expansion and boom in the Amazon is linked to gold markets and the global political economy. The chapter scrutinizes the rise of narco-gold mining, linking drug trade, organized criminal groups, and money laundering with rainforest gold and the surge of authoritarian and mafia-like power. During the Bolsonaro era there was a significant deepening of the link between gold-mining activities and organized drug traffickers and criminal networks. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga. This chapter utilizes field research experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations to illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by communities currently being pressured and divided by increasing gold extraction in their territories. In the end of the chapter the discussion turns to solutions for how to address these and other root causes of deforestation in political economy.

This chapter examines the relief effects, multiply understood, of late antique numismatic and nummiform gold jewelry. It discusses coins and coin-like objects decorated in relief and embedded within frameworks such as necklaces, bracteates, and rings meant to be worn on the body. These objects, the chapter argues, not only employ relief to adorn the body; they also offer aid and protection to the wearer through a set of typological associations connected to notions of authority. Such typologies could be literal, both as official coins and medallions, which were made into relief objects through the process of striking precious metals in carved dies in the imperial mint, and as unofficial, imitative, coin-like objects, which were produced from molds or direct impression from these original issues. But metaphorical typologies were equally important, as the source of authority for both the coins and their amuletic power moved between the imperial and the Christian.

This chapter examines the development of illuminated manuscripts in Late Antiquity, focusing on their origins, evolution and cultural significance. It argues that illumination was not merely decorative but played a navigational, didactic and symbolic role, aiding text comprehension while reinforcing religious and political authority. Tracing the transition from papyrus scrolls to the codex, the chapter emphasises how the Christian adoption of the codex format facilitated the rise of manuscript illumination. It documents how the earliest illustrated Christian manuscripts emerged in Egypt, influenced by pagan scroll traditions, magical texts and the Book of the Dead. These manuscripts incorporated symbolic elements such as the ankh cross and interlace designs, which later became defining features of Coptic and Byzantine carpet pages. The study then shifts focus to early biblical illustration, highlighting works such as the Vienna Genesis, Quedlinburg Itala and Rabbula Gospels, which reflect the growing role of visual storytelling in Christian texts. The chapter concludes by emphasising the imperial patronage of illuminated books, noting Constantine’s commissioning of grand scriptural manuscripts and the development of treasure bindings adorned with ivory and gold. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how manuscript illumination evolved as a medium of authority, devotion and intellectual transmission across Late Antiquity and the early medieval world.

This chapter explores dress and furnishing textiles in Late Antiquity, examining their materials, production techniques and cultural significance in both everyday and elite settings. It argues that textile production was a major sector of the late Roman economy, with fabrics sourced from across the empire and beyond, including silk from the East and high-quality linen from Egypt. This study also investigates how political and social changes influenced fashion, with garments reflecting shifts in identity, status and religious affiliation. A major challenge in studying textiles from this period is the fragmentary nature of surviving garments and the difficulty of matching literary descriptions to actual finds, a concern the chapter addresses in detail. A significant focus is placed on the emergence of Christian liturgical dress, tracing how bishops and clergy gradually adopted distinct garments, such as the dalmatica and pallium, to signal their ecclesiastical roles. The discussion concludes with an examination of furnishing textiles, including wall hangings and upholstery, which played a crucial role in interior decoration. By integrating diverse sources, the chapter demonstrates that textiles were not only practical necessities but also important cultural and economic markers in Late Antiquity.

This chapter explores the role of metalwork in Late Antiquity, with particular focus on the production, distribution and significance of gold, silver, copper, iron, lead and tin artefacts. It examines metal extraction processes, manufacturing techniques and the various ways in which metal objects were used in both secular and religious contexts. Drawing on archaeological evidence, chemical analysis and written sources, the chapter highlights how the study of metalwork provides valuable insights into the economic structures and political landscape of the late antique period. Rather than reflecting decline, late antique metalwork demonstrates adaptation to new demands. Gold and silver, used for coinage, jewellery and ceremonial objects, continued to be produced in both state-run and private workshops, with Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria emerging as key centres. Silver plate played an essential role in imperial gift-giving and church donations, while stamped silver objects indicate a sophisticated state-controlled production system. The chapter also examines the continued production of copper alloys and iron, which were essential for military equipment, everyday utensils and monumental architecture, as well as lead and tin, which were widely used in construction, plumbing and pilgrimage objects.

This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

The leading early twentieth-century US proponents of a transformation in the social organization of money were – albeit far from unproblematically – collectivist and communitarian in ideological orientation, whereas those that succeeded them tended toward libertarian, individualistic, and free-market positions. This chapter offers the first examination of American literature’s connections to this latter wave of alternative currency campaigns, ranging from 1970s calls for privatized monies to contemporary cryptocurrency. It first introduces the foundational articulation of the right-libertarian approach to monetary reform, by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and connects these ideas to a classic of US avant-garde fiction as well as a landmark of the American libertarian literary canon. It then explores how two of the most renowned economically-themed American novels of recent decades – Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) – put a libertarian understanding of monetary innovation into dialogue with complex questions of trust, value, technology, nation, and identity. It concludes by reading an important recent addition to the tradition of American weird fiction – Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) – as suggesting alternatives both to the too-narrow conceptions of the collective and to the privileging of the individual that have characterized visions of monetary transformation past and present.

Starting with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the first major Anglophone text reacting to Euro-American colonialism, this chapter traces how Early American texts – such as Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596), John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630), and William Byrd II’s History of the Dividing Line (post-1728) – reflect the dizzying complexity of economic exchange in the Atlantic colonies before US independence. As European encounters with Indigenous cultures unsettled long-held assumptions about economic value and English colonies adopted multiple systems of exchange to survive, these texts show their colonial actors improvising to navigate ever-shifting conditions. In doing so, I argue, these actors engage in the kind of intersubjective thought experiments that Adam Smith describes in his social and political theories. While contemporary US culture often imagines Smith ushering America into economic modernity, then, these texts show the vector of influence moving in the opposite direction, with Anglophone New World literature showing, very early, the possibilities and problems of the commercial imagination.

Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

By 1434, Alberti was in Florence in employ of Pope Eugenius IV, who would also facilitate the return from exile of Cosimo de’ Medici. The art of Florence would ensure Alberti’s rhetorical high notes in De pictura. Alberti’s popularity lies in his invitation to art, not in its execution. Art theory has never perpetuated art process; organic continuum precedes intellectual reflection. The genesis of De pictura, our first modern book on painting, derives from the personal passion of Leon Battista Alberti in the humanist classroom and attendance before the visual majesty of Padua, Bologna, northern Europe, and Rome – witnessed by the acute eye of an illegitimate son, born in exile.

Silver coinage developed accompanied by locally produced silver. Gold was introduced in the late first century bce. Both were reformed by Nero, and the system eventually collapsed.

After uncovering oil’s role in decolonization, one question immediately emerges: what about other natural resources? Although oil is neither the only fossil fuel on which we depend nor the only resource that produces a substantial amount of wealth, it appears to be the only natural resource that can lead to separate independence. This chapter compares oil and other natural resources to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between natural resources and territorial sovereignty. Through an investigation of coal, precious metals, and natural gas, it argues that natural resources can lead colonial areas to divergent outcomes – namely amalgamation, separate independence, and secessionism – after decolonization depending on (1) their commercial value and (2) the timing of their discovery. While resources with low economic value did not affect the territoriality of states, those with high value resulted in three different outcomes. Resources discovered before or during the process of colonization often resulted in amalgamation into a larger entity. Those discovered between colonization and decolonization often resulted in separate independence. Finally, those discovered after decolonization often led to secessionism.

Like names, the ‘physiognomy’ attributed to the gods by the Greeks helps to differentiate divine entities from one another or, conversely, to link them together, making explicit the nature and the scope of their powers. This chapter addresses the meaning of the adjective khruskomas, ‘with golden hair’, frequently attributed to Apollo: does it mean that the Greeks had in mind a blond god? The analysis of texts and images shows that it is much more complicated. First, onomastic attributes and iconographic attributes do not necessarily coincide. Depending on the media, craftsmen may represent a dark-haired Apollo without this being seen as a contradiction with the images conveyed by the poets. Immortals, unlike humans, take on any appearance they want. Second, the colour of gold is not exactly equivalent to blondness (for example, that of Demeter xanthe): the brilliance of the incorruptible metal expresses the radiance that emanates from the young god, notably through his eternally young hair. Khrusokomas thus expresses one of the manifold facets of Phoibos by summoning the image of his delphic sanctuary, where opulence reigns. The chapter thus shows that the colour of Apollo’s hair deserves to be taken seriously.