Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.

This chapter considers the meanings of human labor in the work of three Bloomsbury writers: John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. The psychological and social potential of “idleness” is discussed with reference to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of Peace and his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he argues that in future, society will see a radical reduction in working hours. Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” is also analyzed in relation to his argument that “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all.” These positions are contrasted with Woolf’s explorations of the increasing access of women to professional work. Woolf’s focus is not on the liberatory potential of “idleness” but rather on the continuing barriers to productive work faced by women in the period. The chapter concludes that while for Keynes and Russell “idleness” offered an opportunity to live a more meaningful and free life, for Woolf the recent entry of women to the professions offered important new opportunities for individual agency and financial autonomy through work.

The Shepherd does not merely depict believers as enslaved persons, rather the very writtenness of the Shepherd itself – its composition, transmission, and readership – is inflected by the discourse of enslavement. I explore the Shepherd’s portrayal of Hermas as an enslaved person expected to copy the book given to him by the Church, to write and disseminate the Shepherd’s commandments to God’s enslaved persons, and to read aloud the visions and revelations he experienced to others. I put the Shepherd in conversation with Cicero and Pliny the Younger, who exemplify the use of enslaved persons for literary labor and the production of a “creative genius” or “sole author” through the labor of others. I note how the Shepherd, in line with other Christian revelatory literature like Revelation, is more explicit about the use of enslaved literary labor than many Roman texts and provides a rare avenue for exploring how ancient writers conceptualized and portrayed enslaved scribes. The Shepherd’s own composition and dissemination by Hermas is, I argue, inflected by its participation in the ancient Mediterranean discourse and logics of enslavement.

This chapter examines representations of and responses to the law’s attempts to regulate poverty in early nineteenth-century England. Drawing upon poems by William Wordsworth, periodical essays, legislative reports, legal cases, and popular treatises, the chapter shows how writers alternately affirmed and interrogated the law’s efforts to strip paupers of agency. It focuses on the legal discourse that governed metropolitan paupers and that some paupers themselves deployed in the service of self-representation. Many writers cast beggary as a professional mode characterized by inventiveness and effort, qualities that paupers were thought to lack. In mobilizing the theatricality of which they stood accused, paupers emerge as both competent and competitive, internally well-regulated and chaotic, criminalized by their very performance of selfhood. By defending their own character in both law courts and the court of public opinion, beggars interrogated legal constructs such as property and testimony.

For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.

There was strong national political interest in the KCIR, which established specialized courts as one of a handful of possible labor policy designs for the United States. The KCIR itself came to be regarded as the key test of the model. Owing in part to Allen’s remarkable talents as a publicist, the KCIR was regularly covered in national media. Labor and business publications were guarded or overtly hostile, but the KCIR was given serious coverage in magazines of progressive opinion, and friendly and extensive coverage in major newspapers like The New York Times. By the time of the 1920 Republican National Convention, a firm majority of notable Republicans favored using the KCIR model in at least some industries. In 1921 and 1922, President Harding called upon Congress to create a federal industrial court system. However, the factionalized Republican Congress and the fractious Harding Administration were unable to pursue any coherent model of labor policy reform. Most state legislatures introduced bills modelled on the KCIR; leaders in several states were eager to try the model, but opted to await the resolution of legal questions.

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant describes domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The Feyerabend lectures lack this framework, but the same set of marriage, parent-child, and master-servant relationships are united under the framework of “domestic societies.” This chapter explores domestic right in Feyerabend, mapping Kant’s careful resistance to conceptualizing these relationships in terms of property right in light of debates about marriage, domestic right, labor, and slavery unfolding in the 1780s. This resistance is informed by a paradox at the heart of Kant’s thinking about domestic right, namely, his claim that marriage and servitude are rightful while sex work and slavery are not. This puzzle arises because Kant follows Achenwall in locating slavery in domestic right, which leads to his innovative framework of domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The deep entanglement of Kant’s thinking about sex, and about service and slave labor, should lead us to think about these problems together, and to challenge the silos in Kant scholarship that treat his thinking about gender and sex distinctly from slavery and race.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

This chapter explores the challenges faced by the Belgian colonial administration in controlling mobility within and across the borders of Rwanda and the Belgian Congo. After Rwanda had become an official mandated area of Belgium, efforts to regulate movement became integral to economic and labor control. The chapter then sets out to explain the inherent contradictions of this asymmetrical labor system englobing both shores and hinterlands of the Lake Kivu region in which Rwanda came to serve as a labor reserve supporting Belgian economic interests in Kivu, and further away in Katanga. The need for labor in the Belgian Congo became one of the main factors explaining its persistent interconnections with Rwanda during the colonial period; the deep-rooted historical ties between the societies around the Lake another.

These interconnections also amplified and altered pre-existing patterns of mobility. This caused problems for the Belgian administration at both sides of the border as they needed to control mobility without damaging the colonial labor market. The chapter shows that they often prioritized economic benefits over their own rules and regulations, and the interests of the Belgian Congo over those of Rwanda. Here as well, chiefs played ambiguous roles, in regulating the movement of commoners and mobilizing labor. The system fostered competition among chiefs for both people and their labor. It incentivized chiefs to closely monitor their subjects, imposing a heavier burden on ordinary people and prompting them to seek better conditions elsewhere.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.