The modern study of the Peloponnesian War has suffered from a double blind spot. On the one hand, the traditional study of political history based on events has shown little interest in the great development in the study of ancient Greek economic, social and cultural history. On the other hand, social, economic and cultural history has shown little interest in the study of events like the Peloponnesian War. In this chapter I want to discuss an alternative framework that can incorporate the full wealth provided by Thucydides and bridge the gap between economic, social and cultural history based on static analysis and political history based on dry narrative. The key for accomplishing this task is the concept of entanglement. The Peloponnesian War can be understood as a history of three different kinds of entanglements. The first entanglement is that between different levels: local communities, micro-regions, macro-regions and the Panhellenic world. The second entanglement concerns a series of processes put into motion by certain key factors: violence, honour, wealth and political discourse. The third entanglement concerns the variety of actors involved in the Peloponnesian War: state apparatuses, alliances, empires, potentates, factions, networks, exiles, mobile humans, the enslaved.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

This chapter contends that Italy was exceptionally wealthy during the Early Empire, both in real and nominal terms. Italy’s prosperity stemmed from several sources: substantial booty, taxes, and rents were diverted from the provinces to the empire’s core; provincial elites engaged in imperial politics were expected to spend lavishly in Rome and its environs; and returns on Italian land were relatively high. Additionally, high prices in Italy for both real estate and commodities augmented Italy’s wealth in nominal terms.

This chapter argues that men with the requisite wealth for political office outside the political orders contributed to the stability of the Roman timocratic political system by serving as a reserve pool from which new magistrates and councillors were recruited. Correspondences between the surpluses of wealthy households at the senatorial, equestrian, and curial levels of the political system, and evidence of shortages of candidates at these levels, substantiate this argument.

In line with the more civilian and less military role of consuls in the 1st century BCE, a number of consulars renounced any potential military glory through a provincial command and preferred to remain in Rome during and after their consulships. In contrast to what had happened throughout the 2nd century, consulars rarely filled their cursus honorum with regular offices. One of the usual tasks of consulars was to intervene in court, not only for their potential skills as orators but above all for the authority that their consular status conferred on them. Consulars acted as advocates, never as prosecutors. Some consulars, such as Cicero and Hortensius, were true specialists before the courts. Speaking at a popular assembly (contio) was always another way of gaining public visibility. For the period 81–50, we have evidence of a greater number of consulars taking part in assemblies than in earlier periods. However, since consulars as privati were not entitled to convene an assembly, their speeches to the people were always unusual. The Senate remained the great dialectical battleground for consulars. Priority to speak in the Senate always belonged to consulars.

How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter examines the law of nullity of marriage to consider how deception has affected the existence or validity of consent. It articulates important differences between void and voidable marriages, arguing that these speak to the public and private sides of marriage, respectively. It also showcases the range of deceptions that have been considered legally significant, situating these within the cultural framework outlined in Chapter 1. On top of this, the chapter argues that the range of qualifying deceptions has often been justified with reference to public policy or convention on the basis that the relevant information would typically be important to an intimate partner or that its disclosure would serve a collective interest or value. The chapter concludes by suggesting that changes in the law of nullity, and a small number of related areas of law, demonstrate that there is still a desire for legal recognition of the wrongs and harms associated with inducing intimate relationships, even as these have shifted over time.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

China’s age of abundance has led to the creation of wealth and a surplus. Using a lifecycle approach this chapter examines the sources of this surplus creation, and estimates the impact of population aging and welfare expansion on future lifecycle surplus. It also estimates future fiscal pressure on the state with the changes in lifecycle surplus.

Three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where should a history of post-socialist social justice start from? This chapter explores how questions of social justice in Eastern Europe after 1989 emerged against the background of policies of privatization – the transfer of state assets to private hands – in public rhetoric and expert commentary. Taking a longer historical perspective, the chapter shows how the notion of a ‘popular’ or ‘people’s capitalism’ came to be instrumental in framing debates about wealth redistribution and mass entrepreneurship after decades of dictatorship in virtually all countries of the former Communist Bloc. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the wider implications of this regional experience for a history of social justice in the European twentieth century and beyond.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.