Who is the audience for social criticism? What goals does it seek to achieve? How do we evaluate performances within this genre? These seemingly simple questions uncover complexities beyond the scope of a single essay, yet they frame the issues addressed here, particularly through the concept of ‘performance’. Social critics often adopt a self-consciously dissident voice, presenting themselves as lonely ‘outsiders’ to emphasise their stance. However, this identity is never straightforward; criticism inherently presupposes a community of potential allies, and every act of dissent simultaneously asserts an alternative authority. One might argue that within every ‘outsider’ lies an ‘insider’ trying to emerge, but this perspective risks solidifying rather than challenging existing categories.This phenomenon is particularly prominent in twentieth-century political writing, where there is a heightened focus on the systemic social and economic forces that reinforce conformity. However, conventional scholarly approaches often overlook the diverse literary expressions of this dynamic, favouring an analysis centred on propositional content. This view assumes that political writing comprises closely argued propositions aimed at securing agreement, dismissing non-propositional elements as decoration or distraction. This chapter’s aim is not to validate or dismiss the dissident voice but to explore the literary strategies that navigate its implicit logic.

Chapter 2 discusses how the New Order regime in the late eighteenth century reorganized labor to create a regular workforce to decrease the Arsenal’s dependence on the labor market, deprive workers of their ability to (re)commodify their labor power, and thus bind them to their worksite. The chapter describes the attempts to discipline labor and investigates how such attempts created tensions between compulsory and wage labor schemes that had hitherto existed in the Arsenal. It discusses how transformations in production and the increasing anxiety with migration to Istanbul pushed for a new order in the labor force, leading to an amalgam of diverse forms of labor relations within the same site. In addition to creating a regular force of skilled carpenters and caulkers, the administration also systematized the labor draft from among guildsmen in Istanbul, and continued to utilize convicts and provincial craftsmen, trying to secure both their immobility and their productivity. Open and hidden ways of resistance and protests against the production regime of the New Order pushed the latter into a crisis throughout the early nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the poetry of G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959) as a medium for expressing political ideas, highlighting his dual identity as a socialist intellectual and poet. While Cole is best remembered for promoting guild socialism and contributing to economic history and the Fabian Society, he also published poetry, which he saw as part of his political life. His early and middle-age works, including New Beginnings (1914) and The Crooked World (1933), reflect a serious literary approach, aspiring to integrate historical verse forms within socialist thought. Cole’s poetic output also embraced satire, with The Bolo Book (1921) parodying hymns and popular songs to critique political figures and issues humorously. This blend of literary and satirical genres allowed him to engage readers in socialist discourse through varied tones and forms. By examining both the poetry itself and its cultural reception, this chapter illuminates how Cole’s verse contributed to and reflected British socialist culture in the early twentieth century, offering insight into how poetry served as a vehicle for political engagement in his era.

A cherished myth in devolved Scotland is that writers and artists were crucially responsible for the establishment of the new parliament. While there is some truth to this, understanding the full context requires looking beyond the literary texts typically viewed as pivotal in reviving national confidence. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) certainly impacted a small literary audience, but its status as a “national” novel emerged from broader print culture networks. To appreciate its political significance, we must consider magazines like Scottish International, which published extracts of Lanark in 1969, alongside cultural periodicals like Chapman and the Edinburgh Review, which integrated Gray’s political vision into their missions during the 1980s and 90s.This chapter considers a range of Scottish political writing that contributed to this process. Here, “political writing” refers not to grand rhetoric, but to the organised creation of a neo-national public that recognised itself. It encompassed literary novels, journalism, and philosophical essays, including Tom Nairn’s work and the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Gordon Brown (1975). The Red Paper, published by the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board (EUSPB), was connected to numerous Edinburgh-based magazines and the literary publisher Polygon. By examining this network of magazines, campaign groups, and party factions (Labour and SNP), we can identify the discursive frameworks and political alliances that led to the Scottish Parliament’s establishment in 1999, tracing much of contemporary Scottish politics back to the writing, editing, and publishing efforts of prior decades.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

In the Coda, I revisit the book’s main themes from non-European perspectives. I suggest that as much as the notion of world literature and the comparative philological apparatus underlying it were conceived and elaborated in European criticism upon late-enlightenment encounters with Oriental literatures, the reception of non-European economies played a comparable role in shaping European discourses of world literature. Directly or indirectly, each design discussed in previous chapters resonated with or drew on non-European conceptions of exchange, wealth, and property (or, rather, what was perceived as such in the encounters). These include the Oriental “bazaar economy”, the anthropology of the gift in pre-modern communities, the isolationist policies of Edo-period Japan, the cult of the indigenously produced in pre-industrial societies, and the dissolution of commons in colonial land reform. Based on these comparisons, the conclusion offers tentative suggestions about a global political economy of world literature.

In the sixth chapter of the book, we use structured topic modeling to identify the number of different ways that elected officials speak about race in their press releases and tweets. This analysis allows us to explore what the most salient topics around racial rhetorical representation are in a pivotal period for racial politics (2015-2021). It also allows us to determine whether descriptive representatives engage in a more diverse array of racial outreach in terms of the number of Black centered topics they speak about in each session in press releases and on Twitter. Given that Black elected officials engage in both proactive and reactive racial representation at greater rates than non-Black elected officials, they also engage in racial rhetorical representation in significantly more categories than non-Black elected officials.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Conservative Party and its intellectual publications from the 1940s to the 1970s, with a focus on articles, books, and pamphlets on Conservative ideas. The 1940s were formative, as Conservatives debated the importance of political writing, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) as the party’s in-house publisher. This allowed the Conservatives to position themselves as intellectual competitors to the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. The 1950s marked a high point, with groups like the One Nation and the Bow Group publishing influential works through the CPC, helping R. A. Butler establish a semi-independent framework for Conservative publications. However, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, Conservative publishing became fragmented and was subjected to the ‘market test’. Under Edward Heath, a shift towards technocratic and market-oriented views weakened the CPC’s role in publishing ideological content.During the Thatcher era, Conservatives embracing neoliberalism saw the party as intellectually strong, but a shift towards relying on the publications of external think-tanks resulted in the narrowing of the field of Conservative writing and publishing.

This chapter examines how elite women used writing to establish expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Beatrice Webb (1858–1943). It considers the early work as a social investigator that she undertook before marrying the prominent Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The Webbs’ co-authored political writings are well-studied by historians, and Beatrice’s diaries and autobiography interest feminist scholars – this chapter combines these perspectives. It explores how Beatrice sought public recognition through writing, analysing her choice of topics, styles, and intended audiences. It also considers paths she avoided, shaped by the constraints of a woman writing on traditionally ‘masculine’ issues. Beatrice’s personal archive, particularly her diary, reveals her pursuit of influence and expertise on social and economic matters, from low wages to state welfare reform. Her approach highlights the challenges female authors faced when entering male-dominated genres like political economy. A final section discusses her autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1926), which became an authoritative account of the Victorian era. This work deepens our understanding of how Beatrice’s identity evolved as a writer and illustrates the complex relationship between gender, authorship, and expertise in political writing.

This conversation draws on an online discussion involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of the Brô MC’s duo, and Kunumi MC (a.k.a. Owerá). The Brazilian rap movement began in São Paulo in late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists, among them DJ Thaide and Racionais MC’s. As in other countries, Brazilian rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. Racionais MC’s focus on youth life in the peripheral areas of urban São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil. Performing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese, Brô MC’s emerged in 2009 as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, speaking to the violence and racism against Indigenous peoples that are particularly intense in the region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul.