The introduction reviews the current debate concerning the origins of the industrial revolution in England, especially the institutionalist argument, its emphasis on property rights, and critical responses to it. In brief, the classic institutionalist argument is that the Glorious Revolution marked a significant improvement in the security of property rights, leading in turn to the Industrial Revolution a century later. The most common counter-argument is that property rights had been secure in England since the medieval period. Herein lies part of the significance of wardship for larger debates concerning the origins of the industrial revolution. If, as the book contends, wardship meant that property rights were much less secure than is now commonly supposed, this would go a long way to resuscitating classic institutionalist accounts of English/British institutional change in the seventeenth century and consequent economic development.

After a successful fundraising campaign, the Church of Christ missionaries arrived in Italy in early 1949. They acquired a villa in Frascati, in the Castelli Romani area southeast of Rome, where they established a school and an orphanage and launched an ambitious missionary effort. Their activities quickly alarmed the local Catholic clergy and Vatican hierarchies, who viewed the mission as part of a broader Protestant strategy to undermine the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on religion in Italy. The Vatican promptly urged the Italian government to take action, relying on Fascist-era laws to curb the missionaries' activities. The Italian Ministry of the Interior, led by the conservative Christian Democrat Mario Scelba, targeted the Texas evangelicals for overstaying their short-term tourist visas and for opening a school without the requisite authorizations. Efforts to spread their message in various towns of the Castelli Romani were met with significant resistance, including violent attacks by locals. As tensions escalated, the missionaries grew increasingly frustrated with what they perceived as the indifference of US diplomats stationed in Rome. They began lobbying their congressional representatives in Washington, and soon members of Congress took up their cause, pressuring the State Department to intervene.

African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

The chapter provides an analytical survey of the development of wardship in England from 1066 to 1540, when the Court of Wards was placed on a legislative establishment. In so doing, the chapter performs two roles. Firstly, it provides a detailed introduction to the institution of wardship. Secondly, it explains how the Crown wrought seismic and profoundly unsettling changes in the English land law, especially during the 1530s. In conjunction with the largest forcible re-distribution of land since the Conquest, that is the dissolution of the monasteries, this significantly increased the number of heirs falling into wardship.

The fourth chapter discusses the officers and personnel of the Court, particularly how they obtained and benefited from their positions. In so doing, the chapter reveals another additional cost wardship imposed – as much as the Crown and its favourites profited from wardship, many of the proceeds were also secreted away by its officers. This originated at the very top – Masters of the Court certainly took bribes from those seeking to obtain wardships, to the bottom, with the Court’s county officer, the feodary. The chapter includes the case study of one such feodary, John Goodhand, whose activities can be traced through the surviving documentary record. Goodhand, as well as making the usual extortions, was accused of kidnapping children he claimed were in wardship – ‘sheep committed to the wolf’ in one court document. Found guilty, he was briefly imprisoned and fined £1,000. But from the Crown’s perspective, he had been an indefatigable servant who had raised Court revenues in his county. After the fine was paid, he re-entered royal service with a letter from Charles I protecting him from future prosecutions.

Chapter 3 examines the origins of modern territoriality in settler colonies, centring on the English colonies of North America. A range of existing accounts view property as important in the history of sovereignty. This chapter engages with them, offering an account of how property surveying drove the emergence of modern territoriality in North America. A host of settler colonial conditions, ranging from cultural understandings of property to non-recognition of Native American boundaries, resulted in the use of geometric surveying techniques in the creation of private property becoming central to colonial life. Territorial disputes between colonies were then addressed using boundary-making techniques of delimitation and demarcation already familiar from the resolution of property disputes. After US independence, these techniques were used to create interimperial boundaries. Comparisons between different types of settler colonialisms globally are used to add weight to this explanation and to justify the focus on English North American colonies.

George McCall Theal’s early career in an emergent South African print industry was fragmented, contradictory and ambiguous. Reflecting the volatility of his environment, he strategically shifted careers, voices and readerships. This period in Theal’s career reveals a profound instability that induced the young migrant to occupy a variety of public spaces and to immerse himself in a range of writing and print endeavours. Obscured by his later racist ideologies, Theal’s initial success is based partly on his collaboration with and reliance on African sources for his first major international publication on Xhosa folklore and ethnography. This chapter is primarily concerned with the significance of this collaborative process for Theal’s career and for early print culture in South Africa. Theal’s urge to publish resulted in a mode of writing and publishing that was undeniably ground-breaking, and as history would show, devastating, in its inscription of a racist ideology.

Chapter 4 examines the origins of modern territoriality in British India and surrounding regions. The cause was a shift in the disposition of colonial governance towards information, as officials dealt with a crisis of knowledge about Indian society and politics. The ryotwari settlement is a well-studied example of this shift in dispositions as reflected in revenue policy, but the rapid expansion of surveying activity starting in the 1790s in the Madras Presidency, especially including Colin Mackenzie’s survey of the state of Mysore (1799–1810), is another example. This explanation is contrasted with other possible explanations based on the diffusion of practices from Europe, or on the maximization of revenue. Finally, it is shown how, once the surveying of boundaries was well established in India, the British began using this practice outside of India proper, and how the emergence of modern territoriality from Persia to Siam depended on the Anglo-Indian surveying practice.

This chapter covers the Democrat Party’s first term in office (1950–54), focusing on two aspects of this period: first, its leaders’ consolidation of power; second, the ways in which their economic policies of lower taxes, expanded credit, and increased investment depended on close relations with the United States. To secure economic and military aid, Democrat Party leaders sent soldiers to fight in the Korean War and continuously reminded US officials of Turkey’s strategic value. Drawing on diplomatic archives from the United States, Britain, and Turkey, this chapter reveals the dynamics of these negotiations. Moreover, the chapter shows how control of economic policymaking was a crucial arena of intraparty power struggles, both among the top leadership and at the provincial level. Again, looking at examples from Balıkesir and Malatya, we see how tensions increased between the parties during the early 1950s. We also see how the DP’s control of government allowed it to steer projects to provinces it controlled and penalize provinces that rejected it.

This chapter focuses on the period beginning with the Democrat Party’s electoral triumph in 1954 and ending with its 1955 parliamentary group crisis, when the government nearly fell. In this period, economic conditions ceased to favor the party. A slump in global demand reduced Turkey’s access to foreign exchange, while the government’s expansionary monetary policies encouraged inflation. As economic challenges intensified, economic policy became as much of an electoral liability as a strength. Facing domestic criticism, Democrat-led governments limited the bounds of public dissent in schools, media, and political organizations. Prime Minister Menderes and his allies resisted calls from economic liberals in their own party (as well as the United States) to devalue the lira, increase taxes, and develop a long-term economic plan. The resulting tensions fractured the party, leading to the departure of many of its liberal members. These efforts to constrain institutions that provided checks and balances on the government constituted a policy of de-democratization. At the same time, the party’s leaders played international creditors off against one another and sought access to additional credit.