This chapter explores stand-up comedy in the UK arising out of comic song in the music hall. Spoken patter rather than songs became the centre of performances of the front cloth comedians in variety theatres, which continued until the 1950s. Subsequently, stand-ups found other places to perform, notably the working men’s club (WMC), with varied performance styles but a shared canon of jokes. The working-class Londoner is a performer and type existing across the development of stand-up. Alternative comedy arose from 1979 as a critique of the perceived sexism, racism and limited creativity of WMC comedy, and most comedians since have careers within these broad parameters. Despite this, inequalities still exist in the UK stand-up scene, and the consequences of the Covid pandemic were greater for comedians affected by inequalities of class, gender, race, disability, and sexuality who suffered more severe career setbacks, being less able to garner income online.

Rawls expounded “a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract.” His theory applies to society’s basic structure, a system of productive cooperation over generations. The state of nature was reconfigured as an “original position” which “incorporates certain procedural constraints on arguments.” The “parties” in the original position have general knowledge but no knowledge specific to themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, values, desires, social position, and so on. The “parties” choose principles that will maximize their fund of “primary goods,” or all-purpose means – means useful to all, whatever their particular interests, talents, etc. Two principles would be chosen: a maximum-equal-liberties principle, and a principle governing the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and income. These are in “lexical” order: equal basic liberties, then fair equal opportunity, then the “difference principle,” viz. distribute so to maximize the resources of the least-advantaged class. The chapter describes the “fact of reasonable pluralism” the social contract must accommodate, and the “well-ordered society” the social contract is to stabilize “for the right reasons,” securing the three great achievements of the tradition: toleration, limited government by popular consent, and “the winning of the working classes to democracy.”

States are unable to cope with economic turbulence and social disintegration. They face an escalating crisis of legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. Transnational state apparatuses are unable to bridge the gap between a nation-state-based system of political authority and a globalizing economy. The contradiction is deepening between the legitimacy function and the accumulation function of the national state. There is a growing complexity and tension in the relationship between national states and transnational capital as well as between distinct fractions of capital. The mechanisms of consensual domination, or hegemony, are breaking down. The ruling classes are ramping up the global police state and turning to militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. International tensions and geopolitical conflict are escalating. The evolution of the U.S.-China relationship is indicative of all of these trends and tendencies. The concept of imperialism needs to be updated to twenty-first century realities, with a focus on the relationship between the U.S. and Western states and their intervention, on the one hand, and transnational class exploitation on the other.

In early 1972, a group of Bengali civil servants residing in Islamabad were able to deliver a petition to David Ennals (1922–1995), a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) and human rights campaigner in the United Kingdom. Ennals, a former minister, was the leader of a group called the Friends of Bangladesh Conciliation Mission at the time. In their appeal for the safety of Bengalis in West Pakistan, the petitioners described their circumstances as below:

This chapter investigates Pakistan's encampment system for Bengali military personnel during the wartime period, 1971–1974. This reveals the captivity landscape by analysing the location, categorisation and spatial regulations of the camps in different parts of West Pakistan that housed Bengali military personnel, non-combatant servicemen and their families.

In the previous chapter, we introduced ourselves to the importance of satellite remote sensing for water management and why the technique is going to take greater importance in years to come as challenges mount from climate change, competing needs and lack of ground data. In this chapter, we will overview the basics of remote sensing, define key concepts and terms. Using these concepts and terms, we will develop an understanding of the fundamental principle required for the success of remote sensing.

Schoenberg’s years in Berlin (1901–3, 1911–15, 1926–33) can be written on the city as an evolving network of people, places and institutions that shifted from the margins to the centres of cultural life, only to be erased when he left for the last time in 1933. These three periods were marked by profound changes in his life and works, mirroring the cataclysmic transformations of Berlin and Germany as a whole. This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the changing locales of his life in the city as well as the dramatically expanding artistic and cultural spheres in which he operated. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with the people and places around him.

April 2022: One of us is talking to a group of Dalits from a Tamil village, mainly women. The discussion revolves around price increases, and the villagers debate which increases are most problematic, from fuel to onions and oil. ‘It is the price of gold that is a problem,’ exclaims one of them. ‘If the government wants to help us, it must lower the price of gold.’ The price of gold is indeed a permanent and daily concern. In the same discussion, another woman wonders how she will find the five gold sovereigns for her daughter's future wedding. To give less to in-laws would be to lose face but also, as we shall see, to lose the investment in her son's education and housing. Gold acts as a currency, used as a unit of account and a means of exchange for matrimonial transactions. It is also a store of value: its price has increased tenfold between 2000 and 2020, while the general consumer price index has increased threefold. Through pledging, gold is also a payment technology for daily transactions, now used to access cash to smooth out expenses and income and make ends meet. Long reserved for the dominant castes as a symbol of purity and prosperity, gold is now a currency accessible to many, even if its uses and meanings remain deep markers and drivers of social differentiation.

In this chapter we explore the political and moral economies of gold as money and its profound transformations in rural Tamil Nadu over the past two decades. The political economy of gold refers to the structural and material conditions that allow the unequal access and use of gold to occur and be sustained.