In his powerful poem titled ‘Shema’, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, urges the world to pay attention to the victims of the Holocaust and to never lose sight of the human monstrosity that unfolded under fascism. Despite Levi's warning, there is a global resurgence of fascism (Mason 2021; Patnaik 2024; Stanley 2020). India seems to be in a similar situation with its embrace of fascism in the form of Hindutva. Fascism is a state of capitalism that arises because of a crisis or its possibility in which the traditional elite cannot dominate the political sphere and serve the interests of large corporations through liberal institutions (Poulantzas 2018). It is an authoritarian reaction (Desai 2016; Patnaik 2024) and a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask (Parenti 1997; Rosenberg 2016).

The core concept of rational choice is what each undergraduate of economics is introduced to in one of the first sessions of their economics course at university. So was I. My fellow students and I sat in one of those large lecture halls in Heidelberg, enthusiastic toward that which was about to come. The teacher enters, starts the class with telling us about consumer demand, a theory grounded in the idea that people’s choices can be modeled via indifference curves. After studying the properties of those curves for several weeks, we concluded that thinking about behavior in this way had up until then been the most puzzling thing we had ever heard of. In German high school, the subject of economics is usually absent. When I began my degree program in economics at the university, I was excited to hopefully be able to critically engage one day in the public and political discourse about economics and the economy by making use of tools provided by the field. My idealistic self was convinced (and potentially still is) that one could only change the system from within, ideally using the language that a system and its proponents use themselves. Yet, I quickly felt that I might fail with economics. The technical language to model behavior in terms of consistent choices, rational preferences, and indifference curves was counterintuitive and so different from everyday discourse that I had a hard time translating. During my first semesters, I did not see any way to connect the two and almost gave up on the subject entirely. Understanding the basics in my first microeconomics class as an undergraduate has been a concern of mine ever since. This book is the result of finding one way to take this puzzlement as a starting point for making a serious attempt to better understand what economists are up to.

This chapter highlights the careers of Save the Children’s principal field officer in Nigeria, Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Irvine Neave and the African Development Trust’s, Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock to explore the legacies of mission and empire. The former viewed poverty as a product of individual ignorance; the latter argued that it was due to the structural injustice of racist legislation across Southern Africa. Despite these differing imperial and political outlooks, both were, however, ‘techno-missionaries’: products of both the missionary past and the technocratic future of development. Mission stayed on after the empire, but it was transformed by the rise of the modern NGO and the humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It resulted in a ‘third colonial occupation’ of volunteer aid workers alongside the experts and technocrats of social and economic development.

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

The conclusion summarises the interconnected histories of the plebiscite and its foremost scholar and places them in historical perspective. Both were shaped by Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to reorder the world. Over one hundred years on from that attempt, with major political changes having taken place, and liberal internationalism of the kind advocated by Wilson and followers seemingly having lost its appeal to the United States, the history of Sarah Wambaugh and the plebiscite seems relevant once more.

Describes Meade’s and his colleagues’ early efforts to plan for the postwar world.