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.

Ireland showcases the full spectrum of policy triage outcomes, driven by varied institutional setups and organizational cultures. Independent regulators at the central level—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Pensions Authority — manage their tasks with minimal triage. Their status as independent agencies limits blame-shifting, while formal accountability frameworks and political clout help secure resources. Moreover, both agencies foster strong organizational cultures that emphasize collaboration and flexibility, enhancing their ability to absorb additional workloads without undermining core functions. By contrast, the Department of Social Protection exhibits moderate triage frequencies, mostly occurring during sudden workload spikes or seasonal surges. Although the organization’s integrated policy formulation and implementation model shields it from excessive blame-shifting, centralized budgetary controls can hinder its resource mobilization efforts. The National Parks and Wildlife Service, however, grapples with severe, routine triage, largely due to chronic underfunding, weak structural ties to its parent department, and a fragmented internal culture in combination with an increasing implementation load. Finally, Irish City and County Councils also face frequent triage, contending with uncapped policy accumulation yet limited authority to negotiate additional support.

This book is about distributive justice. It is about when and for what reasons a certain distribution of important goods and opportunities can be said to be unjust and how we should think about eliminating such injustices. This is, I take it, an important project. It is important because justice is an important value and because distributions matter for justice. This is the central motivation for the book. It is a call to enquire into what justice requires regarding distributive obligations. This is clearly not all that matters. Ethics is so much more than justice, and justice is more than distributions. But distributions matter for justice, and justice is important.

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.

Portugal’s social and environmental sectors both exhibit pervasive and severe policy triage, driven by pronounced policy growth that no longer aligns with stagnating or shrinking administrative capacities. Despite the formal centralization of administrative responsibilities, environmental agencies across the board routinely prioritize urgent tasks while neglecting or delaying routine monitoring, inspections, and enforcement. Austerity measures have worsened chronic understaffing, leading to shortfalls in skilled personnel and aging workforces. Similar challenges plague social implementers, which struggle to fulfill core functions amid overwhelming caseloads and hamstrung resource mobilization. Efforts to mitigate overload such as overtime, inter-agency staff transfers, and basic workflow automation provide only limited relief. Moreover, policymakers frequently shift blame for implementation failures to budgetary constraints and the Ministry of Finance. As a result, Portugal’s public agencies are forced to engage in near-constant triage, with significant negative effects on timeliness and thoroughness of policy implementation.

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.

This chapter elaborates the relevant policy implications of the new theory of sufficientarian justice, the umbel view, as it has been developed in the course of the book. The chapter begins by defining political deficiencism as its general political guideline. Political deficiencism says that political institutions should, other things equal, be designed to identify and minimize justice-relevant deficiencies. The chapter then argues that this implies a special focus on making cluster-breaking policies in reference to manifest deficiencies, that policies should be particularly accountable for the needs of the worst off in society, and that policies should take account of the important ways in which money matters. From this, the chapter proceeds to consider what the umbel view implies for three specific social policy issues: Universal basic income, health inequality, and extreme wealth. The chapter argues that the umbel view is well equipped to give plausible and progressive political guidance on all these issues, and that sufficientarianism, therefore, presents a sound a viable plan for political reform.

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.