This chapter examines the vocational odyssey of the second-generation humanist Giovanni Conversini, as he attempts to match his father’s lofty social status in his pursuit of a literary and teaching career. It focuses on his autobiographical account of his numerous occupations and two marriages (Rationarium vite); his attempt to gain an appointment with his uncle, a cardinal in the Papal Court (Dialogue Between Giovanni and a Letter); his experience in the Paduan court (De primo eius introitus ad aulam); and his major theoretical statement on life choice (Dragmalogia de eligibili vite genere).

This chapter examines the legal and policy regime that governs the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) and the underlying constraints. The AfCFTA, regarded as the largest trade arrangement after the World Trade Organization (WTO) in terms of the number of participating countries, seeks to utilise economic integration to promote pan-African development as a pathway to prosperity. With a commitment to eliminate tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) in intra-African trade, the AfCFTA is governed by general and specific objectives as well as principles aimed at making the agreement a transformative instrument of African prosperity. While the AfCFTA is a consequence of normative beliefs and common identity of the state parties, there are fears that NTBs and prevalent weak institutions could frustrate the expected outcome. This further buttresses our contention that normative interests should be mutually constitutive with the institutions established to manage the underlying implementation for prosperity to be realised. Although development and, ultimately, prosperity are well constructed under the AfCFTA agenda, there must be complementarity between the AfCFTA regime and the implementing institutions. This chapter proffers the way forward to navigate these dynamics.

Democratic governments continually expand their policy portfolios to address various challenges, a process known as policy accumulation. While doing so can ensure more comprehensive governance, it also puts the administrative agencies tasked with implementing new and existing policies at risk of overload. Without matching resources or capacities, these agencies may be forced to engage in policy triage, whereby they must prioritize certain tasks and delay or neglect others. Policy triage lowers overall implementation effectiveness, as attention devoted to one area can draw resources away from another. Yet, existing research on policy growth has largely focused on the causes and patterns of expanding policy stocks, while implementation studies traditionally analyze individual policies rather than the organizational challenges arising from larger policy bundles. By shifting the analytical lens to how organizations handle their entire policy portfolios, this chapter zooms in on organizational trade-off decisions that shape the success or failure of public policies.

The Introduction tackles biases and lacunae in recent discussions about the effects of economic globalization on the world-literary circulation of texts. I highlight three arguments (Ph. Cheah, A. Mufti, E. Apter) that dismiss world literature as a procedure of exchange for surrendering to “neoliberal global capitalism” and confront them with the observation that even the critique of this systemic correlation loses sight of spaces other than that of the Euro-Atlantic world system (D. Ganguly, F. Orsini). Against this background, the Introduction claims that the political economy of world literature offers a more complex picture even within the confines of European capitalist modernity if we recognize the diversity of economic discourses surrounding its early theories. First, I attempt to historicize and diversify the notion of “the economy” by addressing semantic oscillations in the notions of ecology, circulation, and commerce. Then I outline the five “designs of circulation” the individual chapters will address and make preliminary suggestions about their pre-, non-, or anti-capitalist elements.

How did early modern women and their families know they were pregnant? Childbearing guides of the period suggested that married women could know they were pregnant very soon after sex, and was related to moral and sexual continency. Women were encouraged to ‘keep accounts’ in their paperwork of their health and bodies, both as a tool to discover pregnancy quickly and as part of the broader culture of Protestant self-examination. Writing about conception and pregnancy sought to impose certainty on what was otherwise an ambiguous experience. Since keeping good accounts and records was linked to piety, orderly gendered labour and status, these records became examples of the respectability of families more broadly.

Newspaper obituaries of political figures are a distinctive, deeply British genre of political writing, yet one rarely examined. These obituaries trace the rise and fall of British newsprint around the turn of the millennium, a time when newspapers gained new freedoms in technology and politics, briefly flourishing before the internet signalled their decline. Traditionally, obituary writers were anonymous, though by the 1980s, an ‘obituarial turn’ reshaped the genre, widening its scope to include a broader range of lives and details. Obituaries began to embrace anecdotes, highlighting personal quirks and scandals, and thus reflected a broader shift in mores. A central paradox defines the genre: though obituaries appear authoritative in respected newspapers, they are subject to the editorial biases of the day. Shifts in editorship and political climates can reshape reputations, subtly influencing public memory. In the print era, obituaries seemed permanent, existing as clippings and archives. However, the digital age has transformed them: limitless online space has made their reach wider but less impactful. Today, obituaries serve not only as end-points but as starting points for biographical reflections on political lives.

In Chapter 5, we examine whether Black and non-Black elected officials differ in their discussion of what Mansbridge (1999) describes as uncrystallized issues. Mansbridge (1999) argues that uncrystallized political issues are those which have not been on the political agenda for very long and politicians have not yet taken public stances. As a result, uncrystallized issues provide another good avenue to explore whether Black elected officials engage in more proactive racial rhetorical representation than non-Black elected officials. While Mansbridge’s (1999) hypothesis was theoretical, in Chapter 5 we set out to empirically assess whether descriptive representatives are the most likely to speak out on Black centered uncrystallized issues. We find empirical support for Mansbridge’s (1999) uncrystallized issues hypothesis using the hand coding of race-based appeals in press releases during the 114th through 116th Congresses and a case study of press releases and Tweets discussing racial health disparities in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chapter 1 revisits Goethe’s endorsement of a “free trade of sentiments and ideas” in the light of the free trade discourses of his age. First, I dissect these discourses’ complexity and doctrinal incoherence in eighteenth-nineteenth-century British, French, and German political economy. Then I explore the ambivalences in Goethe’s vague suggestion about a free trade world literature by addressing his peculiar attitude to commerce, his reminiscences of the administrative economics of Cameralism based on the heritage of the self-sustaining Aristotelian household, his aversions to modern finance, and his nostalgia for the medieval trade fair. Based on these decidedly antiquated considerations informing his understanding of the mediums, sites, and agents of commercial and intellectual exchange, I suggest that as opposed to Marx’s approach to world literature as an offspring of modern industrial capitalism, Goethe’s views were bound up with pre-modern merchant capitalism.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Social scientists’ writing, in general, is directed at their academic peers. Not all social scientists seek wider forms of influence, but between the early 1960s and the late 1980s those that did so had access to a mass-circulation weekly, New Society, designed specifically, in the words of its long-time editor Paul Barker, to ‘bridge the gap between thinkers and policy makers’. Our chapter examines how social scientists conceptualised writing as a practice in Britain between the 1960s and the 1980s, asking how they understood the challenge of writing to influence a non-specialist audience – whether that be Barker’s policymakers or the wider public. To do so, we draw on two main sources: the UK Data Archive’s ‘Pioneers of Social Research’ interview collection, and the pages of New Society (1962–88) itself. We use the ‘Pioneer’ interviews to explore why social scientists were drawn to write for New Society and how they viewed such writing, and we offer case studies of three frequent New Society contributors: the planner Peter Hall, and the sociologists Ann Oakley and Ray Pahl. We ask what techniques each social thinker developed to popularize their ideas and examine how their contributions interacted with the broad format of New Society.

This chapter explores the theoretical themes of the book: art, politics and anti-racism; emotion and affect in art and politics; Latin American racial formations. It outlines the research project on which the book is based: Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).