This chapter examines the narrative of cybersecurity in China’s mass media, with a focus on the domestication of cybersecurity and its subsequent challenge to democracy. While much ink has been spilled over cybersecurity in (Western) democracies, less is known about the narrative and discourse of cybersecurity in an authoritarian context and its implications for global Internet governance and security. This chapter fills this gap by exploring news narratives on cybersecurity in China’s domestic mass media after the enactment of the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2017. Drawing on computer-assisted semantic network analysis of 9,094 news articles and commentaries, this chapter uncovers how the Chinese regime is adopting a discourse of cybersecurity to legitimize and consolidate its control over the Internet and to counter the challenges of global Internet connection. This domestication discourse is further utilized to place blame on the West for cyber threats. This chapter concludes with thoughts on the domestication of cybersecurity by authoritarian regimes like China and the challenge of defending cybersecurity.

How did ambitious projects of wetland improvement give rise to a new kind of environmental politics in early modern England? This chapter first asks how such projects reconfigure understandings of when, where, and how environmental change took place in this period. Environmental acts were political, it argues, because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. It next explores what kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting wetland improvement. In emphasising material and institutional progress, studies of ‘improvement’ and ‘the state’ have often overlooked the contingent processes through which productivity and power were made and disputed on the ground. Mobilising custom as a practice and right, wetland communities played a vital role in the trajectory of improvement. Conflict over improvement exposed the contested nature of political authority in seventeenth-century England and generated material landscapes of flux. Finally, this chapter examines how speech acted and actions spoke to remake wetlands via print, maps, institutions, and environments.

Wetlands have deep geological histories, stories of bedrock, sediment, and sea rise. But the direction and speed of flow has been shaped just as surely by human interests and intervention. This chapter asks how wetland commons were used, managed, and disputed in the centuries and decades prior to improvement projects. Moving from the action of ice sheets and mosses to national legislation and daily work, it examines how environmental and political scales intersected. By the late sixteenth century, communities in the northern fens faced amplified flood risks and conflict over shared commons. But these challenges did not necessarily strengthen intervention by state-sanctioned institutions capable of coordinating at a larger scale. A less linear and more fragmented picture emerges in the northern fens, where environmental politics pivoted on rights and responsibilities defined by local custom. Fen custom was reproduced by communal decision-making and participatory acts of walking, remembering, and working. It formed a flexible fabric, adapted in response to dynamic waterways and porous boundaries and negotiated through confrontations on riverbanks as well as courtrooms.

At the time and since, early modern wetlands have been subject to double vision: told as a tale of degradation and disaster or celebrated as a site of biodiversity and collective access. Violent Waters is a book about the politics of rapid, anthropogenic, environmental change in early modern England: a politics in which narratives about scarcity and abundance, the past and the future, justice and value became vital to struggles over wetlands. During projects of wetland improvement, environments were forged at the intersection between material conflicts over the distribution of resources and risk and political conflicts about flows of power.

If drainage aimed to free land from the vagaries of floodwater, then enclosure was necessary exclude commoners and transfer management of land to improving landlords and tenants. The development of ‘absolute’ private property in early modern England has often been analysed via legal categories or socio-economic outcomes. Resituating property-making as an environmental act, this chapter argues that the contested exercise of land rights in Hatfield Level relied on the ability to determine how water moved, where cattle could graze, and what kind of plants grew. It traces the words and practices through which commoners and improvers defined their rights, often hinging on disputes about the just distribution of resources. This chapter explores a spectrum of local responses to improvement, including complaints of scarcity, socially fraught adaptation, and action to reinforce customary rights. As disputes over enclosure escalated, physical acts of cultivation and grazing became means by rival groups asserted ‘right’ as jurisdiction and legitimacy. In doing so, they created contrasting environments, generative of different social, economic, and political relations.

The industrial revolution in Britain was labor-intensive, not capital-intensive, especially in agriculture, but to some extent also in industry. The industrious revolution and the revisionist view of the industrial revolution help explain this dynamic. The importance of labor was reinforced through the use of coercive institutions. However, because of this, the rate of growth tended to slow down after the Napoleonic wars. The solution was found in ghost acres, not only in America, but also in Russia (main imports of Russian wheat to Great Britain).

The relationship between the crown and the gentry was multifaceted. It encompassed both military needs and civilian offices. It could be both direct and indirect, involving personal service – in the royal household for example – on the one hand or indirect in helping to maintain royal rule across the realm. It involved central organs of government – attendance at parliament most particularly – and, crucially, power and influence in the provinces. The relationship was by no means a static one. It evolved and shifted focus over time.

Chapter 6 focuses on agriculture and food processing. Analysis demonstrates that women undertook a little more than a third of agricultural work tasks, doing more work in animal husbandry than arable agriculture but participating widely in both. The work-task approach also allows less well-documented activities such as work on common land to be analysed for the first time. The gender division of labour in agriculture is shown to have been flexible.

This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

Commons are tangible and intangible goods (e.g., knowledge, health) that should be accessible to all members of a certain community (e.g., global, supranational, national, local). Private law and the commons in scientific research have traditionally been regarded as two mutually exclusive concepts. While the idea of the commons in scientific research is based on the concepts of open access to information, knowledge, data, and materials, the traditional understanding of private law evokes the opposing notions of ownership, patents, and privatization. However, scientific practice has shown how different models based on private law rules can be used to enhance and protect the commons, while at the same time encouraging innovation. This chapter explores, from a theoretical and practical perspective, how private law (property rights, intellectual property, licenses, and other contracts) can be used to develop models to lay down the legal foundation for the construction and further protection of the commons arising from the use and exchange of health data and human biological materials in scientific research for the improvement of human health.

In particular, this chapter’s general objective is to determine how, and to what extent, the interplay between private law and the commons is instrumental in protecting and promoting individual and collective human rights, with particular emphasis on the right to health and health care and the right to enjoy the benefits of science and scientific progress.

This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.

As he rose to leadership of the Spencean Philanthropists in 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote and published six issues of Axe Laid to the Root, an inexpensive weekly periodical for working-class readers. Axe Laid to the Root instructed its white audience about the radical potential of African-Jamaican land and food-based liberation. The provision grounds, plots set apart from the plantation for enslaved people to grow their own food, were a source of resistance to plantation capitalism, providing food sovereignty and communal identity. The ecological knowledge of the Jamaican Maroons was another source of resistance to plantation economies. Finally, Wedderburn’s writing in “cheap” periodicals aspired to cultivate a transatlantic alliance between the English lower classes, the colonized Irish, and free and enslaved people in Jamaica. The chapter concludes by discussing George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, which features Wedderburn as a central figure within abolitionist circles.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.