How has the CPC maintained its organizational strength over time, especially during the period of economic reform? This chapter argues that the several important measures taken since the 1990s have reinforced the party as a strong organization. The personnel management reform since the 1990s has standardized the elite recruitment and provided a relatively fair channel of social mobility within the regime. The CPC has monopolized both the allocation of critical economic resources and appointments of key political, economic, and other societal offices through the Nomenklatura system, so that the party can distribute spoils of China’s economic growths to its key members and supporters in exchange of their loyalty. Since the beginning of Xi’s rule in 2012, the party has expanded the anticorruption and disciplinary body, committed more resources to campaigns of ideological indoctrination, increased the party’s involvement in daily policymaking and the private sector, and diversified channels of elite recruitment. These measures appear to have reinforced the party’s organizational capacity, but their long-term effects are yet to be assessed.

This chapter assesses the Spanish Inquisition’s treatment of so-called “Old Christians,” meaning Spaniards who allegedly had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors in their genealogies. While Old Christians convicted of serious heresy could be relaxed to the secular arm and burned at the stake, their ancestry meant that Spanish inquisitors usually interrogated them less stringently, tortured them less frequently, and penanced them more lightly. Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition did not single out Old Christians as a potentially heretical group. Instead, inquisitors typically arrested Old Christians for morals offenses -- which connoted religious error -- as part of a larger effort to discipline Spain’s Catholic population. Speech acts, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, witchcraft, and magic committed by Old Christians preoccupied Spanish inquisitors. The Inquisition’s attention to a wide range of more prosaic crimes beyond crypto-judaizing rendered the Holy Office a constant presence in the lives of Old Christians.

It is a principle of international law not only that workers should be free to join trade unions and take part in their activities, but also that trade union autonomy should be respected by the State. Trade unions in the United Kingdom in contrast are subject to detailed regulation by legislation, which undermines their right to promote political objects without restraint, decide their own procedures for the selecting and electing senior officials, and determine when disciplinary powers may be used against those who break the rules. This chapter considers these and other questions, as well as the controversial regulatory role of the Certification Officer.

Mass rather than skill formed the basis of the Red Army’s victory primarily because inadequate training, weak motivation, and low morale plagued the army for the duration of the war, though after the Battle of Kursk, soldier motivation and morale improved. Often poorly led, inadequately fed, ill-trained, and under-supplied, Red Army soldiers faced daunting prospects just to survive. The dire need to replace losses led to abbreviated training; troops were thrown into battle with little preparation, leading combat effectiveness to suffer; fearful and feeling unprepared, soldiers deserted, shirked, straggled, and showed cowardice and committed many acts of indiscipline, crimes, and violations of regulations on a wide scale. When given the right equipment and weaponry, and properly trained to use it, and led by competent leaders, most soldiers fought well and with determination. These conditions, however, did not present themselves very often. Officers were often in positions for which they were unprepared. The ability of the Red Army to fight well improved in 1943 with defense production at full capacity and American Lend-Lease delivering vital supplies.

In early summer 1914 many thought the Italian army grossly unsuited to modern warfare. Cadorna himself complained that it was on the brink of collapse. The barracks were nearly deserted, the store-rooms empty, the regiments so understaffed they could not even put on basic training, while for want of officers whole companies were being placed under newly promoted sergeants. But there was another problem: the commander-in-chief’s utter distrust of his own men, and all his fellow countrymen, come to that. It was a deep-seated conviction. Italy was too liberal and permissive, lacked ‘social discipline’ (as he called a people’s propensity for strict respect of the law, social hierarchies and institutions), and this caused an unhealthy situation which inevitably corrupted the national servicemen. Unsurprisingly, his first act as head of the army in wartime was to announce implacable iron disciplinary measures to be applied with brutal severity so as to bring the unwarlike rebellious Italian people to heel.

From May 1915 till the end of 1917, 200 generals commanding the major fighting units and at least 600 senior officers were sacked by Cadorna’s direct order or authorization. Though not only an Italian phenomenon, the degree of that officer purge is puzzling. Cadorna always inflexibly defended his absolutist (pre-modern) handling of the officer cadres: he would weed out any commander rumoured to be weak or cowardly, but likewise anyone who contradicted a superior or voiced doubts as to the certainty of victory, or the infallibility of the Chief. Still more draconian were his disciplinary measures against the troops. Cadorna set out to eliminate three great enemies within his army: the soldiers’ indiscipline and cowardice, indecision by the officers, and leniency by the courts. These he pursued by dint of special tribunals and ordering an extraordinarily high number of executions. ‘Discipline is the spiritual flame of victory’, ran one of his best-known circulars, issued in the first September of the war. And, particularly revealing of the supreme commander’s inflation of the discipline factor: ‘the most disciplined troops win, not the best trained’.

This chapter considers the influential argument that there is a formal and substantive complicity between disciplinary surveillance and the novel, specifically the realist novel. Foucauldian readings of literature argue that the nineteenth-century realist novel functioned as a kind of disciplinary power, acting as a complement to the spatial technologies of a disciplinary society. This argument has not been readily acknowledged by the spatial turn in literary studies, but this chapter revisits the disciplinary theme in Dickens’ David Copperfield and compares that novel to Thackeray’s Pendennis. Finding very different treatments of space, surveillance, and the self leads to a reassessment of Foucauldian criticism and the idea that the novel is complicit with disciplinary spatiality. As Bildungsromans, Pendennis and David Copperfield have many similarities, but whereas Dickens plays up the themes of disciplinary introspection and an internalised form of carceral surveillance, Thackeray’s hero remains subject only to a worldly form of discipline, including the business of literature itself. Thackeray moreover suggests that prisons are a microcosm of society rather than that the techniques of the prison extend to a disciplinary spatiality. The chapter concludes that literature exhibits and exemplifies different kinds of spatiality and different versions of the carceral imaginary.

Chapter 6 explores the simultaneous and contradictory projects of protection, detention, reform, and rehabilitation at a state-run shelter in Mumbai. It discusses the challenges of doing research in a carceral institution, explaining, in particular, the use of film screenings as a research method. The chapter describes how women placed in shelter detention experience profound uncertainty about their release, an indefinite curtailment of their mobility, interaction with kin and partners, and ability to earn a living. It examines how NGOs participate in shelter detention through programs providing livelihood skills training that appeal to foreign donors and the Indian state because of their neoliberal objective of facilitating women’s exit from both prostitution and state custody. It demonstrates how, from the perspective of detained women, however, these rehabilitation programs are questionably useful and rarely sustainable or lucrative. The chapter also highlights how Bangladeshi women are targeted by an immigration control agenda that joins the existing forms of governance shaping shelter detention. The chapter ends by tracking tabloid reports of an incident of escape from the shelter and the Bombay High Court’s subsequent intervention. The author argues that these responses by the media and judiciary ultimately extend and intensify, rather than question, shelter detention.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

This chapter examines how the episode in Pliny Ep. 6.31.4−6 relates to Roman concepts of gender and warfare. The emperor Trajan judged the case of Gallitta, a military tribune’s wife who had committed adultery with a centurion. Since the reign of Augustus adultery had been criminalized. The Augustan legislation on marriage and adultery has received much scholarly attention, but relatively little has been paid to cases involving military officers. This study argues that the repression of adultery and the control of officers’ wives culturally maintained military discipline, in particular the hierarchy of command. Adultery in this instance subverted military hierarchy; the young officer’s cuckolding of his senior and his failure to display self-control vitiated his fitness for command. The stability of the imperial order depended on the reinforcement of normative gender roles on the frontiers as well as in the city of Rome.

This chapter explores the relationship between education and a school’s punishment and disciplinary practices. Distinct from discipline, punishment is defined partly in terms of its attempt to express moral disapproval. While there are serious criticisms of the use of punishment in educational settings, punishment is largely justified in school in terms of its ability to foster certain sorts of educative conversations. Not all punishment is justified: the particular sort of punishment, and the context that surrounds it, must match the educational nature of the school environment. The punishment must send the right educational messages and accomplish legitimate educational goals. The context of punishment that best supports these goals can be found in the restorative justice framework.