Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.

Water is rarely a subject of Euro-American literary attention, even if it is one of the most essential commodities today. But this is not the case for literary studies in places such as Oceania and the Caribbean, and in our world’s moment of environmental crises the status of water as (and as not) a commodity is more important than ever. This chapter first sketches out broader trends of water’s commodification in several canonical literary texts. The chapter then examines imaginaries of transnational waters, hydro-power, and water contamination in works by Ruth Ozeki and Nnedi Okorafor. Finally, I focus on contemporary authors from Oceania who prioritise water’s critical importance as they challenge notions of it as a commodity and complicate the ‘Blue Humanities’. This chapter considers shows how fictions and poetry can creatively engage with forms of water’s commodification but also theorise alternative water futures.

The 1870s was a critical period for the transformation of British aestheticism into a mainstream phenomenon that both commodified and parodied its avant-garde origins. This transformation unfolds through three representative controversies: the 1870 publication of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems, which was savaged by Robert Buchanan in his review ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; the appearance of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which pitted an avant-garde aesthetics against conventional art historical criticism; and the notorious libel trial of 1878, in which John Ruskin’s attack on James McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket led to a legal dispute that hinged on the definition of art itself. All three episodes reveal a doubleness at the heart of aestheticism: it is committed to both idealised abstraction and concrete embodiment. This doubleness underlies aestheticism’s status as an arcane philosophy that nonetheless manifests itself in highly recognisable and commmercialisable popular forms.

This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

This chapter considers the problem of ‘heavy freight’, a problem posited by Anthony Snodgrass in the 1980s concerning how Greeks might have moved heavy goods like marble around the Greek world. A dataset of freestanding marble statues is presented, where the size and the shape of these statues is used to consider how much marble might have been used in the Greek world during various economic production processes. After estimating the scale of the industry, this chapter uses spatial network modelling to consider some of the routes along which marble might have been transported on the sea, using a rules-based system that ships will always have gone the most direct route from-anchorage-to-anchorage. The shape of these networks is then discussed in light of their implications for our understanding of the whole of the Greek world.

Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.

Chapter 9 introduces the Q’eqchi’-Maya institution of replacement (eeqaj), a set of practices and beliefs, which determine when various kinds of entities and agents must be replaced, as well as what kinds of entities and agents may substitute for them, and thereby serve as their replacements. It uses this institution as a means to articulate various modes of temporality that underlie social practices and material processes: temporality as repetition (and interruption); temporality as irreversibility (and reversibility); temporality as reckoning (and regimentation); temporality as roots and fruits; and temporality as cosmology and worldview. In addition, it highlights the important role that thresholds play in mediating such practices and processes.

While the previous Chapter explores the origins of cryptography and explains the functional features of Blockchain, this Chapter provides a robust discussion of the various legal challenges and arguments surrounding this novel technology. While self-regulating markets have some desirable aspects, the anonymous or pseudonymous feature of cryptocurrency has its drawbacks which can lead to more fraud and corruption if left completely unchecked. Primarily, this Chapter focuses on administrative law implications and addresses the question of who could (and should) regulate cryptocurrency markets. The answer depends on how digital assets are classified. For example, if the digital asset is labelled a security, it will fall under the regulatory authority of the SEC but will be limited by the Supreme Court’s decision in SEC v. Howey. Further, this Chapter analyzes the constitutional implications of cryptocurrency–do people have a constitutional right to privacy when making financial transactions? This Chapter discusses the various constitutional rights that may be implicated and the arguments that may be used in future litigation.

This essay offers a historical scope of the concept of “commodification” as it has come to dominate Marxist and liberal critiques of contemporary capitalist culture. It traces how the term “commodification” emerged out of Marx’s original term, “the commodity form,” and it explores the gap between these two important but different concepts. The essay asks: what is commodification, and why do so many critics understand it to be a process of intensification and historical change? Further, it questions whether it is possible to conceive of commodification as a term of stasis and not progress. Ultimately, the essay argues that the received understanding of “commodification” as a capitalist process needs to be rethought to consider how the term also functions as capitalist narrative, one which structures how critics analyze history, periodization, and transformation under capitalism.

Exploring the vast anthropological and archaeological scholarship on money, this chapter lays out an approach to early money. Examining what it is we refer to when we talk about money, and what effect it supposedly has on society, it becomes clear that money can be diverse and does not have a set effect on society. Rather, the significance of money depends on the social and cultural logic in which its use is embedded. Arguing from this perspective, a distinction between primitive and modern forms of money – or equivalents, such as special-purpose and general-purpose money, or indigenous currencies and state money, with coinage representing modern/general-purpose/state-issued money – is rejected as arbitrary and not conducive to a better understanding of early money preceding coinage. Instead, money is conceptualized as being a commodity and a token at the same time. This is then applied to the material that is placed at the centre of this study – the cut and broken precious metal items generally known as hacksilber and hackgold – thereby substantiating an understanding of this material as a form of money, still preceding coinage.

Chapter 4 considers the intersection of appetite and desire in plays such as Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. It argues that the elision of these two drives lends a gustatory logic to the theatre’s depiction of excessive desire. The chapter explores the extent to which this serves to associate desire with the excessive appetites unleashed by material excess and tyranny. But it also emphasises the vulnerability which the culinary logic instils in representations of desire, emphasising the period’s profound ambiguity regarding who, precisely, is being consumed in the context of a sexual relationship. Finally, the chapter emphasises the extent to which the imagery of appetite foregrounds the potentially debilitating consequences of sexual desire, at a time in which humoral theory asserted a model of the body as porous, and potentially vulnerable.

This chapter explores how a global claim to authority over forested land has been materialised or made real through an examination of the private law mechanisms that structure the REDD+ scheme, namely the creation of new quasi-property rights in carbon and the establishment of new contractual relations. It examines REDD+ through the lens of contract to show the key norm-production role played by actors involved in developing template or standard form contracts, focusing on the role of the World Bank carbon funds. It also examines REDD+ through the lens of property in order to highlight how the initial unequal distribution of carbon rights through the UNFCCC processes has shaped the political economy of carbon markets. By doing so, it shows why it is necessary to disrupt the constructed public–private dichotomy to provide a more comprehensive account that shows how REDD+ is co-constituted by both public and private law.

Chapter 2 explores the poetics of epic catalogue in the best evidence we have for the archaic catalogue poem, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. While Greek lists in some instances impart official value to a collection of objects, this chapter explores the idea of the catalogue as a mode of gendered control and a marker of loss. Alongside the Odyssean catalogue of women in the Nekuia and Semonides catalogue of women, we can read the genre of woman-catalogue more generally as an attempt to typologize and collapse the individuality of women, all the while treating them as objects similar to any saleable prestige item.

In this chapter, we describe the two components of the database of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The first is the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM). The SAM database reports the value of all transactions in an economy during a period of time. The data are organized in a logical framework that provides a visual display of the transactions as a circular flow of national income and spending. The SAM’s microeconomic data describe transactions made by each agent in a region’s economy. When aggregated, the SAM’s micro data describe the region’s macro economy. The SAM’s micro data can be used to calculate descriptive statistics on an economy’s structure. We describe three extensions to a SAM: non-diagonal make matrices, domestic trade margins, and multi-region input-output tables. A CGE model database also includes elasticity parameters that describe the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in income and relative prices. The role of these parameters in driving model results can be evaluated in a sensitivity analysis.

Chapter 1 invites readers to think more carefully about paper as a technology. It begins with a brief investigation of the history of paper as a technological innovation, of its travel to the West and of its introduction to England. It then considers the story of paper entangled with other goods, like wool and other luxury items, such as spices. It tells a story of ingenuity, cultural contacts and convenience, and considers how investments in the making of paper are pivotal to the success of the craft itself. It reconstructs the social circumstances of the arrival of paper in England and its reception there. Instead of arguing for the revolutionary impact of paper or for scepticism about its adoption, this chapter argues for the acceptance of it within a complex set of transnational diplomatic and mercantile connections.