Why does the supply of mental health care vary across countries? Moreover, why would the state supply services to those who cannot demand them? This chapter introduces how a comparative, political-economic, and historical perspective can explain mental health care outcomes, as well as how studying mental health can inform comparative political economy. It then turns to the theoretical argument, explaining why and how public sector managers and workers – the “strange bedfellows” of the “welfare workforce” – shape the supply of public social services. The chapter closes with a sketch of the book’s research design and how it structures the following chapters

This concluding chapter reviews the core findings about psychiatric deinstitutionalization and mental health care and lays out the argument’s theoretical implications for social policy scholarship more generally. It highlights that the political logic of social services (e.g., health, education, and care) is distinct from that of cash transfers (e.g., pensions, unemployment, and disability benefits). The key difference: the welfare workforce. I also discuss the complex policy implications of this trend (especially as the contours of the welfare workforce become less clear) and close by considering how to harness the power of welfare workers in contemporary welfare capitalism.

This contribution surveys the essays in political economy that Hume began to publish in 1752, with particular attention to his thinking about money. The essays are presented as, in part, extensions of the natural history of property and government that Hume began to sketch in A Treatise of Human Nature. But they were also carefully calibrated interventions in the political discourse of trade and finance prominent in British politics since the seventeenth century. Hume’s political economy can be situated in a range of British and European intellectual and political contexts. This chapter pays particular attention to his recurrent engagement with John Locke’s extensive writings on money, trade and taxation, which served Hume as a foil in developing his own positions. There is, it will be suggested, a deep connection between Hume’s celebrated critique of Locke’s account of the original contract and his rejection of Locke’s search for an invariable monetary standard.

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

Chapter 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

Chapter 3 explores the final decades of the sixteenth century, a period of deep, overlapping, and abiding crisis for the New Kingdom as a result of the limitations and failures of colonial governance. At its core was the unravelling of the authority of Indigenous rulers, who were placed under unprecedented pressures by colonial authorities who misunderstood Indigenous politics with European legal and political concepts. Engrossed in increasing competition over the leadership of the colonial project, the second archbishop of Santafé, Luis Zapata de Cárdenas, and his civil counterparts tried to pursue increasingly belligerent policies to reform the lives of Indigenous people in the final decades of the century. Their rivalries, venality, and misunderstanding of local conditions and of the limitations of their own power eventually unleashed a brutal campaign of violence and dispossession on Indigenous communities in the late 1570s, with harrowing results. The blow this struck to Indigenous political structures, and through them to the colonial tributary and extractive economy, brought the kingdom to its knees.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

By examining transportation, agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, and commerce, this chapter explores the regional division of labor among residents of the landscape trilogy.

The epilogue critically assesses how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, laborers, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It also invites global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.

Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.