The US Constitution committed to equality in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War. Legislators and judges quickly confronted the question of what these new provisions might mean for private actors. The Radical Republicans aimed to bring the commitment to equal protection into private spaces, propagating republican discourses about the practical requirements of equal citizenship and the potential duties of private actors. However, the Supreme Court soon reached its own countervailing conclusion that only state actors, not private actors, gained duties from the Reconstruction Amendments. While this latter understanding remained firm, private actors effectively gained obligations to equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later court decisions working around the initial cabining of constitutional equality. Later debates evince a revival of republican-inflected language and arguments for something like horizontal application, even while the country’s jurists viewed such an extension of rights as basically impossible. Several other episodes in constitutional politics, both at the national and state levels, would continue to revisit this question across a range of issue areas.

‘Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized’, or so the famed journalist W. T. Stead believed at the turn of the twentieth century. But what did people understand by ‘Americanisation’ and who was doing the Americanising? The term was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used by a range of political figures, writers and commentators, typically with reference to mass migration. At the time of Stead’s comment nearly two million Irish-born people resided in the United States. Through their communications and return journeys to Ireland, emigrants became the primary image-makers of America in Ireland, making distinctive interventions in the development of political ideas and organisational models in Ireland. This chapter examines perceptions of the impact of the United States, and Irish America, on Irish politics and how different American influences were welcomed, withstood, filtered, and were in competition with each other in the period from the end of the Great Famine to the 1920s. They made significant contributions to different types of political activity in Ireland, but they were always entangled with a range of other transnational influences.

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

The UN’s human trafficking protocol is the linchpin of the global antislavery governance network. It drew on a series of early twentieth-century international treaties directed at the problem of ‘white slavery’ – European women being procured to work as prostitutes. Designed to accommodate disagreements over the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking, the protocol’s definition of human trafficking produced legal instability. The chapter traces the expansion of human trafficking policy from a state-centred focus on using the criminal law to target international sex traffickers to include an ensemble of private and public actors who advocate supply chain transparency legislation and bans on the importation goods made with forced labour. Concentrating on UN-related organisations and the US government, it investigates this shift and its implications for how unfree labour is governed. The chapter demonstrates how the legal assemblage of jurisdiction kept highly gendered governance strategies from clashing.

A popular refrain in many countries is that people with mental illnesses have “nowhere to go” for care. But that is not universally true. Previously unexplored international data shows that some countries provide much higher levels of public mental health care than others. This puzzling variation does not align with existing scholarly typologies of social or health policy systems. Furthermore, these cross-national differences are present despite all countries’ shared history of psychiatric deinstitutionalization, a process that I conceptualize and document using an original historical data set. I propose an explanation for countries’ varying policy outcomes and discuss an empirical strategy to assess it. The research design focuses on the cases of the United States and France, along with Norway and Sweden, in order to control for a range of case-specific alternative hypotheses. The chapter ends with brief descriptions of contemporary mental health care policy in each of the four countries examined in this book.

To set the stage for the US–French case comparison, this chapter shows how the political economy of mental health care was similar in the two countries prior to the Second World War (the critical juncture that initiated deinstitutionalization). One difference, though, stands out: the possibility of coalition formation between workers and managers in public mental health services. On the labor side, French public sector trade unions acquired full legal rights after the war, but the maturation of their US counterparts was late, limited, and staggered across the states. On the management side, the organization of French public psychiatric managers was better equipped to enter into this coalition than its American counterpart. I discuss how these differences came to be. Special attention is paid to the economic interests that drove psychiatrists’ intra-professional conflicts and how their gradual settlement produced diverging organizational outcomes. A discussion of potential confounding factors closes.

Although midcentury US policy-makers showed a robust commitment to expanding public mental health care, services precipitously declined over the following decades. This chapter identifies the political factors that produced such results. The absence of a public labor–management coalition in mental health care facilitated three negative supply-side policy feedback cycles, producing the type of psychiatric deinstitutionalization that has gained international notoriety.

This chapter provides a history of sweatshops during the industrial revolution in the United States and Great Britain and explains how higher wages and better conditions were eventually attained. It then looks at the postwar East Asian economies that had sweatshops and that developed more rapidly than Great Britain and the United States did. Finally, the chapter looks at how economic development has taken place over the last two decades in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book and how sweatshop wages have improved.

Chapter 21 provides an account of the governing legal framework with respect to the gathering of digital evidence by US law enforcement authorities (LEAs) and the rules that bind US service providers – an issue that, given the quantity of data of interest in the hands of US-based providers, increasingly matters to LEAs around the world. It describes the general statutory and constitutional scheme governing data collection in the United States, with a focus on the federal level. It then examines specific questions with respect to cross-border cooperation, particularly in light of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which seeks to better facilitate cross-border access to data, in specified circumstances, and in accordance with baseline procedural and substantive protections. The chapter’s concluding thoughts point to both the need for more attention to cross-border access to data and some of the lacunae in US law.

This introductory chapter articulates the main thesis and summarizes the arguments that support it. It lays out the reasons that the thesis is important, describes what the book adds to the existing literature, explains some critical terms and concepts, and adds necessary disclaimers.

Focusing on the efforts to recover, repatriate, and rebury thousands of fallen soldiers from the China-Burma-India Theater, this chapter analyzes how the disparate treatment of American bodies and Chinese bodies defined the Sino-American relations in the immediate postwar period. The first part of this chapter examines how well-established institutions, ambulant resources, and cooperative regimes enabled US servicemen to salvage the bodies of American soldiers from distant theaters of war to reinter them in national and private cemeteries on American soil. The second part addresses the struggle of the Chinese government in Nanjing, the Chinese military command in India, and the Chinese communities in Burma to provide proper burials for the dead of the Nationalist expeditionary forces. China lacked the formal institutions and infrastructure to manage war graves in foreign territories, and failed to garner the support of local authorities. When the political chaos of the Chinese Civil War led to the cessation of funding from the Nationalist government, the graves of Chinese soldiers in India and Burma fell into oblivion.