Chapter 2 examines how the Mall in St James’s Park – the prime location for promenading in eighteenth-century London – became a key site for writers and artists who turned a humorous eye on the social ambitions of London’s middling sorts. Here, men and women congregated “to see and be seen, to censure and be censured”, as one account put it, and comic accounts of the promenade frequently describe the Mall as a battleground in which new, commercial wealth clashes with forms of inherited status. The literary and visual satires examined here respond to concerns about the blurring of distinctions by suggesting, albeit wishfully, that attempts by the middling sorts to imitate those higher up the social scale are always transparent, and true rank and status always reveals itself.

Most early colonial Bengali migrants travelled and worked under contract and experienced poor health, insecurity and desperation. Nevertheless, with the end of the indenture system, the government gradually introduced regulations to secure migrants’ welfare and interests. British Malaya offered new and extensive work opportunities in different plantations and mines, including rubber and tin mines. Though most workers were Chinese and Tamils, many came from northern India and Bengal. The ethnic identity of Bengali professionals and workers was often conflated with that of non-Bengalis, and their vocations were not officially recorded. However, piecemeal sources can help us to locate many Bengali professionals. This chapter examines various formal and informal occupations that Bengalis engaged in, shedding light on their vibrant presence in colonial and postcolonial Malaya.

At the Construction Site and Cattle Farm

The term ‘coolie’ is widespread in British colonial history in Asia. It broadly refers to hardworking labourers who performed menial jobs; however, the definition of coolie differs according to different perspectives and circumstances. I had used this term consciously and in a non-diminishing manner to reflect the professional category of labourers in colonial registers when they migrated as workers to British Malaya and other colonies. South Asian and Chinese coolies worked in construction sites and rubber estates in the Straits Settlements. Most South Asian coolies were Tamils, and most female coolies were ‘passive victims’ in the migration process and lived in the plantations. Alongside other South Asians, Bengali coolies worked in different sectors, including roads and railways, harbours and cattle farms. The Singapore Governor fully implemented the Indian Immigrants’ Protection Act in order to protect the well-being of labourers, in particular those who came from India and Bengal. L. H. Clayton, the Chairman of the Immigration Committee in Malaya, made provisions for social amenities for labourers and coolies. He showed a keen interest in employing Bengali coolies. However, he noted that the recruitment of Bengali coolies rested on the cooperation of the Indian government. I. R. Belilios (1846–1910), a cattle trader, recruited mostly Bengali5 clerks and coolies for his farm business, and their number significantly increased in the 1890s. Aristarchus Moses, an Armenian Jewish merchant, migrated from Calcutta to Singapore in 1820 and established a trading farm in 1840. Like Belilios, Moses employed Bengalis as stevedores and keepers at his house and warehouses.

There is a heated debate in scholarship on Gregory of Nyssa as to whether Gregory is a proponent of physicalism. Gregory does teach a physicalist soteriology, but what can easily give rise to the mistaken impression that Gregory’s soteriology is not physicalist is that Gregory posits a temporal delay when he is speaking of the internal transformation of human nature caused by the incarnation. While physicalism is not necessarily connected to universal salvation, Gregory’s temporal delay between the incarnation and its effects is revealed as part of a physicalist soteriology only in light of his belief in universal salvation. Gregory believes in a necessary progression initiated by the christological mixture between divinity and the particular human nature of Christ that concludes with the salvific transformation of all humans. Despite the time gap between the incarnation and individual salvation, and despite the addition of later sacramental mediations, Gregory manifests true physicalist thought by maintaining that the cause-and-effect connection between incarnation and individual salvation does not absolutely require any of these later mediations.

From the three-fifths clause and the Mason-Dixon Line to the doctrines of mixed character and separate-but-equal, the legal apparatus of slavery and anti-Black racism in the United States is infamous for its coldly formalist logic. Indeed, the formalism of the first civil rights movement has been obscured by a tendency to ascribe this approach exclusively to its political opponents. This chapter draws on recent reassessments of form in legal and literary studies to illuminate the Black formalist tradition of the long nineteenth century. In particular, I examine how authors (David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt) and litigants (Harriet and Dred Scott) wielded the ancient legal-cultural form of the person to detach certain classes of person (slave, freeman, sailor, citizen, wife, mother, daughter) from racialized human groups (“colored,” white). By contrast, I demonstrate, white supremacists such as Thomas Jefferson and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney sought to naturalize, humanize, and racialize the persons known as “slave” and “citizen.” As the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments attest, early civil rights activists transformed legal personhood in the United States by insisting on the abolition of one class of person (slave) and the reconstitution of another (citizen).

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of theme or content in Irish literature became more pervasive from about the 1890s onwards. Prior to that the reluctant Americanisation of Irish authors had been well underway, facilitated by cash-rich tours of the continent and a certain transatlantic reciprocity of intellectual influence. Representations of ‘American wakes’, and the ‘returned Yank’ are common in Irish popular culture, and the chapter probes these for significance. There are tantalising glimpses of Irish authors at the ‘frontier’, and perhaps the most enduring influence of the Irish was their influence on one of the most famous product of America itself – the very mythology of the western frontier, which was produced by Irish authors in some cases. This helps to show how the mythos of the West converges in both Irish and American culture, and the ways in which they may have been dialogically produced.

In a well-known apocryphal story, Theresa of Avila falls off the donkey she was riding, straight into mud, and injures herself. In response, she seems to blame God for her fall. A playful if indignant back and forth ensues. But this is puzzling. Theresa should never think that God is blameworthy. Why? Apparently, one cannot blame what one worships. For to worship something is to show it a kind of reverence, respect, or adoration. To worship is, at least in part, to praise. You cannot praise and blame simultaneously. Indeed, Paul counsels against “back-talk” against God, suggesting we lack the standing to blame our creator (Romans 9:20). Drawing on Strawsonian theorizing about praise and blame, this chapter argues that, surprisingly, a person can both blame and worship God. Although blameful worship is possibly epistemically akratic, it may sometimes be acceptable given our nature as finite, emotional beings. In fact, blaming God might on occasion be the only way we have to stand with God’s goodness despite apparent evidence of evil in the world. This suggestion, I’ll argue, should change the way we think about the problem of evil. The problem has interpersonal and moral psychological dimensions that merit serious attention.

The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.

The expansion of cities in the Global South has given shape to a social and material dynamics of “habitation” whose relationship to the emancipatory promise of citizenship is neither uniform nor stable (Holston 2009). Although cities are known for their capacity to generate the kinds of mass action that can lead to the “enlargement” of citizenship rights (Holston and Appadurai 1996), the material exigencies of urbanization, such as housing, infrastructure, and services, pose certain explanatory limits to this characterization. Henry Lefevbre defined this as a shift in urban political consciousness and representation from “production to reproduction,” specifically, toward neighborhood-level questions of occupation, settlement, and habitation (Lefevbre, quoted in Holston 2009; S. Benjamin 2008). Such transformations in urban political participation and activism highlight the growing role of land in producing the “congregations of interests that underpin disjunctures in the way cities get built” (S. Benjamin 2008: 245). This is especially the case in post-Partition Karachi, where the “control of land ownership comes hand in hand with a degree of power and control over the city, its population and its investors” (Hasan et al. 2015: 20).

I argue that in the case of Pakistan, the narrative of the urbanization of the political has been profoundly shaped by the onset, retreat, and return of competing orders of military and civilian “rule.” As a postcolonial political concept, “rule” implies both neocolonial and self-determining modalities of sovereignty in motion, especially in the context of Pakistan, where, as the previous chapter made clear, the institutional and cultural locus of sovereignty remains undecided. One site where the tussle between martial and civilian forms of “rule” has been especially pronounced is at the level of neighborhood urban life. More specifically, repeated and abrupt shifts in the structure of state sovereignty have been accompanied by the attendant waxing and waning of the apparatus of elected local government. One of the most vivid yet underexamined effects of this process on Pakistan's democratic landscape has been the inflation of the powers of such elected “local bodies” during martial rule combined with the sheer absence of any form of elected local government during periods of civilian democracy (until 2015).

This chapter draws together the whole argument of the book to face the defining question that it must answer, and through that answer to unfurl the full significance of incarnational theology. The question is, what happens when God’s purpose to be with us now and forever meets with a refusal? Addressing the question of humankind’s alienation from God, itself and the wider creation is not, from the point of view of incarnational theology, the central dynamic of Christianity, as it is in conventional accounts. But the utter with-ness of Jesus inevitably encounters the profound, widespread and powerful resistance to God’s embrace: and the truth of God is thereby revealed like never before. Jesus does not ‘come to die’: yet in his death and resurrection he exposes the forces that oppose him and displays the dynamic that sent him and settles the only questions about existence and essence that ultimately matter.

Here I begin my constructive account of a Christocentric incarnational theology. The Trinity has a chapter on its own: only thus may I express my insistence that this is fundamentally a story about God, and that creation, human beings and their divine destiny must stand in the light of that priority. My concern is to withstand the anthropocentrism of so much theology, which centres human existence and need, rather than God’s character and purpose, as the story’s focal point. The eight dimensions of being with provide a helpful structure through which to articulate the claims made about the Trinity.