Part I comprises three chapters focused on the history of disability rights activism and recent reforms related to accessible public transit and disability discrimination. Chapter 3 overviews historical parallels in the marginalization of people with disabilities, the development of welfare policies for them, and the emergence of independent living movements in Japan and Korea. Activism by (rather than for) Japanese and Koreans with disabilities, along with growing rights consciousness, accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s through ties with transnational activist networks and negotiations around the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As background for the next two chapters, Chapter 3 surveys recent reforms and the organizational ecology of disabled persons’ organizations and lawyers, who activate the causal mechanisms and thereby contribute to the legalistic turn in governance.

Bengal was a region long known to the Company. Trade, however, was stifled by the Portuguese and the determination of Mughal authorities to resist English incursions. The Company was able to establish settlements in the weaving centres of Patna, Dacca and Malda, but these were outlying centres of production. Josiah Child’s control of the Company signalled a shift towards a new aggressive phase notable for a resolve to fortify settlements, exploit new sources of land revenue and a willingness to challenge Mughal authority. In the aftermath of the abortive assault on Chittagong, Job Charnock settled on a site on the banks of the Hugli. Pestilential, remote and of little interest to Mughal authorities it may have been, and yet the three small villages which became Calcutta were trading centres, made easily defensible by the encompassing jungle and river. Charnock died before any vision he had for the site could be realized, but his successors acted expeditiously and mostly fraudulently to secure zaminardi rights over the surrounding area, erect adequate fortification and after a period of uncertainty, impose a system of justice based on the mayors’ courts of Bombay and Madras.

As this book’s “negative cases,” Chapter 7 unpacks why legal mobilization related to tobacco product liability and the recovery of healthcare costs for treating smokers has had so little impact on legal frameworks and jurisprudence. The chapter highlights the persistence of the Tobacco Business Law in sustaining the tobacco industry’s political power, the role of transnational networks among tobacco companies in resisting stronger regulations, domestic Japanese and Korean judges’ narrow interpretations of standing rules and causation, and the weaknesses of support structures for sustained legal mobilization and advocacy.

Although Surat and its satellite ports had provided the Company with the necessary means of trade and communication, the resistance of Mughal authorities stifled any prospects for expansion. The Coromandel coast seemed to offer opportunities. Here were important trading centres beyond Mughal authority where local chiefs, anxious to consolidate their rule in the febrile political climate that prevailed, viewed the activities of European merchants as a means of generating revenue. From the time Francis Day was first appointed as a factor in 1632, he had applied himself to the task of finding a new site to further English trade. In 1637, he set a course southward from Masulipatnam to Pondicherry with the hope of negotiating the establishment of a factory. The voyage achieved little, but Day noted in passing a small fishing village which clearly attracted his attention, not least because overtures were made by local Telegu nayaks who were keen to attract English trade. A kaul, probably drafted by Day, was speedily granted for the ‘tradeing and fortificing at Medraspatam’. So were laid the foundations for the settlement of Madras.

Chapter 2 outlines the book’s conceptual and theoretical frameworks. It bridges studies of regulatory styles with scholarship on legal and political opportunity structures to detail indicators of legalistic governance, which serve as a guide for the subsequent paired case studies. It also theorizes five causal mechanisms that elucidate how activism contributes to more legalistic governance. Finally, it discusses, in probabilistic terms, the conditions under which activism is more likely to contribute to legalistic modes of governance.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

In this chapter, I develop a fuller picture of the puzzlingly intense demand for government jobs across lower- and middle-income countries. The evidence for this chapter draws upon administrative data, a large-scale survey of applicants to the Indonesian civil service, and a series of online survey experiments also conducted in Indonesia. In the first part of this chapter, I draw on administrative data on civil service examination scores paired with original survey responses gauging respondents’ monthly wages to estimate the public sector wage premium for entry-level employees. In the second part of the chapter, I use a survey experiment to estimate the wage elasticity of demand for government jobs. In the third part of the chapter, I turn my attention to evaluating the alternative explanations for the high demand for public sector jobs – focusing specifically on the role of status-seeking.

Drawing on four historical case studies, this chapter develops a picture of the paths toward civil service reform by interrogating the motivations of reformers, searching for clues as to whether they believed the merit system to be a democratizing reform or not. The first part of the chapter thus trains its sights on the period prior to reform in the United States and the United Kingdom. Whether reformers achieved their goals is a separate question. The second part of this chapter thus focuses on the distributional and representational consequences of civil service reform, looking at two different cases: China and India. In China, the merit system introduced during the seventh century was, in comparison to what preceded it, a democratizing reform, enabling ambitious office-seekers from regional hinterlands to share in power. India's brief interlude with unmediated meritocratic recruitment while under British colonial rule, meanwhile, was not democratizing and was ultimately criticized for effectively shutting the door to government representation among the less well-to-do.

The second chapter is devoted to the lure of India felt increasingly by the English merchant community, and the Company’s first, tentative attempts to gain a foothold in the great Mughal port of Surat. Frustrated by repeated failures to gain a favourable hearing from the emperor Jahangir, and the hostility of the Portuguese who were determined to resist any challenges to their trading privileges in the region, the EIC court petitioned James I to appoint Sir Thomas Roe as an ambassador. Although he was treated with respect, at the end of the three years of his embassy, Roe returned to London having gained few trading privileges. In the meantime, mounting hostilities between the EIC and Dutch VOC prompted protracted negotiations invoking the fledgling law of nations and culminating in the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1619.