Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

The role of the judiciary as a check on the legislative and executive branches was believed necessary to the effectiveness of the horizontal separation of powers as a check on political factions. The nature of the judicial power was generally agreed to include the power of judicial review, but selection and tenure in office were thought to be important to limiting abuses of power.

Gaining resonance from 1918, pacifism joined socialist internationalism and Communists’ novel militancy. The League of Nations drew much of that sentiment, from refugees and humanitarian relief through public health and the ILO to nutritional science and development economics, claiming economic planning, scientific and technological transfer, and humanitarian cooperation for new networked expertise. Self-consciously “Europeanist” initiatives formed, including fascist ideas of a united European “great space” under Mussolini and Hitler. By 1936–1939, imperialist visions of a New Europe made population politics key to international revisionism, exchanging self-determination and minority protections for greater-national expansion and population removal. Brutally radicalized by the Nazis’ Kristallnacht (November 1938), antisemitism became a violent driver. In 1937–1941, anti-Jewish laws reversed earlier emancipation – from Poland and Romania, through Italy and Hungary, to Czecho-Slovakia, Croatia, and Vichy France. That was the ugly backcloth to Hitler’s drive for war. In September 1939, vitally enabled by Franco-British appeasement and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Hitler invaded Poland.

This chapter situates the study within a broader historical, political, and scholarly context, and presents the methodology upon which it draws. First, the chapter sketches the history of Gambella as a site of encounter between the Ethiopian state and Nuer society and examines the historical and anthropological scholarships on Ethiopia’s peripheries and on the eastern frontier of Nuerland. It then discusses my own encounter with Gambella, the context and political environment in which research took place, the local religious landscape and the place of Messianic Jews in it, and the ‘data collection’ methods and research approach deployed. The final sections of the chapter explore my positionality in Gambella, as a Jewish Israeli researcher among Messianic Jews, and the sort of intersubjective encounters that informed this study.

The Introduction explains why nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying racialism (the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races), racial doubt (those moments when this assumption gets questioned and racial differences seem less clear), and the different groups of racialized people who mobilized doubt as they worked to reinvent themselves and their society. It also shows how the analysis of the notions at the core of each chapter – racist agnosia, farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – illuminates present-day critiques of color blindness. Finally, it explains why the book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist writing that attacked illegal slavery by denouncing lies, falsification, and farce; the second one, on free people of color who wrestled with two “one-drop” rules (one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made them whiter); and the third one, on the emergence of Black Cuban writing.

By design, the judiciary is meant to be independent from politics and thereby free from factional pressures. The power to review legislative and executive as well as state government actions for constitutionality is essential to controlling abuses of power and democratic excesses that infringe on individual rights. While the federal courts have generally performed these responsibilities well, the politization of judicial appointments combined with liberal standing requirements and reliance on an assortment of balancing tests that require policy judgments have invited factional pressures in the form of lawsuits. At the same time, a presumption of constitutionality has served to counter the Framers’ constraints on democratic excess and the abuse of power.

Policies have complex lives and afterlives. They interact with contingent political and social agents and are mediated by their wider contexts, from the processes that inform their conceptualisation through their enforcement.1 Prohibition in India originated in the context of late colonialism. It took shape as an idea, became part of a mass movement and crystallised into an ideal before emerging as a policy with the Madras Prohibition Act of 1937. The ensuing interactions are best understood as constituting the long-term process of prohibitioning, wherein each phase of the policy's development simultaneously overdetermined and constrained its subsequent iterations. As we have seen, this formative experience also enabled prohibition to migrate from the colonial context to the postcolonial era, its origins illuminating crucial parallels and precedents for developments that followed the achievement of independence. Through all this, prohibition bore – indeed, has borne – the imprint of the interactions that produced it, which are discernible in its manifestations as an idea, ideal and policy. As much a history of the policy as it is a history of the Indian state, Sober State has presented a history of prohibitioning that rests on three related arguments.

First, we saw that prohibition emerged as a function of the exercise of state power by the colonial and nationalist states. The colonial state engaged with alcohol policy as a means to maintain power by achieving revenue maximisation and ensuring regulatory checks and balances at a time when said power was quickly slipping out of its hands. The nationalist leadership saw the prohibition demand as a trump card that would expose the colonial state's avarice and hypocrisy, while signifying a new and superior model of governance.

Representation was believed to serve as a filter on the passions and excesses of direct democracy, but representatives could be influenced and even become the leaders of political factions. A central concern was to assure that representatives were insulated from such influence and focused on the public interest. As with the selection of executive and judicial officials, the questions that most occupied the Framers were the method of selection of representatives (appointment or popular election) and their term of service and eligibility for reelection.

Three-Way Tango: Politics of Liquor Production

Any account of prohibitioning in the decades leading up to the Madras Prohibition Act would necessarily be incomplete without addressing the politics of alcohol production. Colonial officials and nationalist elites were interacting as much with one another and diverse segments of society as with liquor business interests to devise policies aimed at regulating drinking. The cumulative impact of the ensuing developments had a tremendous impact on prohibitioning by influencing the momentum towards the policy's introduction in 1937.

During the period in question, liquor businesses had to contend with mounting social pressure against their trade on the one hand and political manoeuvring by both the colonial government and the Congress leadership on the other. Whilst prohibition discourse cast drinkers as victims who could eventually be redeemed of their affliction and transformed into upstanding citizens, it painted the producers, distributors and retailers of alcohol unforgivingly and with a large brush stroke as traitors of the nation. ‘A number of Indian merchants, be it said to their shame,’ charged a letter that was published in The Hindu, ‘have taken up the merchandise of liquor to ruin their countrymen.’ The most spectacular anti-alcohol protests were, unsurprisingly, directed at toddy and arrack shop contractors.

The constraints imposed on liquor business interests by, first, the colonial establishment and, subsequently, the nationalist leadership were part of an overarching political contest to dictate the terms of liquor production. If the colonial government was concerned that the emergence of liquor monopolies would result in lowered revenue yields for the state, the nationalist leadership sought the right to altogether remove liquor production from the workings of the national economy.

This chapter delves into the geopolitical landscape of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, often considered an ‘island of stability’ amid the turbulence in the broader Middle East. While this notion holds true in comparison to neighbouring countries like Iran, Iraq and Yemen, the chapter highlights that the Gulf region is not immune to internal and external conflicts. It discusses the impact of significant events such as the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the political dynamics of the Gulf states. The analysis spans four parts, each focusing on a key conflict: the Iran–Iraq War, the liberation of Kuwait, the 2003 Iraq War, and the war in Yemen since 2015. These conflicts have not only shaped the formation of the GCC in 1981 but have also significantly influenced the broader regional system. Emphasising the period since 1979, the chapter explores how over four decades of wars, revolutions and inter-state tensions have affected the security and stability of the Gulf states. Despite a generation passing since the last inter-state war, the ongoing fragmentation of Yemen into civil wars involving regional actors signals a transformation in the nature of conflicts. The chapter also highlights the challenges to regional stability, including the difficulty in reaching a comprehensive agreement addressing Iran’s ballistic missiles programme and its support for non-state actors. As the possibility of increased US disengagement from the Gulf looms, questions about the future security architecture in the region and the role of external participants gain prominence. The chapter raises concerns about potential security vacuums and the responses of regional actors in such a scenario.

Caste, Country Liquor and Company Raj

The year was 1710. The wardens of a European cemetery in Madras wrote to East India Company officials complaining about the nuisance they had to put up with owing to the coconut trees on the property. This was a peculiar complaint; we do not normally imagine coconut trees when we think about sources of public nuisance. The crux of the matter at hand was that the gates had to be kept open all the time so that a certain country liquor could be drawn and sold. Variously described as the homegrown beer or palm wine of the Madras Presidency, the miscreant in question was toddy, the word deriving from the Hindi tari. In this imperial account, the cemetery was rendered noisier than all the punch houses in Madras put together as basket makers, scavengers, buffalo keepers ‘and other Parriars (Paraiyars)’ converged there at night to drink toddy, whereupon inebriated ‘beggars and other vagabonds’ even proceeded to lie down in freshly dug graves. Company officials wrote to the governor recommending replanting the trees elsewhere to relieve the European community of their troubles. The offending coconut trees were promptly removed.

As Company officials increasingly found themselves thrust into the role of a governing body in the Presidency of Fort St George, they found themselves having to develop a coherent response to the issue of alcohol, which eventually became the precursor to the colonial state's alcohol policy. Observations of local drinking cultures that a broad cross-section of European society had contributed became the basis of their response, which evidenced a growing reliance on strategies constituting governmentality over time.

This chapter explores why relations between the European Union (EU) and Africa around the issue of climate change are crucial, in particular, for the developmental dimension. It describes that EU claims to offer a global leadership role in the field of climate change. The chapter also analyses how policy incoherence has the potential to weaken support from African countries for its attempts to shape the post-Kyoto climate agreement. It highlights some of the main barriers to the potential success of partnership, such as EU trade, energy and agriculture policy incoherence, access to resources by African states and a potential lack of true dialogue. It describes the marginalisation of the EU at the Copenhagen Summit and the rise of China as an alternative development actor, challenging to the EU's normative leadership.

The means by which factions persist are many, including political parties, lobbying, partisan media, passion and prejudice, rent-seeking, the permanent campaign, the politics of identity and principle, and today’s high-tech political campaigns.

This chapter provides a general overview of World War I, including the scale and character of the military campaigning; the depth of societal mobilization and the transformation of state–economy relations; the consequences for personhood and citizenship; the normalizing of mass killing and genocide; the war’s demographic catastrophe and the pervasiveness of violence and death. “Total war” is distinguished as a main theme for the early twentieth century, whether in the shape of popular experience or the impact of the interventionist capacities of states. Empire, colonialism, and the war’s globality are also marked.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”