President Roosevelt to Former Naval Person, 11 March 19421

I have given much thought to the problem of India, and I am grateful that you have kept me in touch with it. As you can well realise, I have felt much diffidence in making any suggestions, and it is a subject which of course all of you good people know far more about than I do. I have tried to approach the problem from the point of view of history and with the hope that the injection of a new thought to be used in India might be of assistance to you. That is why I go back to the inception of the Government of the United States. During the Revolution, from 1775 to 1783, the British Colonies set themselves up as thirteen States, each one under a different form of government, although each one assumed individual sovereignty. While the war lasted there was great confusion between these separate sovereignties, and the only two connecting links were the Continental Congress (a body of ill-defined powers and large inefficiencies), and second the Continental Army, which was rather badly maintained by the thirteen States. In 1783, at the end of the war, it was clear that the new responsibilities of the thirteen sovereignties could not be welded into a Federal Union because the experiment was still in the making and any effort to arrive at a final framework would have come to naught. Therefore the thirteen sovereignties joined in the Articles of Confederation, an obvious stopgap Government, to remain in effect only until such time as experience and trial and error could bring about a permanent union.

These opening lines from a lesser-known novel by Baren Basu, a soldier-turned-novelist, capture the textures of feelings and experiences that wrapped around most Bengalis during the Second World War. Translated from Bengali, they reveal the layered, complex yet varied emotional response to Russia's defeat and a possible German invasion of India.

In the previous chapter we looked at the role of rumours in dislodging the image of the colonial state and the activities of various revolutionary parties in attempting to politicise the countryside in preparation for a revolutionary struggle. Let us now pan out of Bengal in this chapter to analyse the responses of the Government of India (GOI), as well as Gandhi, to the movement. In the following pages, I undertake an analysis of the different ideas and meanings of ‘responsibility’ for the movement, passed around between the GOI and Gandhi. Both tried to completely deny any sort of responsibility for the movement or the violence that ensued, but for different reasons. This then will give us an insight into the desperate situation that Britain found itself in the global context of the War as well as Gandhi's position at this critical juncture of anti-colonial politics. But before that, and since in the previous chapter we have studied the preparations made by the revolutionary parties, let us first take a look at how prepared exactly the GOI was in meeting any threat of civil disobedience from Gandhi and the Congress. This will also reveal subtle tensions between routes envisaged by the GOI and the British government, an aspect that continued to find echoes even in the post-war political scenario (see Conclusion).

This chapter focuses on the co-production of commercial social credit ratings by citizens and e-payment platforms, and on the financial transaction and financial network data provided by citizens when participating in Alibaba and Tencent’s commercial credit-rating systems. It starts by laying out the regional variation in voluntary subscription to commercial credit ratings. It finds that, surprisingly, less developed provinces are taking the lead in this development. The chapter then investigates who engages in data production, focusing on the role of privacy concerns and motivation. Despite strong evidence for privacy concerns, these play a minor role in decisions about joining commercial social credit-rating systems. Instead, citizens predominantly join for financial motivations. Financial rewards help overcome privacy concerns, thus drawing citizens into volunteering their data for the construction of the SCS. Data production is therefore skewed toward those who see SCS as a financial rather than political tool. These users volunteer financial transaction and network data to the firm, which can be leveraged by Alibaba and Tencent as informational and organizational resources in the state–company relationship around developing the SCS.

Film theorists rewrote the history of cinema by claiming that standard Hollywood products, long regarded as patently unreal, escapist entertainment, were realist. The chapter shows how and why they were wrong, and it argues that there are significant inherent limitations that the medium of the commercial fiction film places on any attempt at realism, especially the standard theatrical running time. In order to do this, I focus on the films of Howard Hawks, whose films have been said to best illustrate what Robert Ray calls Hollywood’s invisible style. Hawks was used to illustrate classic Hollywood’s supposed illusionistic realism, which it was claimed allowed movies to disseminate all manner of ideological mischief. But one only need to pay attention to the films themselves to see that they don’t claim to be realist. Indeed, Hawks’s films often seem to be hermetically sealed off from ordinary life, ignoring the details of social relations in which realist narratives are grounded. In this he entirely typical of Hollywood film then and now. Finally, I look at Italian neorealism, the films of John Sayles, and other films that are more properly understood as realist.

The Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons is one of the prime intellectual actors of World War II producing applied studies of Nazi Germany and providing training to members of the military government entering the occupied areas in Germany. Chapter 6 revisits his collaboration with Carl J. Friedrich, especially on a pamphlet on Nazi Poison, his momentous meeting with social philosopher Alfred Schutz and political theorist Eric Voegelin. I argue that the insights that he gained into the supposed “anomie,” that is, the chaotic nature of Nazi Germany starting in 1938 and throughout World War II, significantly shaped – by means of inversion and contrast – his positive design of a functioning social system in his post-war study The Social System, at first for the United States, but then also globally, as a scheme for the organization of modern society as such.

Russian imperial nationalists demand Ukrainians accept they are a Little Russian branch of the pan-Russian nation and will never accept a Ukraine independent of Russia with a right to decide its own memory politics, language, foreign and security policies. Since 1991, Russia has found it very difficult to accept an independent Ukraine. The Soviet Union included a Ukrainian republic and recognised Ukrainians as a separate people, although forever bonded with Russians. Putin reverted to the Tsarist imperial denial of the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians. Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 made imperialism and nationalism the driving forces of Russian foreign policy. During the decade between Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine, from 2014 to 2021, Russian imperial nationalism became a dominant force in Putin’s Russia, providing ideological justification for the Kremlin’s plan to destroy the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian identity.

Through investigating how exactly bribery take place, this chapter examines why guanxi is a necessary conduit of corruption in China. I argue that guanxi-practice embodies an alternative contracting mechanism of corruption with three functions. First, it allows corruption practitioners to communicate their intent to exchange without explicitly expressing it. Second, it minimizes the otherwise prohibitively high transactional costs and reduces the moral and cognitive barriers of corruption. Third, it contains a self-enforcing mechanism that allows the terms of corruption to be negotiated and enforced. Performed with tactics and etiquettes, guanxi-practice seamlessly grafts a corrupt and immoral agreement upon a social setting, in which venality is neutralized and rationalized. In this redefined social reality of corruption, an instrumental relationship is perceived or at least presentable as a reciprocal relationship based on social commitment. Lastly, I draw attention to the emergence of professional guanxi-brokers that has marketized guanxi and extended the otherwise highly restricted opportunity to engage in parochial corruption to a much-broadened user base.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

This chapter begins Part II of the book – on the SCS as participatory space. It explores the relationship between government and companies in developing commercial social credit ratings targeting citizens. It starts by explaining the overall structure of the SCS, followed by background information on the two most important company players – Alibaba and Tencent. Drawing on procurement notices and process tracing of the evolution of SCS over time based on expert interviews, Chinese academic publications, news articles, and policy documents, it outlines the nature of the state–company partnership and the dynamic changes in the partnership over time. It argues and demonstrates that the user base and architecture built by companies preceding the 2014 plan for the SCS created a certain degree of dependency on platforms for the state. This in-depth analysis of the role of companies during the evolution of social credit rating of individual citizens highlights that commercial credit rating was not established under a command-and-control system where the state dominates the design of the system and corporate players merely follow the state’s vision, instructions, and directives. Instead, Alibaba and Tencent significantly influenced the design and implementation of the central government’s vision.