By the eve of World War II, nationalist leaders and industrialists alike were concerned about unregulated industrial competition among regions. A national tripartite structure of industrial relations was thus initiated at the beginning of the war. War-time political re-alignments, including Quit India, Indian Communists’ support for the war efforts, as well as the Labour Party’s influence in the UK war cabinet, changed the context for negotiating social security. Dr B.R Ambedkar, who became Minister for Labour on the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1942, pushed an all-India agenda of social security for industrial workers. This chapter charts the agreement by representatives of employers and workers to a contributory model of sickness insurance within the new structure of tripartism. This was inspired by Beveridgean policy development in Europe during the war but was ultimately confined to a more Bismarckian focus on industrial labour. On the eve of independence, an accommodation between labour and capital helped enforce a floor in labour market competition within India and paved the way for sickness insurance to be enacted in 1948 as part of India’s new industrial relations regime.

Chapter 6 discusses the policies of colonization in India in a comparative perspective with Korea and Taiwan under Japanese rule. In this chapter, I consider the differences in policies of colonization. At the time of independence, the share of industry in total GDP was not very different in the three countries. Modern industries had developed in India, Korea and Taiwan during the colonial period. The two big differences in colonial policies were with respect to agriculture and education. Japan imported essential food grains from the colonies. This prompted investment in improvements in agriculture to raise productivity. A large proportion of land came under irrigation in both colonies enabling introduction of new varieties of seeds. The British government in India did little to raise agricultural productivity. Second, the Japan as a colonizer expanded primary education, helping to create a literate workforce. A large proportion of industrial workers became literate. In India as a result of the emphasis on higher education, mainly the service sector occupations benefitted in terms of human capital.

The Spanish and Portuguese and their American territories saw the disembarkation of almost two-thirds of all the enslaved carried from Africa. They were the first colonizers of the Atlantic and chose those areas that were best for obtaining slaves and putting them to work in the Americas. Almost every port large enough to launch a transoceanic voyage at some point entered the slave trade. Rio de Janeiro and Bahia (now Salvador) dispatched more vessels to Africa than did any European port, and overall sent out more voyages than did Europe. Thus the typical slave-trading voyage was not triangular, but rather bilateral. The Americas were the center of the slave trade because of their millennia-long isolation from the rest of the world, the inability of their Indigenous populations to resist Old World pathogens, and the very high land–labor ratios that resulted. Voyages to Africa from the Americas were quicker than those from Europe and the plantations and mines quickly generated a pool of investors willing to underpin the slave trade. In Brazil, especially, these small investors included free and enslaved Blacks, including even some enslaved crew. Close to half the merchandise traded for slaves came to be produced in the Americas rather than in Europe.

Under Nehru, there had been no attempt to introduce publicly financed social policies for the rural poor. Instead, social policy focused on activating a ‘duty to work’, while the absence of a model of labour-intensive industrialisation ensured there was no mass movement from rural areas into urban employment. The green revolution in the mid 1960s initiated a new form of agrarian capitalism but also drove rising inequality and endemic unemployment. This created pressure for new social policies to address rural poverty and support rural consumption. The erosion of patron-client relations in rural areas intensified competition for the votes of the rural poor as the Congress Party’s dominant position came under serious pressure for the first time. It was the emergence of stronger multi-level, or Centre-State, electoral competition that provided the political impetus to expand social policy into rural areas as political parties competed for the votes of the rural poor, without alienating agrarian producers. The chapter explains why employment on rural public works became the dominant approach to social security in this context.

“Ars” came to be laden with specific meaning in the intellectual culture of late-Republican Rome, with some artes being regarded as intellectually and socially worthier than others. These “higher artes” were distinguished by several features that would form the premises for the scientific culture of the artes in the early Roman Empire. These premises were established in Rome by the reception of Greek notions of technê (τέχνη) but were elaborated independently and joined for the first time into a unified conception of specialized knowledge by Roman thinkers, including Cicero and Varro. The higher artes are logically organized and systematically presented, hence systematic. They are related to one another in their principles and methods, hence interdisciplinary. They entail explanatory knowledge of their methods in terms of causes in nature, and are hence explanatory. And they balance experience and practical know-how with theoretical knowledge, and are hence balanced.

The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

This educational work was intended to inspire action. This chapter explores what some of this work catalysed, including mobilising songs by the group Akut Kuei, whose work inspired many young men to return to fight in the SPLA, to men and women sharing war news, organising fundraising and practical help for the rebel efforts, and other (often unclear or uncertain) efforts towards resistance. Not all of this work was for the SPLA; many young men organised for southern militia groups working in Khartoum or were inspired to return to family villages to fight in local militias against predation from the Sudan government and SPLA forces alike. Others (men and women) joined the SPLA’s New Sudan Brigade, or the pan-Sudanese and pan-Africanist underground organisations of the African National Front and the National Democratic Alliance, among other small political parties and ‘spying’ work. This chapter explores people’s various aims and self-justifications alongside their accounts of this work, with a close eye on the epistemological and methodological questions of these retrospective accounts of subversion.