The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

Following Expo 70, the Japanese state continued to use international exhibitions and other big events to remodel the archipelago, with Okinawa in 1975 and Tsukuba in 1985 the beneficiaries of the bureaucratic determination to develop the regions. They were vastly outnumbered, however, by a torrent of local initiatives in the 1980s, as cities and regions turned again to exhibitions, as they had in the 1930s, to resituate themselves on the national map, trying to navigate the shift of the economy away from heavy industry. This chapter explores both, thereby tracing the relationship between national plans and regional development. Big cities used expos to rebrand themselves for the information age, regional centres to advertise their distinction. Many expos continued to rely on corporate exhibits to attract the crowds; but some branched out, acknowledging environmental limits, and incorporating the local community, not just as consumers but also as participants. More important than the exhibits, however, was the demand unleashed by the expo and the impact on the local economy.

This chapter provides an overview of the origins, expansion and reform of India’s welfare regime since the early twentieth century. It outlines the contributions of the book to wider literatures on the histories and politics of social policy in developing countries. The chapter demonstrates interventions in three bodies of literature: firstly, to histories of labour and of the mid twentieth-century democratic and developmental Indian state at the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial eras; secondly, to the literature on the political economy of democracy and development in postcolonial India; thirdly, to the comparative politics literature on welfare regimes beyond Europe and North America. The chapter highlights three factors for their role in shaping the nature of India’s welfare regime over the past century: firstly, the changing shape of India’s model of capitalism; secondly, the gradual deepening of democratic participation; and thirdly, the multi-level territorial articulation of both capitalism and electoral politics.

Exhibitions suggest a more complicated history than the familiar caricature of early twentieth-century Japan, which sees the country sliding inexorably into authoritarianism from the late 1920s, then embracing peace and democracy in 1945. The military had always been present at exhibitions and became more prominent in the 1930s. Wartime exhibitions did what they could to mobilize the Japanese people for ‘national defense’. Overseas, however, the government continued to use exhibitions to convince the world of its pacific intent. At home, exhibitions testify as much to commercial energy, municipal ambition, and colonial aspirations, as to militarism. This chapter explores the complicated, increasingly contradictory weave of war and peace during the 1930s and 1940s. Exhibitions not only articulated the need to expand empire and mobilize the nation but also continued to insist on the possibility of international amity and modern life, even as Japan descended into total war. Once it was over, peace and democracy became new keynotes, but the sites, protagonists, and ambitions of exhibitions remained much the same.

The emergence of a systematic literature around land-surveying in the late first century AD affords an ideal opportunity to study the development of an ars within the scientific culture of specialized knowledge in the early Roman Empire. The variegated methods that belonged to the historical inheritance of surveying practice challenged the construction of a discrete and coherent disciplinary identity. The surveying writings of Frontinus and Hyginus evince several strategies intended to produce a systematic and explanatory conception of the ars. These include rationalizing explanations of key surveying terminology and practice with a view to natural first principles and an accounting of surveying methods in interdisciplinary perspective with astronomy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. While these earliest surveying works pose several unique challenges, they ultimately provide a precious window onto the challenges and opportunities that greeted the emergence of an ars in the fervid scientific culture of the period.

Chapter 2 focuses the largest sector of the economy: Agriculture. The rural economy produced most of the output in Mughal India and in British India. 85 percent of the population lived in rural communities. The economic history of India has a rich narrative of regions, of introduction of new institutions and integration of the cultivators into commercial exchange of food and raw material at the regional level. This chapter brings together an overall narrative of the regions and explains why some regions prospered, while others declined. It sees the role of infrastructure as an important part of this discussion, that is, the impact of the railways and irrigation. While British investment in irrigation and new technology in agriculture was inadequate and can explain agricultural stagnation in different parts of the country, the railways played an important role in integrating markets. The chapter ends with a discussion of the building of agricultural infrastructure after independence and the Green Revolution of the 1960s and it importance in economic growth and development.

More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

In Khartoum the work of managing displacement and organising the future involved extensive educational projects. Residents of all socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds organised adult night schools and taught their own syllabuses of critical political and social education, using self-written alternative history textbooks, in multiple mother tongues or in a common southern Sudanese Arabic. Based on private archives of teaching resources, school records, aid agency archival marginalia, and personal accounts of educative work, this chapter reconstructs this intellectual terrain. It explores the definitions of education among these residents, which included practical and moral knowledge, linguistic creativity, and critical political analysis.

Many people fleeing the massacres, village burnings, slave raids, and famines across southern Sudan from the early 1980s followed paths north to the capital. This chapter starts at the height of this wartime displacement in the mid-1980s, detailing the emergency mutual support and organisation that people undertook, based on older associational cultures and systems rooted in long histories of migration and displacement north. The chapter locates the people whose lives and work are followed through the book, as they build new neighbourhoods and negotiate access, safety, and work within the hostile capital.