Khartoum’s war-displaced residents had to fight for safe space to live, work, and think, and over the late 1980s and early 1990s this was a battle over bulldozers, deportations, exploitation, and exclusion. This chapter sets out this fight over the city under the al-Ingaz regime’s civilising project from 1989, from the perspective of its new residents. To them, this was a project not of forcible acculturation but of silencing, exclusion, and disciplining of an exploitable labour force. Former residents explain their choices in navigating these forces to make measures of security and neighbourhood safety, including their renaming of space in this new displaced city. The political geography that this period of state violence and popular resistance created by 1994 sets the terrain for the rest of the book.

This chapter introduces the principal Roman authors and texts studied in this book and examines the relationship between the artes and the society and politics of the early Roman Empire. The development of the artes can be understood in terms of the “Romanization” of specialized knowledge, whereby the scientific and technical contents of the artes were suffused with the peculiar interests and prerogatives of Roman Empire. The chapter surveys several ways in which this process of Romanization was instantiated in the artes: by the refiguring of specialized knowledge in the artes as Imperial self-knowledge; by an expansive conception of Roman imperium as fueling the growth of scientific knowledge; by the mastering and elaboration of Greek specialized knowledge; by the fashioning of an ideal, elite Roman readership for the artes; and by technocratic approaches to the artes relating disciplinary knowledge to Roman Imperial government.

Review of the inhumane practices of people in both New and Old Worlds prior to Columbian contact. Slave trading and cruelty were widespread, and slave trading was extensive. Most slaves were female, employed in domestic or agricultural environments (with little evidence of gang-labor), and came from a wide range of geographic areas and cultures. Most were born into slavery or were enslaved as a result of raids and wars in which many men on the losing side were killed. Slave markets existed across Eurasia, though in the pre-contact New World such markets were less common. After 1500, transatlantic trafficking came to draw exclusively on Africa or at least on Black people, probably because of the long isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world, and the inability of its Indigenous population to resist harmful pathogens from the Old World. Before 1820 migration to the New World was dominated by Africans rather than Europeans and by males (in contrast to the female-dominated slave populations of the Old World). White slaves were scarcely ever present in the New World.

The fiscal burden of government interventions in the rural economy had created growth but led the economy to the brink of crisis. When India implemented full-blown economic reforms in 1991, many assumed these would sideline social policy. This chapter shows that liberalisation pushed social policy up the political agenda. Efforts to enable an ‘exit policy’ for ailing firms by loosening restrictions on retrenchment under chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act failed due to opposition from organised labour. The controversy created an opening to strengthen - or at least maintain - existing ‘social safety nets’ to support the project of economic transformation. The Government of India used a World Bank loan initially intended to support the ‘exit policy’ to maintain the rural social policies that had been introduced or expanded in the 1980s, as part of what Finance Minister Manmohan Singh described as macroeconomic adjustment with a ‘human face’. The chapter shows that political regionalisation and the intensification of multi-level electoral competition in the 1990s encouraged subnational social policy innovation and worked against the retrenchment of existing social policies.

The introduction starts by recounting the history of this project, from an ignorant first encounter with the traces of expos, through the enthusiastic embrace of the burgeoning academic literature on them, to a puzzling first experience of an expo in real life. It suggests that the existence of expos, and their endurance in Japan, challenges the existing literature, which either mines them to explore other phenomena, or assumes that as exemplars of modern spectacle they can serve as an effective ideological apparatus. Rather, it argues, they might help us refine our understanding of development, spectacle, and their relationship, and of modern Japan. Doing so, however, requires us to be alert to the limits of our sources, however extensive the expo archive, and to craft our accounts to reflect these.

Chapter 3 is about industry. The decline of the traditional textile industry is analysed in the context of competition from the new technology of the British industrial revolution. This sector was small part of the economy. A modern industrial sector developed from the middle of the nineteenth century, which was more productive than the traditional sector and it grew rapidly. In 1947, the shares of the modern and the traditional sectors were roughly the same. Entrepreneurship and capital for the modern import substituting cotton textile industry came from the Indian trading communities. British investment in industry was in the exporting sectors, such as tea and jute. After 1947, India adopted a strategy of intermediate and capital goods led industrialization. The process of industrialization was led by the public sector with highly interventionist policies towards trade and industrial location. The role of the private sector was constrained. Yet, the industrial conglomerates owned by family based enterprises prospered and dominated the industrial sector in second half of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores a double shift in social policy from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Firstly, under the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA governments (1998-99; 1999-2004) contributory social insurance was extended to reach labour market ‘outsiders’, who worked in the informal sector without access to the social insurance enjoyed by formal sector workers. This policy shift was intended to support wider labour law reforms by sidelining the political power of organised labour. As the sustainability of India’s new economic model came under scrutiny, a second shift took place under the Congress-led UPA government (2004-14) in which non-employment-linked social assistance programmes were recognised for the first time - at least in theory - as permanent, statutory rights or entitlements of citizenship. The chapter ends by examining the centrality of states to social policy implementation. It shows that by 2014 the typical subnational welfare regime combined high levels of labour commodification with publicly financed social assistance. This reflected the embrace of labour informalisation on the one hand, and the provision of direct, publicly financed social assistance on the other.

Vitruvius’ De architectura (c. 35–23 BCE) offers an ideal lens through which to view the emergence of the Imperial artes. In the introduction to his work, Vitruvius develops an elaborate theory of architectural knowledge that connects the discipline with other branches of specialized knowledge and gives pride of place to causal explanations of architectural method via natural first principles. Vitruvius’ theory is tailored to architecture but is of wider importance in that it establishes a general notion of ars predicated on the scientific premises sketched in Chapter 2. True to his expansive conception of the discipline, throughout his treatise Vitruvius carefully explains his methods in terms of natural first principles, demonstrating their fundamental soundness. His advice for orienting city streets and walls (Book I) and for choosing building materials (Book II) exemplifies his characteristic interest in connecting architecture with a broader understanding of nature.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.

Political possibilities closed down as the war ended in 2005. With the negotiation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the death of the SPLA’s leader John Garang – which sparked riots and racialised murder across Khartoum – many people’s connections and trust in inclusive intellectual and political projects were broken. This chapter briefly surveys the aftermath of the riots and peace process, which saw a massive movement of well over a million Khartoum residents to the south, where they reconstructed a very different set of neighbourhoods that in the late 2000s were often known as New Khartoums. The secession of South Sudan in 2011 was not a panacea or end goal of the long conflicts for many of these returned Khartoum residents. Reflecting discussions with returning residents over 2012 and 2013, the chapter examines the lost possibilities of the projects they undertook in Khartoum, and the closing space for political projects and democratic communities that they discussed and worked for during the war.