Exhibitions were seized on by the leaders and bureaucrats of the new Meiji state, following their experience abroad, as a way of promoting industry (kangyō), both by encouraging competition among producers at home and by fostering exports abroad. This chapter explores their early efforts, examining in detail the First Domestic Industrial Exhibition in Tokyo in 1877, and tracing its relationship to both the international exhibitions at which the government sought to impress the white world (Vienna 1873, Philadelphia 1876, Paris 1878 and 1889), and its domestic successors (Tokyo 1881 and 1890). Exhibitions at home served to create a nationwide network of officials and institutions devoted to industry, but they proved less effective at disciplining exhibitors or visitors. After twenty years, in any case, industrialization at home was well under way. Official interest in exhibitions, and also European enthusiasm for Japanese export craft, was on the wane.

This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.

Conlusion: Summary of findings

State-led planning shaped the path of industrialisation in ways that prevented the expansion of a mass industrial workforce covered by social insurance. This chapter examines how - in conditions of labour abundance but capital scarcity – India’s planners sought to expand the capital-intensive, low-employment capital goods sectors of the economy as the key to unleashing the resources that would in the future be used for investment in the welfare state. In the interim, the majority of Indians would partake in a different form of ‘welfare state’ fulfilling a duty to work via small scale industry and involvement in community works in rural areas. This was a vision of decommodification that privileged the human need for self-creation through work, rather than protection of a minimum level of consumption. The chapter shows that the Nehru-Mahalanobis model overshadowed alternative visions for an Indian welfare state forwarded by sections of Indian business, in which the state would support the growth of mass-employing private consumer goods industries and focus its efforts on investing in human capital and infrastructure.

Chapter 4 discusses the origins of India’s service sector advantage. Although modern industries developed in the colonial period and the policy of public sector led industrialization after independence led to the development of industries producing consumer, capital and intermediate goods, the share of the sector in employment has remained low. Industry in India did not place the same role in structural transformation as it did in the context of European industrializers and in China today. The service sector in India has been the most productive sector historically. Labour productivity in services in early twentieth century was higher than in industry. Labour productivity in industry grew faster until the 1980s, thereafter service sector has led productivity growth. The service sector today has a concentration of workers with secondary and tertiary education. But this was also the case historically. The education policies in colonial India prioritized secondary and tertiary education for a few at the cost of universal primary education. This continued after independence. The service sector led growth in India today has historical origins.

Columella wrote his Res rustica (c. AD 60/1–5) in the wake of a well-developed Roman tradition of agricultural writing. His approach to the ars distinguishes him from Republican predecessors such as Cato and Varro, however, and reflects the scientific culture of the artes of the early Empire. Columella presents agriculture as an august discipline requiring broad, interdisciplinary knowledge and theoretical understanding of nature. Depreciatory views of agriculture, imputed to other Romans, are explained as resulting from moral decline that has led to ignorance of correct technique. Columella’s discussions of manuring (Book II) and vine propagation (Book III) are shaped by his scientific conception of ars, as he argues that close appreciation of the principles of plant life provides the foundation for good agronomy. Columella’s treatise is not only the preeminent work of agronomy from Greco-Roman antiquity but also witness to the vibrant scientific culture of the artes.

While no Latin ars of warfare survives from the early Empire, its development can be reconstructed with the help of Frontinus’ Stratagemata (Domitianic), a collection of military stratagems composed as a pendant to his (now lost) treatise on the scientia rei militaris, and with Onasander’s Stratêgikos (c. AD 49–58), a Greek theoretical treatment of generalship dedicated to a Roman general. Onasander’s treatise embodies a paradigm of specialized knowledge that puts precepts into an explanatory relationship with universal (natural) first principles, much in the spirit of the artes. This approach to the art of war was popular but seems also to have been fiercely criticized at Rome. Frontinus’ Strategemata responds to this criticism by eschewing generalized precepts and offering instead exemplary historical anecdotes for contemplation and imitation. The Roman art of war thus reveals significant generic diversification in reaction to pressures internal and external to the scientific culture of the artes.

Of Celsus’ Artes (early first century AD), which originally handled agriculture, medicine, the art of war, rhetoric, and philosophy, only the eight books on medicine survive. Celsus’ work attests to the vibrant interdisciplinary culture of the early Imperial artes. The books De medicina in particular reveal a distinctive conceptualization of specialized knowledge that bears the hallmarks of the scientific culture of the artes but contrasts sharply with the approaches of Vitruvius and Columella. Celsus’ theory of the medical ars self-consciously appropriates but also develops and expands key methodological terms from the Greek medical tradition, including reason, experience, cause, and nature. These terms set the parameters for Celsus’ exposition of medicine, as exemplified in discussions of bloodletting, fevers, and fractures. Celsus’ more reserved attitude toward the kind of knowledge of nature required for expertise does not ignore the central preoccupations of the scientific culture of the artes, but instead pragmatically inflects them for medical practice.

This chapter explores the political theory within this educational work. It draws on self-produced works, cassettes, photocopied pamphlets, song sheets, and lyric books collected from people’s own archives as they returned from Khartoum, and the interviews, group translations, and discussions of these works and photographs conducted during their collection. These texts, poems, and songs are engaged in critiques of their authors’ economic, political, racial, and social circumstances; they build competing political philosophies and set out a spectrum of ideas about the future. Together the discussions across these projects centred on the possible shape and extent of a new political community rooted in common Black experience of exploitation and marginalisation, versus a political community drawing on more specific ethnic or localised parameters, based on a more conservative and pessimistic reading of the war economy and its futures. At the same time it contains shared common critiques of the civic and moral failings of the wealthy, apathetic, culturally promiscuous, and politically ignorant.