This chapter examines how the legal status of female servants and slaves evolved over the course of the seventeenth century, and how women in service challenged the structures of patriarchy that governed familial relationships. Female servants had a relatively wide spectrum of legal rights and routinely filed petitions with the courts for breach of contract. The legal relationship between a master and a female servant was dependent on a contract that stipulated the amount of time to be served, as well as the remuneration the servant would receive for her labour. The legal action taken by female servants shows that although they were at the bottom of the household hierarchy, they exercised a form of subordinate agency in the courts. In contrast, slaves had no legal standing. A master owned the labour of his servants while they were under contract, but not the servant themselves. The legal relationship between a master and a slave, however, was not subject to the terms of a contract. Masters owned not only the labour of their slaves, but also their persons; this made it legally impossible for slaves to bring any grievances against their masters to court.

This chapter explores both the complex and challenging context of historic national antagonism and the degree to which political change has promoted reconciliation. Tragically, the North of Ireland makes visible some of the internal contradictions of the great post-Enlightenment project for freedom in politics which insisted that government requires the consent of the governed. While supporters of independence for Ireland, to be achieved violently if necessary, could claim the support of a majority on the island, they failed to make significant inroads among Protestant voters concentrated largely in the industrialised north-east. But in Ireland there was no international peace treaty to determine new frontiers, only direct confrontation with a British government. The trump card of the peace process has been its ability to render political violence strategically hopeless and to reduce the level of immediate fear.

In a book that deals with procedure and focuses a little less on MPs and politics than other works, a chapter on the officers and servants of parliament brings light onto this sometimes forgotten corner of parliament. While nobody could fail to acknowledge the importance of the speaker of either house, this book brings a sharp concentration of the very important roles of the judges and other legal officers, on the all-important clerk and his juniors, and on the lesser officers of parliament. It discusses the role of the officers, their responsibilities, and the capacity for influence on political and other developments in parliament. It also describes the payment and other rewards they received for their work.

This chapter focuses on Northern Ireland, with Scotland as a point of comparison and outlines efforts in Northern Ireland to try to ensure that citizens can shape the 'normalisation' of political life. It examines the short-lived Civic Forum and the statutory duties in the Northern Ireland Act 1998 as forms of inclusive policy-making. The significance of the voluntary and community sector in policy-making is connected to sectarianism in local formal politics, the 'democratic deficits' of direct rule by Westminster and the conditions for receipt of funding from the European Union (EU). The tradition of participation and EU-inspired district partnerships led the transversal party, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC), to propose the constitutional innovation of a Civic Forum. The chapter deals briefly with the motivations for and the contexts of reform; some similarities and differences in institutions and procedures; and the depth of 'new politics'.

In the light of the growing debate about international investment and developing economies, this chapter begins by establishing that the term ‘investment’ in investment law is a product of the extremist conception of liberalism in economics. On this basis, the chapter examines whether there are justifications in support of the arguments that Africa has been unfairly treated in international investment terms since decolonisation. The chapter also inquires whether the new international economic order of the 1970s brought any investment successes to Africa. Finally, the chapter provides a few remarks on the position of Africa post-1990s and beyond.

This chapter looks at the production of the figure of the worker-citizen as a response to the discrimination against migrants in the public discourse, and the attempts to rectify them as rightful citizens. It traces the process of how this identity of worker-citizen is constructed through acts of ‘voicing’ (of migrants’ grievances), ‘challenging marginalisation’ and ‘constructing a new identity’ for migrant workers. The NGOs which engage in this form of activism aim, though not always successfully, to liberate migrant workers from the hierarchical spatio-temporal rural/urban, backward/modern, and economically useless/useful binaries entrenched in structural citizenship. Consciously cast in the language of class and the value of labour, their figure of worker-citizen rejects both the suzhi discourse and the hukou system’s denigration of migrant workers as second-class citizens, and aims to reshape migrants’ relationship to both the rural and the urban.

This chapter sheds light on the extent of the emancipation from the international investment protection regime contemplated by the African Society of International Law (AfSIL) and situates it against the backdrop of some recent contestations of international investment law. After recalling the drafting history of the AfSIL Principles and some recent contestations, the attention turns to the content of, and possible adjustment to, the international investment protection regime vindicated by AfSIL. This short chapter ends with a few concluding remarks on the choice for an emancipatory mode of contestation rather than a reformist one.

In a largely chronological manner, this chapter presents a history of the mutual co-constitution of the citizenship regime and discourse. It argues that the current formulation of citizenship in China is founded not only on the formal legislative aspect of the hukou system, but also on the underlying citizenship discourse, which stems from the processes of modernisation, urbanisation and nationalism, underlined by the new economic divisions created by market reforms. The chapter traces genealogies of citizenship in China in order to reveal how it has been constructed through the mechanism of the spatio-temporal ‘othering’ of the rural/migrant worker population. It then presents the attempts by central and local governments to reform the hukou system, arguing that despite much debate about reform of the system since 2003, and particularly since 2014, not enough has been done to truly transform the citizenship status of migrant workers in China. It also discusses the state-prescribed citizenship practices, which are enforced both through the law and through public campaigns and school education, and reflects on what type of citizen they promote. The final section of the chapter sets out how these various historical and contemporary discourses have been entangled in local China, in the form of the municipal authorities’ policies and narratives towards migrant workers in Shenzhen, Beijing and Hangzhou, the main fieldwork sites.

This chapter analyses two acts, ‘defending rights’ and ‘educating in legal rights’, which utilise state-designated channels (in this case, labour laws), and therefore do not challenge the state directly. The chapter demonstrates the special role which labour rights play in negotiation of citizenship in China. Unlike aspirational kinds of rights, such as the right to the city or the right to self-organise, labour rights are usually framed as already existing ‘legal rights’ (hefa quanyi), which simply need to be ‘respected’, and, until recently, this made activism around them somehow less contentious. The chapter reflects critically on when ‘defending rights’ and ‘educating in legal rights’ can have a transformative effect on citizenship and when they help to maintain the status quo, by comparing cases when they help to produce active and informed citizens, and when they do not.