Here, the unit of analysis moves to the capitalist state, shaping and being shaped by reproductive unrest. The strategic selectivities of the capitalist state and dominant state projects were embedded in the expropriation of water. In each case, state (in)action allowed expropriation to take place as dominant fractions of transnational capital gained institutional expression. In Australia, the state created the water market, and provided regulatory conditions preferring extractive industries over other users. In Ireland, despite Irish Water remaining, ostensibly, public, it was a commercial entity transferring costs of water provision from state budgets to households. As the political and economic overlapped, a closing-down of formal political opportunities for alternatives co-existed with growing dissent among those rendered disposable to the status quo. In prioritising the reproduction of transnational capital, the institutional legitimacy necessary for capital accumulation was destabilised in each case. By adopting the vantage point of the state, the intrinsic role of the state in the process of expropriation is revealed, and also the way that ecological and social contradictions are mediated through these selectivities. The state response to crisis revealed the internal relation of the economic and political, which subsequently undermined political legitimacy and fed a growing unrest.

This chapter examines two UK-based development bodies, the Crown Agents and the CDC Group, focusing on moments of controversy surrounding these organisations’ impacts on public finances, in the UK and in its former colonies. It highlights the role these ‘development’ organisations played in managing colonial currencies and supply chains to ensure the expansion of Britain’s nascent welfare state in the immediate post-war period. Both organisations have undergone significant restructuring and repositioning since the formal end of empire, and now take centre stage in the retro-liberal aid regime under which the state exists to sponsor and facilitate the private sector. Donor states are increasingly entangled with private, for-profit agencies through a range of state–capital hybrids that may benefit donor states in the Global North and development professionals more than they do ‘beneficiaries’ in the Global South. This retro-liberal aid regime is also a ‘re-colonial’ one: development bodies established during the colonial period find success through new arrangements, but much like their colonial antecedents, do so as bearers of expertise that can address development challenges while demonstrating ‘value for money’ for the UK taxpayer and chipping away at the tax base in ‘beneficiary’ countries. The chapter thus foregrounds the colonial durabilities which are so deeply embedded within aid flows, government by contract, and even ‘value for money’ models of accountability that structure the retro-liberal aid regime.

Our chapter aims to contribute to the topic of police racism by showing how the dynamics of racialisation and racism are rooted both in the occupational experiences of French and German police officers and in their ways of describing reality. Based on data collected through several observational and/or interview-based studies conducted among police forces in France and Germany, our chapter follows the footsteps of a body of research that considers police occupational socialisation as the main variable explaining how police officers may embrace and pass on racialised patterns of perception. We make a distinction between racialisation, whose underlying logic is the production of racial hierarchies and the attribution of social and behavioural features to certain categories of the population (in the present case ethnic/racial minorities), and racism, defined as one specific instance of racialisation characterised by the hostile stereotyping of said categories, what we call the ‘temptation of racism’. Despite these shared patterns, the practices of police forces differ, as German police officers tend to be less prone to discrimination than their French counterparts. To explain this discrepancy, we shall see that institutional authorities differ significantly in terms of how they address the question of racism, both in their discourse and in their management methods, or even in the prioritisation of police tasks.

Taxation was an important feature of European colonisation and extraction, and remains central to the extractive processes of economic and financial globalisation that have replaced formal empire. The global inequalities in taxing rights extant today are directly related to the economic governance of previous European empires – and of the British Empire above all. Three distinct, imperial ages of illicit financial flows can be identified. The first is one of violent dispossession, with tax used in various supporting roles. The second aimed to deny newly independent states the ability to reclaim stolen assets and income streams, while simultaneously preventing effective taxation by the metropolis. This gave way to the third phase in which cross-border tax abuse drives global inequalities. The key actor in the tax havenry that facilitates this is shown, by a variety of measures, to be the United Kingdom with its ‘spider’s web’ of dependent territories. The damage done is substantial, and the UK’s responsibility is clear. The importance of tax – not only for revenues but also for responsive governance – is such that former colonies continue to see their prospects of effective statehood eroded by these imperial legacies. The dependent territories that remain, meanwhile, suffer a more intense version of the finance curse to which the UK too is exposed, leaving them more unequal and prone to corruption, with citizens often denied any benefits of havenry. Full reparations may be beyond the UK’s economic capacity, but approaches should be considered while immediate steps are taken to end the harms.

Although Charles I and Oliver Cromwell had little in common, they had both promised to give away hundreds of thousands of acres of land confiscated from Irish Catholics. For Charles, the land was promised to financial speculators in London who gambled on the conquest of Ireland and sought to drive the Irish from their homelands. Cromwell, who conquered Ireland militarily in 1650, proposed to reward his soldiers with land instead of cash and encouraged colonisation by defaulting on his soldiers’ pay. In 1660, a restored Charles II promised to uphold both of these pledges and Ireland’s land was given away to soldiers and speculators for a fraction of its value. Much of this land was promptly mortgaged for its full value, a ‘gage’ with which to leverage further colonial development. The confiscated land was also taxed, promising a huge cash windfall for the English exchequer with the prospect of a perennial colonial surplus. This tax, the Quit Rent, was also mortgaged, or ‘farmed’, together with most other forms of taxation raised in Ireland. Between 1660 and 1670, vast sums of money were borrowed against Irish land, or the tax on Irish land. The exchequer, however, never received the windfall it had been expecting. The Irish exchequer ran out of money in 1670, and the English exchequer ‘stopped’ the following year. The money had disappeared. This chapter examines where it went.

The chapter explores how the EU’s boundary-drawing practices directly influence anti-LGBT mobilisation in countries seeking accession to the EU by focusing on the case of surging resistance to LGBT rights in Serbia. It addresses demands posed by the EU concerning LGBT rights and the emergence and transformations of the local political discourses which interlock and mutually incite anti-LGBT and anti-EU appeals. The chapter traces the changing discourses and practices of arguably the most active and influential participants in the anti-LGBT mobilisation, such as the political movement/party Dveri, public intellectuals, politicians and members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and uses relevant textual sources, including EU and nongovernmental statements, media reports and documents produced by or about the observed actors. By looking at the productive interplay of anti-LGBT and anti-EU arguments in the Serbian context, the chapter shows how EU sexual governance can be seen as a particular marker of the symbolic border between Europe’s ‘Western core’ and its ‘Eastern’ periphery. The chapter argues that this border-making process represents one of the key factors which not only influence anti-LGBT mobilisation, but also incite a desire to resist membership in the European Union.

The chapter explores how questions of national, social, and individual health and poverty intersected in early modern Scotland with debates over the new inequalities created by empire. Widespread perceptions of Scotland’s material impoverishment were exacerbated through inclusion in a new British state and single market. Much of the cultural tone informing debates on Scotland’s potential as a ‘province’ of the new Great Britain was shaped by the supposedly stark contrast with the country’s more affluent southern neighbour. In this context, ideologies of ‘improvement’ emerged strongly which sought the individual and collective advancement of Scottish society. Yet this ‘improvement’ agenda generated highly ambivalent reactions. On the one hand, empire was seen as an absolutely central means of securing this wider societal progress. Yet, simultaneously, many feared Scotland had become too quickly and unsustainably immersed in empire. Overseas links were widely critiqued as a destabilising influence, generating new forms of poverty, socially disruptive consumption, and the loss of national wealth through migration. The chapter argues that an underappreciated way that these tensions were resolved involved the conscious and conspicuous allocation of colonial wealth to the country’s health, welfare, and educational provision.

Centred on the idea that police forces are often a focal point for conflict in today’s societies, this chapter takes an interest in big data policing in Amsterdam as a contested development. Looking at the socio-technical preconditions of such new, algorithmic forms of policing brings to the surface that police forces employ certain grids of legibility upon the input they receive from communities, both by recognising only certain forms of input as legitimate, and by decomposing individuals into their predictive features. Against the background of a grim conflict between police officers and young Moroccan Dutchmen, the authors offer a selected description of three security innovations on the basis of the six months of fieldwork in Amsterdam that were part of larger ethnographic study of the Dutch police (2008–13).

Migration to Germany has profoundly affected the demographics of the country. This has implications for state institutions, whose positioning on issues such as diversity and self-perception and perception of others is problematised. The police present an interesting case to analyse: they are the most visible representative of the state in daily life and in everyday interactions with people. Also as an employer of the state, the police is the addressee of integration efforts, insofar as an increasing number of police officers now have a so-called ‘migration background’. This chapter presents initial empirical findings from an interdisciplinary research project which focuses on the organisational design of the police, its personnel and diversity management, the interactions between citizens and police officers, and their organisational culture in Germany since 2018. The ethnographic part of the project deals with the mutual relations and interactions between police officers and citizens in metropolitan neighbourhoods characterised by ethnically and culturally diverse structures. By examining everyday working life in four neighbourhoods in the federal states of Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, we are investigating the extent to which the migration background of individuals – both police officers and citizens – affects the way they interact with each other in order to grasp what patterns of perception, interpretation and behaviour exist in the different locations. Settings such as proactively or reactively stimulated encounters on the street and within the police station are the focus. We also explore how individual and institutional practices are developed and transmitted within police personnel.

The introduction sets out the importance of addressing the institutional and fiscal processes involved in the modes of extraction – that is, taxation – and hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. It discusses the importance of rethinking our conceptual frameworks – from nations to empires – and taking colonial histories seriously. It situates itself in relation to long-standing histories of ‘colonial drain’ and how such topics have been dealt with in contemporary accounts. It explains the need for focusing upon the politics of economic governance across states and empires to indicate the ways in which imperial extractions and their legacies have shaped the wealth and poverty of contemporary nations and the configuration of global inequalities today. The introduction also sets out the structure of the volume and the importance of the contributions to the general themes.