This chapter focuses on the experiences of powerlessness among police detectives in a global world. Specifically, it discusses how Danish detectives often feel that certain foreign national criminals get away with their crimes with impunity – here not necessarily meaning that criminals are not caught and sentenced. Rather, what increasingly frustrates Danish detectives are their experiences of how even convicted foreign national criminals do not seem to think of their conviction as a real form of punishment, as something which is painful or problematic. To the detectives, such unaffectedness troubles not only the intended deterrent aspects of the law and the criminal justice system, it also comes off as a professional provocation – as a sad symbol of how all their work is, in the end, futile. As the chapter goes on to describe, this futility, this police impotence, sometimes becomes a catalyst in the police applying their own sort of ‘street justice’, to make sure that punishment is not only formally handed down but also truly experienced as such by the foreign national criminal. And as the chapter concludingly ponders, such Dirty Harry-style practices may indeed be on the rise in an increasingly globalising world of crime and policing. As not only Danish detectives but police officers worldwide experience that criminals from other places and parts of the world appear unstirred by the threat and force of the criminal justice system, there is a growing risk of the police taking the delivery of punishment into their own hands.

Formal political independence for Kenya from British colonial rule was achieved in 1963. Yet upon its departure, the colonial administration did not leave behind a viable nation. State building was neither the original intention nor the primary objective of the colonial power. The administrative framework they had established provided the justification for economic exploitation and political domination of the newly independent Kenyan state. Even after independence, the Kenyan economy continued to be controlled and directed by its former colonial ruler. Being an outpost of international monopoly capitalism, the Kenyan economy could not help but respond to the demands of the established international market. Independence thus meant the ability to make laws within the country but not the power to change the structure of the economy or the pattern of trade with the outside world. The private sector and private investment from both domestic and external sources were given a critical role to play in the development of the country. Contrary to the claims made to its citizens by the newly independent government to set the country on a social welfare model, the government instead promoted free enterprise and foreign investment, permitting investors to export their entire profits without assessment for domestic taxation. This predisposed Kenya to a particular pattern of economic development – where the burden of taxation fell on the citizens while the benefits from domestic resource extraction that were accrued were guaranteed for foreign investors.

By 1906, the Pacific had been partitioned between key colonial powers – United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Colonial rule had to be financed and funded. Metropolitan grants-in-aid were either entirely absent, set at minimal levels, or varied between colonial regimes. Colonial officials were responsible for plural communities, including indigenous majorities, settlers, and merchants, each of them having their own fiscal potentials for taxation. This chapter examines taxation in two neighbouring countries, the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, and the jointly governed Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). Taxation was imposed with violence in the first three decades of British rule in Solomon Islands and met with indigenous resistance and protest. However, as decolonisation unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, indigenous Solomon Islanders took control of taxation to fund independence. In the New Hebrides, by contrast, British and French officials could not agree on fiscal policy and taxation. Given the inability to levy effective taxes in the New Hebrides, decisions were made in the early 1970s to convert the country into a tax haven and offshore finance centre. However, while expatriates, investors, and settlers were freed of the need to pay most taxes, indigenous ni-Vanuatu continued to do so. As a result of British rule, Solomon Islands inherited the orthodox metrics of a conventional taxing state during the country’s decolonisation, whereas in the New Hebrides the politics of compromise, deferral, and cancellation between British and French officials meant that Vanuatu achieved independence as a prominent tax haven and offshore finance centre.

This chapter charts the evolution of French colonial finance at the turn of the twentieth century and draws the lineaments of the French imperial state’s fiscal hierarchy. It focuses specifically on political debates about the ‘cost’ of empire at a time of resurgent imperial protectionism and how they led to the voting of a series of laws in 1900 imposing ‘financial autonomy’ on French colonies and Algeria. From this moment onwards, French colonies were increasingly asked to draw on their own fiscal resources, but this did not equate to financial self-determination for the millions of French colonial subjects living in the empire. Instead, ‘autonomy’ served as a disciplining device which gave the metropole greater control over imperial expenditures. Like other imperial powers at the time, France sought to govern its empire ‘on the cheap’. In practice, this meant that locally levied taxes became the main revenue source for French colonial states. This chapter argues that this policy emerged out of the necessity to preserve a precarious metropolitan fiscal bargain in a context of extreme inequality and alleviate fears of colonial ‘profligacy’ in the aftermath of massive territorial conquest. The political fallout of this policy was immediate and generated a flurry of tax revolts, prompting several reformist colonial officials to rethink colonial financial relations in the aftermath of the First World War.

The consolidation of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century did not only coincide with the systematic dismantling of the British Empire but was significantly shaped by the empire that preceded it. The story that tends to be told about the welfare state, however, situates it firmly within the national context. Such understandings go on to shape contemporary political debates centred on questions of entitlement and concerns over legitimacy. This chapter reassesses the standard accounts of taxation and welfare that are claimed to be central to the construction of the nation to demonstrate how taking the Empire into account offers the possibility of a different political response to the challenges we are faced with today.

The hospitals built in the viceroyalty of Peru after the Spanish conquest were institutions aiming to mediate charitable transactions which were important for legitimising the colonial order. However, few historical inquiries have focused on the policies and practices shaping the economy of the colonial hospitals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This chapter explores the schemes designed for the hospital of the mining city of Potosí (present-day Bolivia), a major extraction site of the early modern Spanish Empire – their justifications and their contestations to question the form and very nature of this imperial welfare. The case of Potosí’s hospital, supported by a mixed economy of private endowments, incomes from its properties, and tax paid by the Andeans who had to come to the mine as part of their labour obligations demonstrates the complexity of the history of the mechanisms of redistribution, especially the history of charity, in the Spanish Empire. The petitions the scheme generated from the end of the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century also suggest one of the ways in which welfare policies and their negotiations were a part of the monarchy’s political space.

The chapter describes the findings of participant observation of the professional lives of two Russian police divisions – patrol service and local police – in Kazan, Tatarstan in 2007. The research explains why police-initiated encounters mainly target phenotypically identified non-Slavic migrants, as well as the ensuing dynamics. Despite a significant presence of foreigners from Ukraine and Moldova among migrant labour in Russia, they are less likely to be stopped by the police than migrant workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus region. While the assessment of police officers’ work in Russia is subjected to quantitative performance indicators, the police officers use an instrumental racism in migration control, providing ethnic profiling mainly on the physical characteristics of people. We call this approach instrumental as its predominant function is to facilitate stop-and-search practices and thereby reach the quantitative indicators. The chapter distinguishes between two opposite strategies in establishing daily interactions between the police and migrants: first, mutually beneficial cooperation, including long-term corruption, and second, punitive and strong control towards ethnic minorities, or sporadic extortion of money under threat. The first strategy is more prevalent in the local police, whereas patrol-guard officers favour the second one. At the same time, an instrumental racism is the main technique for the ethnic profiling of migrants as ‘potential criminals’ in the Russian police and it is applied in both strategies.

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.