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.

This chapter studies the border from the perspective of gender, exploring the desires present in the current images and practices associated with the Finnish–Russian border and the act of crossing it. The analysis is based on long-term ethnographic work with autoethnographic observations of the border, border-crossings and the border area on both sides of Finnish–Russian border since the beginning of the 2000s. The chapter explores gendered border-produced desires through the prism of resentment and nostalgia, the sources of which we see in the perceptions and memories of Second World War and the Cold War era on the one hand, and in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Socialism on the other. This is accompanied by different desires for crossing the border among border area residents of different backgrounds. For some the border represents a guarantee of national and personal security; for others the border represents access to desired other spaces: for Finnish border-crossers the ‘home’ and battle landscapes lost in the Second World War; and for the Russian-speaking immigrants living in Finland the welfare state and social security lost after the collapse of the Soviet system, which, it is believed, can be rediscovered on the other side of the border.

Our ethnographic research aimed at exploring the communicative practices of police officers in Germany when encountering speakers of different languages. However, we soon realised that they face similar communicative issues in many other encounters. Therefore, this chapter widens the focus, not only studying communicative practices when different ‘named languages’ are involved, but also exploring encounters involving differing language varieties, styles and registers; these differences are not grounded in nationality or culture but in the citizens’ class, community, state of mind and more. In these encounters, police officers routinely reach a sufficient level of understanding by mixing languages and language varieties, by using gestures, by relying on common-sense sequences of bureaucracy, and ultimately by employing the potential to use violence. Surprisingly, the main challenge – and the main source of misunderstanding – is not translation in a linguistic sense, but the need to translate complex everyday situations according to organisational guidelines and legal norms. Communicative practices are intertwined with ‘doing police’ – the challenge of translating between citizens’ expectations and organisational rationalities of the police.

This chapter examines the ways in which women who have migrated from post-socialist countries to Italy and Finland narrate their reasons for migrating. Drawing on two different ethnographic research projects conducted in two different settings, the chapter analyses how migration can be a strategy for escaping certain gender relations or an attempt to take full advantage of other configurations of them. We explore the different dimensions of desire by looking at the continuum from sex to love as ways to ensure a better future and how this continuum sits in the post-socialist gender orders and their renegotiation in these migratory contexts. Moreover, we argue that mainstream migration literature needs to reconsider the idea of the migrant as an economically rational individual by taking into account the importance of desire as a driver of migration and as a key force which shapes gendered migratory mobilities.

This Afterword provides reflections on individual chapters and the broader project that centres imperialism and its legacies for understanding both international and global inequalities. In particular, it draws out the significance of critical analysis of the violence of colonial capitalism more generally, within which taxation was a strategy of extraction and exploitation. While the method of analysis resonates with critical historical approaches of imperialism and its lasting legacies, the rich and empirically substantiated discussions of institutional arrangements that served to uphold extraction, often through brutal violence, are acknowledged. Another theme the chapter draws attention to is that of resistance to the imperial project. It concludes by offering some observations on how imperial extraction becomes disarticulated from the post-1945 international development framework. It also raises the question of how a just reparation may be effected without reproducing the logics of colonial violence.

Largely theoretical, this chapter develops Moore’s approach to studying social movements within an integrated theory of capitalism. First, it critiques current social movement studies research, to demonstrate the need for a historical materialist approach to studying social struggles. After establishing this, it adopts social reproduction theory (SRT) as a way forward. SRT, although often applied to domestic labour or the household, should be extended to questions of ecology via eco-socialism. By employing an epistemic shift to the background conditions of possibility for both social and societal, crisis tendencies beyond the economic are revealed alongside the constitutive role of social struggle in pushing forward contradictions that mark the present. Crucially, a labour-oriented starting point is revealing for questions of ecology. Where eco-socialist theory allows the extension of SRT into nature relations, SRT recentres political potential, not on an end pre-ordained by the system's structures, but on agency and collective struggle. Building on this, the epistemic shift that reveals these background conditions also lets us withdraw from capital’s given terms, and a form of class coherence emerges. Drawing on emergent class analysis, agency is not just given; the potential for rupture is activated through struggle. This chapter also introduces the incorporated comparison.