This chapter examines the role of taxation and welfare in the making of the imperial inequalities of the Spanish imperial state. It uses the term ‘imperial state’ to transcend the historiographical gap between states and empires and examine the politics of economic governance across expanding and transforming political communities. It focuses in particular on the moral economy of taxation and welfare in legitimating the extraction and distribution of resources in ways that created and enforced inequalities.

The supplement to the 2018 Sunday Times Rich List claimed that 94 per cent of its entries were self-made. Our own research into the top fifth of the Rich List shows that much of this ‘self-making’ consisted of a rise from being very wealthy to becoming stupefyingly wealthy. Many of them were born into straightforward old and inherited money. In some cases, this implied wealth dynasties that go back many generations; other supposedly ‘self-made’ Rich Listers were born into the aristocracy. This made us wonder what distance someone must travel to deserve the self-made label. Beyond that, we contemplated less obvious and more ‘subtle’ forms of privilege. They might make people pass as ‘self-made’ but yet sit slightly uneasily with the claim to ‘humble’ backgrounds. Some of such ‘hidden’ privilege might be those born to well-off and high-powered parents who could ensure their offspring an elite upbringing or, at least, exclusive schooling. The appeal of the ‘self-made’ fortune is that ‘good’ wealth is merited wealth, one that has been achieved by honest means and through hard work. The Sunday Times opted for such an editorial line, one that celebrates the accumulation of wealth while denying the structural privileges which have enabled the successes of those on the Rich List.

Emotion, a key area of interest in contemporary sociology, forms the central focus of Chapter 4. This chapter offers a sociological analysis of emotion in relation to baby loss and post-mortem practice. It focuses on parents’ experiences of emotion or being emotional as well as exploring emotion work in different types of professional practice. While parental and professional data form the central focus of the chapter, it also provides a sociological exploration of the emotional nature of doing research in this area. Throughout the chapter we explore the acute trauma and sadness of both experiencing and witnessing baby loss and post-mortem examination. The chapter also seeks to uncover some of the more life-affirming emotions often experienced in this context – for example, articulations of parental and professional pride – which often remain hidden from view. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the ways in which the articulation and management of emotions is contingent on the social relations and structures surrounding them.

This chapter draws together some of the significant conceptual, substantive and methodological themes that have emerged throughout the book, reflecting on their wider significance for existing debates in medical sociology, science and technology studies, social studies of death and dying, and research methods. We begin by examining the complex relationship between life and death, analysing and reflecting on parental coping strategies after loss. The chapter also considers the relationship between gender and reproduction, shedding light on the implications of our research findings for wider sociological debates on gender and masculinity. Existing conceptualisations of post-mortem practice tend to focus only on the clinical aspects of the examination. We aim to use the space offered by this conclusion to lobby for the development of a more enlightened approach to post-mortem, one that acknowledges the centrality of care and emotion. The chapter examines the sensory and sensitive nature of the research on which this book is based, offering suggestions on how researchers can successfully navigate emotions in research. As is shown throughout the book, while baby loss occurs to individual mothers and fathers, both parental and professional experience of this loss are profoundly shaped and mediated by the social. The conclusion draws to a close, therefore, by reflecting on the classic sociological relationship between the individual and society.

Experiences of anxiety, concerns about risk and threat and powerful moral panics make up some of the most significant collective emotional experiences shaping contemporary life in our globalised, mediatised age. This introductory chapter argues that the fast-changing and deeply unequal context of South Africa requires a reconsideration of assumptions about how people and societies process risk and fear and the effect that these states have on how we live. Drawing on the work of theorists like Zygmunt Bauman (2007, 2006), Chas Critcher (2011), David Altheide (2002) and Sara Ahmed (2014), it discusses the idea of the culture of fear and make an argument for the importance of taking emotion seriously as a collective and political practice. It considers how ideas around risk, anxiety (social rather than psychoanalytic) and moral panic, emerging as they do from theorists based in Europe and America, largely fail to take the global south into account. The chapter suggests an outline for a renegotiation of these categories of theory and illustrates the way in which the book’s case studies are part of this new critical agenda. The chapter ends by introducing the four case studies and outlining some of the connections and equivalences between them. The chapter also argues for the relevance of localised cultural analysis as a way of drawing conclusions about the intersection of identity, emotion and politics in South Africa.

In the course of the 1970s, Britain’s relative economic decline triggered by the end of empire mutated into a full-blown crisis of hegemony spilling over into the political and cultural domains, thoroughly destabilising capitalist rule. Unprecedented fissures as well as unexpected solidarities would become distinctive features of this period, as men and women from all backgrounds were thrust into the struggle over the future direction of society. This chapter documents the new utopian projects of socialist transformation that emerged, and the infrastructures and ideas that animated them. At times, these projects moved well beyond the logic of Labourism to realise the desire of oppressed and exploited people of all colours to live a life of happiness and contentedness. It also maps the simultaneous break from the neoliberal right initiated by Powell and realised by Margaret Thatcher in her capture of the Conservative Party leadership. Her subsequent victory in May 1979 would launch the most concerted attack on the organised working class since the 1920s, undermining the organisational infrastructure that sustained the politics and language of class and socialism. By recovering this hidden history in its complex and contradictory totality, this chapter shows that the transformation of Britain from a Fordist model of capitalist accumulation to a more flexible regime of accumulation that we now understand as neoliberalism was not inevitable. Rather, it was dependent upon extinguishing a counter-hegemonic project that crystallised in the form of an emergent multi-ethnic politics of class. This is why we understand neoliberalism as a capitalist counter-revolution.

This new introduction reflects on developments in the two decades since the publication of the book in 2000. It describes the profound changes in the international legal sphere, notably the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, intractable conflicts that have weakened the authority of multilateral institutions and the growth of right-wing populism. The chapter questions the overall optimism about the power of international law to improve the lives of women manifest in the book and emphasises the ambivalence of the international legal order for women. The chapter starts by considering the meaning of the term ‘feminist analysis’ and then moves on to review some of the history of feminist engagements with international law, observing that the international sphere has long provided a beacon of hope for women. Its focus is an area that had barely emerged when Boundaries was published: the UN Security Council’s ‘women, peace and security’ (WPS) agenda, which commenced with resolution 1325 adopted in October 2000. This field illustrates a pattern of apparent normative progress, which is undermined by gendered institutional cultures. The most acceptable feminist ideas internationally have been increasing the participation of women and combating violence against women, although these have faced many hurdles. It has been even more difficult to achieve normative and cultural change to support transformative equality for women, or an international legal order where issues of sex and gender and other structural inequalities are given sustained attention and adequate resources for achievement.

Statehood is fundamental to traditional international legal doctrine. This chapter investigates the international legal notion of statehood, the doctrine of recognition, aspects of statehood, such as jurisdiction and state responsibility, as well as the concept of self-determination as a way to acquire statehood. It points to the invisibility of women in the formation and application of these legal principles and studies their impact on women’s lives. The chapter examines self-determination and Palestinian women. The chapter challenges the standard idea that the state is a neuter, without a sexed identity and argues that the paradigm state is constructed in a gendered way, as male, with female features only in specific contexts. It considers ways in which the state could be reconceived using feminist ideas.