This chapter investigates why people join pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators –that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships. Joiners also critiqued CEC’s focus on civility, which they believed undercut the effectiveness of the campaign.

The third way that populations change size is migration. People may be added to a population by moving into it or subtracted from it by moving away from it. Unlike a birth and a death, which only occur to us once in our lifetimes, migration may occur to us on multiple occasions, or not at all. There are two main types of migration: internal migration, that is, within a country, and international migration, that is, between countries. Internal migration is the change of permanent residence within a country, involving a geographical move that crosses a political boundary, usually a county or county-type geographical unit. Not all changes in residence are migrations. To be an internal migrant, the mover must cross a jurisdictional boundary, usually a county, when changing residences; if the person moves to a new residence in the same county, they are referred to as a mover, but not as a migrant.

Whether one is looking at the planet Earth or at the United States or at Texas, it is clear that the population is far from being equally distributed. Most of the people in China and the United States live in the eastern sections, but the distribution in China is far more concentrated in the eastern half of the country, where 90 percent of the population resides. In the United States, considerably more than 10 percent of the population resides in the western half of the country, unlike the situation in China. In some countries, people are more likely to be rural than urban dwellers. Generally, however, there is an urbanization movement throughout the world. This chapter is especially concerned with examining how the inhabitants of the world are distributed, and how most of them have become city dwellers rather than cave dwellers, as was the case thousands of years ago.

This chapter explains why oil companies recently started to embrace citizen mobilization after a long history of avoiding such outreach. It shows that while the coalescing climate movement and the availability of new online tools for organizing have played important roles in this shift, the proliferation of new government forums for citizen input in the regulation of fossil fuel projects has been the core driver of the industry’s new approach.

This chapter first discusses age composition, that is, how a population is divided among children, young and middle-aged adults, and older adults. Aging is a biological process, but there are many social expectations associated with certain ages, referred to as age-grading. There are minimum ages, for example, for starting school; for obtaining a driver’s license; for voting; and for qualifying for Social Security and Medicare. The US Constitution specifies minimum ages for members of Congress, and the presidency. People of the same age tend to have much in common because they have had similar experiences at similar ages. This chapter focuses specifically on the definition and measures of age and age distribution, the concepts of age heaping and age dependency, and population pyramids. It then turns attention to some of the issues posed by aging populations, including healthy aging, and lastly to the concepts of cohort and generation.

Profiling as Policy

At the height of the Non-Cooperation movement in 1921, supporters of the Congress harassed six men – all of them labourers – trying to enter a toddy shop in Vellandivalasu, Salem district. The violence was enough to deter four of the men, who promptly turned away from the premises. However, Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were determined to have their drink that day. Leaving the establishment later, Sowariappan was ‘garlanded and beaten with a shoe, and Innasi Muthu was garlanded and slapped on the cheeks’. The latter was reportedly so furious that he would have whipped out a knife in self-defence but for the number of assailants. Filtered through the perspective of colonial officials, this account noted that Innasi Muthu and Sowariappan were Dalit Christians and sympathised with the drinking public for the caste violence they had had to endure owing to Congress nationalism.

Excise records surfaced a distinctive administrative term towards the end of the nineteenth century: ‘the drinking public’. Akin to ‘the criminal tribes’, the term circulated through repeated usage, so much so that official correspondences often did not elaborate any further on the subject. As we have seen, drinkers came from every strata of society and drinking in public triggered a great deal of alarm. However, the drinking public meant something entirely different and very particular. Erected at the intersection of caste, class and gender identities, it referred to working-class men drawn from the lowest caste communities. In the Presidency of Fort St George, it also included tribal communities from the Nilgiris whom the state defined by their economic role as servants of the resident European community.

The family is an important topic for demographers because most of the time it is the family that is responsible for the production of the next generation. This chapter first undertakes a historical review of the family, its structure and form. The historical review is followed by an empirical depiction of the family today. The contemporary family has changed tremendously in the past 75 or so years. In 1960, almost 88 percent of children in the United States lived in two-parent families; in 2023 just over 71 percent of children lived with both parents. These days people marry later, fewer people marry, premarital cohabitation is normative, and over 40 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers.

The book’s final chapter returns to issues of transparency, arguing that so- called front groups tend to be open secrets of sorts, with their funders or founders rarely fully hidden from view. The chapter demonstrates that oil companies today are apt to use financial transparency as a strategic asset, framing themselves as amplifiers of citizen speech. As oil companies embrace a more open model of citizen organizing, critiques or policy interventions that call for exposing the sponsors of pro-oil campaigns see their relevancy wane. The chapter closes by exploring how scholars and environmental activists might use the empirical insights of previous chapters, particularly the top-down control, internal political fissures, and affective experience of risk by joiners in pro-oil campaigns, to create more just and effective grassroots interventions in climate politics.

This chapter introduces the reader to how the oil industry mobilizes political support from publics. It argues that historically, the sector has shied away from grassroots politics, or employed short-lived, financially secretive front groups. However, today this is changing. Oil firms’ contemporary outreach is apt to take the form of visible, far-reaching, and long-term campaigns that openly tout partnership between companies and citizens. This style of organizing troubles the neat binary between grassroots politics and corporate public relations. To address this, the chapter suggests we think of all political mobilization as “manufactured publics,” emphasizing the strategizing, labor, and mixture of interests inherent in all contentious political efforts. This theoretical lens allows us to explore both the affective realities of people who join pro-oil groups and the corporate interests that shape these campaigns.

The Introduction explains why nineteenth-century Cuba is a particularly rich context for studying racialism (the assumption that social hierarchies are based on the existence of races), racial doubt (those moments when this assumption gets questioned and racial differences seem less clear), and the different groups of racialized people who mobilized doubt as they worked to reinvent themselves and their society. It also shows how the analysis of the notions at the core of each chapter – racist agnosia, farce, passing-as-open-secret, fictions of racial coherence, back talk, and the reappropriation of Blackness – illuminates present-day critiques of color blindness. Finally, it explains why the book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on enslaved people’s testimonies and abolitionist writing that attacked illegal slavery by denouncing lies, falsification, and farce; the second one, on free people of color who wrestled with two “one-drop” rules (one which rendered a person not-white, the other which made them whiter); and the third one, on the emergence of Black Cuban writing.

Policies have complex lives and afterlives. They interact with contingent political and social agents and are mediated by their wider contexts, from the processes that inform their conceptualisation through their enforcement.1 Prohibition in India originated in the context of late colonialism. It took shape as an idea, became part of a mass movement and crystallised into an ideal before emerging as a policy with the Madras Prohibition Act of 1937. The ensuing interactions are best understood as constituting the long-term process of prohibitioning, wherein each phase of the policy's development simultaneously overdetermined and constrained its subsequent iterations. As we have seen, this formative experience also enabled prohibition to migrate from the colonial context to the postcolonial era, its origins illuminating crucial parallels and precedents for developments that followed the achievement of independence. Through all this, prohibition bore – indeed, has borne – the imprint of the interactions that produced it, which are discernible in its manifestations as an idea, ideal and policy. As much a history of the policy as it is a history of the Indian state, Sober State has presented a history of prohibitioning that rests on three related arguments.

First, we saw that prohibition emerged as a function of the exercise of state power by the colonial and nationalist states. The colonial state engaged with alcohol policy as a means to maintain power by achieving revenue maximisation and ensuring regulatory checks and balances at a time when said power was quickly slipping out of its hands. The nationalist leadership saw the prohibition demand as a trump card that would expose the colonial state's avarice and hypocrisy, while signifying a new and superior model of governance.

Three-Way Tango: Politics of Liquor Production

Any account of prohibitioning in the decades leading up to the Madras Prohibition Act would necessarily be incomplete without addressing the politics of alcohol production. Colonial officials and nationalist elites were interacting as much with one another and diverse segments of society as with liquor business interests to devise policies aimed at regulating drinking. The cumulative impact of the ensuing developments had a tremendous impact on prohibitioning by influencing the momentum towards the policy's introduction in 1937.

During the period in question, liquor businesses had to contend with mounting social pressure against their trade on the one hand and political manoeuvring by both the colonial government and the Congress leadership on the other. Whilst prohibition discourse cast drinkers as victims who could eventually be redeemed of their affliction and transformed into upstanding citizens, it painted the producers, distributors and retailers of alcohol unforgivingly and with a large brush stroke as traitors of the nation. ‘A number of Indian merchants, be it said to their shame,’ charged a letter that was published in The Hindu, ‘have taken up the merchandise of liquor to ruin their countrymen.’ The most spectacular anti-alcohol protests were, unsurprisingly, directed at toddy and arrack shop contractors.

The constraints imposed on liquor business interests by, first, the colonial establishment and, subsequently, the nationalist leadership were part of an overarching political contest to dictate the terms of liquor production. If the colonial government was concerned that the emergence of liquor monopolies would result in lowered revenue yields for the state, the nationalist leadership sought the right to altogether remove liquor production from the workings of the national economy.