This chapter examines the Italian humanist discourse on vocation in terms of two intersecting binaries: on the one hand, the competing demands of shame culture (as in Cicero’s De officiis) and guilt culture (as in Augustine’s Confessions); on the other, the interplay between individual humanists and the status and expectations of their families. The result was the first substantive articulation of the concept of secular vocation.

In Chapter 2, we rely on interviews with 29 communications directors in the U.S. House of Representatives to better understand the strategic considerations that influence their rhetorical outreach. Here we ask when and how do legislators, offices engage in proactive and reactive forms of rhetorical outreach? What shapes these decisions? And how does this vary by the race of the member of Congress? We demonstrate that proactive rhetorical outreach is a key component of most legislator offices’ communications strategies. In an effort to build favorable brands for their member, which is not only important in their efforts to appeal to their constituents but also to accrue influence in Congress, communications directors regularly engage in proactive rhetorical outreach. However, what they focus on in that outreach varies by office based on a host of variables, including legislator identity and constituency demographics. In that vein, we show that Black legislators regularly engage in proactive racial rhetorical representation and that their racial identity, along with the large presence of minority constituents in their district, help explain why. In contrast, though non-Black legislators engage in proactive rhetorical outreach, they tend to be more reactive in their racial rhetorical outreach.

Chapter 5 focuses on the notion of “common possession” (Gemeingut) in the formulas of world literature by Marx and Goethe. I suggest that their sense of collective possessiveness drew on the history of communal land ownership and its ramifications in German historical jurisprudence and Romantic philology. The chapter also claims that Goethe’s (conservative) scepticism about the liberal absolutization of private intellectual property formed an unlikely alliance with early socialist thought (Proudhon). On the other hand, the label “common good” attached to world literature in the Communist Manifesto not only resonated with Marx’s belief in the approaching dissolution of bourgeois property but also pointed at the ambivalent legal status of world-literary works before the internationalization of copyright. I argue that Karl von Savigny’s distinction between property and possession cuts across the legal history of world literature before and after the Berne Convention and signals a perpetual crisis of ownership in literary works.

The rise of right-wing populism has provoked a variety of responses. This chapter engages with one such response: Chantal Mouffe’s ‘left populism’. Mouffe’s call for an anti-essentialist, agonistic politics that can shift away from the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism which underpins right-wing populism is welcome. And yet our concern is that it risks being trapped by its reification of the nation-state. It may also miss the international dimensions of right-wing populism, including how forms of relation between states and corporations figure in its rise and stabilisation. We explore an approach which does not locate politics primarily as a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the state, but which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. We take up Featherstone’s account of transnational solidarity to frame a study of resistance to the Adani conglomerate. In our argument, this can be understood as an example of collective action not reliant on pre-existing (national) identities. Drawing on Featherstone’s account of solidarity as a lens invites us to consider whether transnational practices which decentre the state may offer resources to tackle the international aspects of populism’s rise, and the company-state nexus central to right-wing populism.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

Chapter 6 analyses the connections between trans-imperial labor migration and Ottoman industrial and urban modernization in the nineteenth century. In a context marked by the mechanization of industrial production through technology transfer, the increasing political-economic ties between the Ottoman and British states, and the scarcity of workers with mechanical skills in Istanbul, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work mostly in the arsenal, as well as some other state factories. This chapter narrates the history of these workers and the community they established in Hasköy beginning with the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. It analyses the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences in the workplace and the city. It demonstrates how their contentious relationship and effective struggles pushed the state authorities to deploy skilled military workers, who were the products of the processes described in the previous chapter, to decrease and eliminate its dependence on them.

In this chapter, I consider how transparency and gold are established and maintained as “global values” and how actors differently positioned within gold markets seek to align them, with greater and lesser degrees of success. I trace how this happens in three clusters of transparency projects: certification schemes and voluntary frameworks for mining companies; efforts to use blockchain technologies to increase transparency in the supply chain; and efforts to verify (and perform the verification of) gold’s presence in European central banks, especially the Deutsche Bundesbank. Exploring these specific sites where transparency and gold convene, both supporting and tugging against each other, allows us to consider transparency from a different angle than is found in many other discussions, viewing gold and transparency as engaged in competitive processes of value-making (and unmaking).

This chapter examines the vocational odyssey of the most famous humanist of the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, as he struggled to pursue a literary and creative life against the background (and sometimes obstacles) of his merchant natal family. It analyzes how he dealt with his vocational decision and aspirations in a variety of genres: a comedy (Philodoxus), dinner pieces (Intercenales), a treatise on the practical and moral features of learned professions (De commodis litterarum atque incommodis); consolatory and psychological dialogues (Teogenio, Della tranquillità dell’animo); his celebrated dialogue on the family (Della famiglia), in which he simulates paternal advice from his father and various surrogate fathers from within the family; and a treatise on vocational advice to the young (De iciarchia).

This chapter presents and discusses important challenges to sufficientarianism as a theory of distributive justice. First, the groundlessness objection claims that sufficientarianism cannot reasonably be grounding on any relevant value. Second, the outweighing priority objection says that sufficientarianism implausibly allows small benefits to people below the threshold to outweigh large benefits to people above it. Third, the indifference objection observes that sufficientarianism is counterintuitively indifferent to even significant inequalities above the threshold. Finally, the threshold problem refers to the difficulty in identifying and justifying the threshold. The chapter responds to all these objections and concludes that sufficientarianism is largely unmoved by them. The chapter argues that the response to the indifference objection uncovers a minor intuitive problem in relation to sufficientarianism’s ability to explain the asymmetry between benefit-driven and burden-driven inequalities at high levels. And, that the threshold problem is not in and of itself an objection to sufficientarianism but rather an essential part of the development of sufficientarian theory.

Chapter 3 investigates how military modernization and capitalist transformations converged to reorganize the labor force, understanding naval service as a form of military labor, and modern conscription as a modern form of labor coercion. Modern conscription promised the Ottoman elites the ability to employ workers with industrial skills for long periods in a more reliable disciplinary scheme, with wages far lower than the market. The chapter describes how the navy employed conscription as a tool to reduce dependency on civilian wage workers by deploying conscripts in both the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, and by devising a detailed scheme to militarize the labor force. Ottoman reformists systematically attempted to utilize modern conscription as a way to draft non-Muslim (mainly Greek) subjects from coastal areas, skilled in shipbuilding and naval crafts, as regular soldiers to the Ottoman navy. The chapter analyses the conscription process, introduces the profile of the military labor force in the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, the militarization plan and the attempts to conscript non-Muslims, and the impacts of resistance against naval conscription and the militarization plan.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 argue that the emergence of convict politics in the early Chinese empires was a direct result of the legal system producing a significant number of innocent convicts, thereby undermining the understanding of crime and criminality. Chapter 3 delves into the mutual-responsibility system – a major principle of legal practice from the Qin and Han dynasties through to the twentieth century. This system, aimed at deterring crime through the imposition of severe punishments to instill fear, inadvertently compromised justice. It led to openly punishing the lawful, including the families, neighbors, and friends of offenders. While effective in enforcing surveillance and procuring convict labor, the mutual-responsibility system underscored the absolute power of the throne, yet it distorted the relationship between crime and punishment and conflated moral standards. This systemic injustice sparked ongoing and fervent debates among scholars, officials, and even emperors. However, the bureaucratization of legal processes prevented any meaningful reform from happening.

The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.