Scholars of Chinese history are well acquainted with the use of convict labor in constructing infrastructure, serving in armies, erecting monuments, and aiding in the establishment of settlements in newly acquired territories. This chapter explores the role of convict labor in local government. I argue that convict laborers were integrated as essential aides to officials. While they were exploited as both objects and instruments to sustain the political economy, convicts simultaneously occupied crucial roles in operating the governmental apparatus and administering the populace. The local administrative space functioned as an open prison. Despite the brutality inherent in the exploitation of convict labor, the unearthed administrative documents masked the grim reality, projecting a veneer of civilized order onto this group. Legal statutes and administrative records granted bureaucrats and scribe–functionaries the authority to control convicts; paradoxically, these same documents also subjected the bureaucrats and scribe–functionaries to scrutiny. Failure to meet expected job performance standards could result in criminalization, turning these officials into convicts themselves.

This book benefits from weaving together intellectual history and political and legal history, illuminating legal practices through the lens of philosophical ideas and re-examining philosophical ideals within the tapestry of historical experience. As the title From Utopia to Serfdom suggests, this approach uncovers profound paradoxes within the political and legal practices of early Chinese empires. Contemporaries keenly observed the hardships these legal practices imposed on the population and called for change. However, reforms either were never initiated or failed to fundamentally alter the core practices. The legal practices of early Chinese empires, which often distorted the concept of justice, were not arbitrarily devised to serve the absolute power of the throne, as some scholars have claimed. Rather, they were frequently grounded in a utopia complex and perfectionism in classical Chinese thought. A deeper exploration of these ideals, along with the evolving notions of justice and sovereignty, is essential to fully grasp their impact on Chinese history, particularly on its political and legal culture and practices.

Is solidarity possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI? If not, why not? To answer these questions, I inquire into the emergence of solidarity in two historical cases. The first maps German coal and steel workers’ resistance to exploitation during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The second case explores resistance and community formation by the Maroon, a group of fugitive plantation slaves in eighteenth-century Suriname. I analyse these cases with the help of four heuristic elements: (1) communal living of labourers entailed by the industrialization of a new technology (steam powered industry and slavery-powered plantation agriculture), (2) under-regulation of ensuing labour relations, (3) the emergence of resistant proto-law amongst labourers and (4) the response of repressive-appeasing law by owners and the state. I extract two necessary attributes of solidarity: the sharing of a physical place by labourers forming a community in solidarity, and the location of that place on the inside of a politics of exploitation. I conclude that cybernetics, digitalization and AI undercut the preconditions for solidarity, as they eradicate the sharing of a physical place on the inside of exploitation politics.

Emperors generally did not worry that pardoning crimes and revoking associated punishments would constitute an injustice to victims or erode the legality of the law, as sovereignty was often understood not only in relation to the body politic but also through the framework of parenthood. When individuals of flesh and blood were translated into aggregations of nameless parts of a unity which was represented by the emperor, the suffering inflicted on the victims and the suffering inflicted on offenders by punishment were metaphysically equivalent – both were detrimental to the whole body. Whereas the emperor punished offenders primarily to maintain the order of the whole, he could also pardon offenders on behalf of his people – the parts of the whole – if it served the interests of his empire. Furthermore, Han emperors also claimed to be the mother and father of their subjects, whose compassion compelled them to grant imperial amnesties to all under Heaven. Therefore the justice that protected individual interests was required to be compromised with mercy and love. However, frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale directly paralyzed the justice system.

This chapter asks how newborns were cared for and charts the formulaic regimen of encouraging babies to cry, watching them change colour, cutting their navel cord, searching their bodies for impediment, bathing them, swaddling them, putting them down to sleep and, finally, suckling them. Medical guides imagined that it would be mothers that did this care, but middling and elite families often hired nurses to manage this laborious regimen. These individuals were often already servants or recommended by family or friends. In the period, servants and others residing within the household were called ‘family’. In this way, making babies was a family project, albeit one in which family members did not have equal stakes and one in which mothers’ and other women’s procreative work was often subsumed within everyday expectations of domestic labour. Although nurses and others who carried out infant care were sought carefully, details about their lives and perspectives are often hard to find in family paperwork, which was often more interested in what procreative experiences said about the family and its name, rather than valuing others’ work.

In the conclusion, we speak about the growing significance of racial rhetorical representation in demonstrating that elected officials are working on behalf of their constituents in an era of increasing political gridlock. We also connect our findings to the continued importance of Black representation in a period where the salience of race and racial inequality has grown. Not only do we find that Black legislators provide Black people with the most rhetorical representation on race, we also find that they are more proactive, speaking out on issues that are not widely known and pursuing interests that are not yet part of the national agenda. Black elected officials continue to play a crucial role in advocating for Black interests, and they appear necessary for the full and equal representation of Black people. We then discuss why this advocacy is particularly important in a period where debates over crucial policies face political reckonings. For example, the advocacy behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act which has been challenged in court and expires in 2032 will likely shape Black politics into the future. We also address whether racial rhetoric will continue to be enough to voters of underrepresented groups who yearn for federal legislation to address critical societal disparities. We conclude the chapter by discussing how the Democratic Party notably has liberalized with regards to race since the 1990s and we contend that the racial advocacy by Black members of Congress is behind this liberalization.

This chapter outlines the empirical strategy for studying policy triage, which occurs when limited administrative resources and growing policy stocks force agencies to prioritize certain implementation tasks over others. To measure policy triage, the analysis distinguishes between triage frequency and intensity. These dimensions together provide a nuanced assessment of overall implementation performance. The chapter also details the theoretical predictors of policy triage: whether central policymakers can shift blame for failures, whether implementing agencies can mobilize external resources, and whether they are internally committed to achieving policy goals despite resource constraints. To test these claims, the research design focuses on two policy areas — environmental and social policy — across six countries representing diverse administrative traditions. Data collection involves secondary document analysis and 157 expert interviews with implementation officials. By systematically capturing both formal and informal organizational practices, this methodology reveals the complex trade-offs inherent in modern public administration and underscores how different political and organizational conditions jointly shape policy triage.

Chapter 2 describes convict politics at the central court. Former convicts were entrusted with power, serving as important officials or even chancellors. Approximately twenty percent of recorded high officials throughout the two centuries of the Western Han had once been condemned; some of them even received the death penalty but managed to reascend to the center of politics. At the same time, officials easily fell foul of the law and became convicts themselves. In a high-risk job, approximately forty percent of high officials, during their tenure, were accused of violating the law and received punishments ranging from hard labor to the death penalty. Severe tension emerged between the nature of the law and the status of convicts, between the lawful and the guilty, and between the philosophical elaboration on the treatment of criminals and the actual practice.

The Introduction locates transparency in the global governance of agriculture and mineral supply chains. It proposes an analytical focus on the mediations of transparency to tackle the paradox of transparency, a process of mediation that incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation. This helps to investigate transparency beyond the normative and substantive assessment of its implementation. Rather than assuming that transparency is itself transparent, we ask: What are the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency? How is transparency standardized, regimented by “ethical” and “responsible” businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? Acknowledging that transparency is a global value, we question how transparency projects materially organize and semiotically regiment the global production and circulation of commodities across local settings. Focusing on moments and processes of mediation toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth, we introduce how the chapters render transparency observable across sites, actors, institutions, and technologies.

Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous art is rising both in production by and public recognition of artists such as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell, Naine Terena and Daiara Tukano. Indigenous literature is also becoming increasingly visible with writers such as Daniel Munduruku, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Eliane Potiguara and Julie Dorrico. These trends have opened new spaces for a ‘contest of imaginaries’, expanding possibilities for Indigenous rights. For Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, racism is often connected to land and resource control. So anti-racism often takes the form of a struggle to defend ancestral territories and livelihoods, often associated with the ‘multiplication of differences’, opposing monocultures of all kinds and promoting the creation of spaces for the similarities in life and struggle that connect people across differences. First we give an overview of Brazilian Indigenous movements since the 1970s, introducing recurring themes that have concerned writers and artists. Then we describe the development of contemporary Indigenous literature and visual art in Brazil and their relation to anti-racism, with extended case studies from the Brazilian Amazon and the northeast region.