This chapter approaches the concept of transparency by examining the work of secrecy and occlusion in trade. Exploring the role of secrets in the Indian Ocean sapphire trade, where exchange is based on arbitrage, it seeks to understand Sri Lankan and South Indian gem traders’ emic notions of what it means to conceal and reveal knowledge and to tease out their conceptions of ethical conduct in relation to secrecy. It asks: How do we conceptualize transparency in relation to a trade where practices of concealment and disclosure are folded into the gestural, embodied, and affective landscapes that make up everyday modalities of negotiation, brokerage, and arbitrage? How do such forms of withholding contribute to making gems move? What are the ethical landscapes within which certain forms of secrecy are permissible and expected? Reading trading secrets as a part of the craft of trade, the chapter seeks to reframe the assumption that a lack of transparency amounts to deception and examines instead how practices of occlusion facilitate trade.

In exploring the politics of corporate versus small-scale mining of rubies and the ongoing struggles over a potentially enormous rare earth element (REE) deposit, this chapter hinges upon a critical analysis of transparency, opacity, and the politics of sovereignty in a country that is increasingly framed as a synecdoche for climate change in this century. Recent decades have seen the growth of two emergent forms in the international aid industry: (1) transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) that endeavor to bring aid organizations in line with standard expectations around their operations; and (2) modest, small-scale do-it-yourself (DIY) aid projects that emerge from and depend on trusting relationships between benefactors and beneficiaries. This chapter considers the ambiguous coexistence of these forms, drawing from ethnographic research with a small-scale healthcare project in Madagascar to illustrate how DIY aid can be effective (for better or worse) despite operating outside the purview of TAIs.

This chapter examines Petrarch’s construction of a vocational narrative through his various writings (Secretum, De vita solitaria, De otio religioso, Coronation Oration, “Ascent of Mt. Ventoux”) and especially his letters (Familiares, Seniles). It focuses on the role played by family members (father Ser Petracco, brother Gherardo, son Giovanni) in his vocational choice and literary aspirations, and shows how he sought surrogate family members to realize his aspirations.

This chapter examines early modern expectations of delivery and recovery from childbirth by women. Medical manuals expected women would give birth painfully but without complication, stay in bed (or ‘lie in’) for a month, go to church to give thanks to God for their survival and then return to their normal selves. During this month, they were also expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. Examining doctors’ casebooks reveals that women often sought medical assistance for problems long after delivery. Certain postpartum ailments like breast problems were often perceived as untroubling in medical print, but paperwork reveals that this often meant women could not return to their normal selves for months after birth. Although prescriptive models contained in religious and medical print may have helped to frame women’s experiences of delivery and recovery, they rarely capture the reality of the emotional and bodily difficulties they faced.

In Chapter 3, we explore who provides Black centered racial rhetorical representation. This chapter allows us to first examine whether a link between descriptive and rhetorical representation, which has been absent in previous research on this topic (See Price 2016, Gillion 2016, Haines et al. 2019), has strengthened in recent years. In addition to this exploration, this chapter makes two important contributions to our understanding of race and rhetorical representation. First, we move beyond the Black-White paradigm and explore the rhetoric of Latino/a and Asian American elected officials. Second, rather than treating each racial/ethnic group as a monolith, we explore how the intersections of gender, class, educational attainment, and age within racial groups may shape levels of rhetorical representation. For example, do African Americans who attended a Historically Black College or University provide more rhetorical representation to co-racial individuals? Are White women more likely to engage in rhetorical representation than White men? By moving beyond the dichotomy of race (Junn and Brown 2012), we can explore the nuanced ways that individuals with various intersecting identities may provide different levels of rhetorical representation.

Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.

The traditional view that Chinese empires relied primarily on rituals and ceremonies while neglecting the role of law has been increasingly challenged. Archaeologically discovered sources show that sophisticated laws with meticulous procedures constituted the backbone of early Chinese empires. The Qin and Han dynasties were more “Legalist” than their counterpart in the West, the Roman Empire. This book revives the stories of the main operators within the imperial bureaucracy – technical bureaucrats (law implementers) and convict laborers – whose histories had been forgotten for nearly two millennia.Leveraging methodological innovations from the digital humanities, I have collected data on a large number of officials who were criminalized and later re-employed in officialdom. This discovery enables me to propose a new framework for examining Confucian criticism of law and legal practice in early China. The biographical database also transforms linear storytelling into multidimensional narratives and helps identify Confucian social networks otherwise hidden in current literature.

This chapter examines universal amnesty through a previously ignored lens of utopian discourse. Chinese scholars, particularly Confucians, articulated the ideal of a crime-free society as an intellectual foundation to support their teachings. However, their theoretical construct was appropriated by the Han emperors, who embraced this philosophical discourse as both an aspiration and a benchmark for their governance. Self-congratulatory emperors extolled their reigns as golden ages by granting amnesties, thereby temporarily transforming a tainted world plagued by wickedness into a realm devoid of criminals. Self-reflective emperors used frequent amnesties to acknowledge their inability to attain ultimate peace, promising a fresh start for their era as a way to secure their legitimacy. Contemporary scholars and officials recognized that frequent, widespread pardoning of criminals compromised the justice system. However, canceling crimes no longer merely aimed to pardon criminals but served as an instrumental strategy to re-establish a semblance of normality and thereby secure the legitimacy of the dynasty. To pursue a perfect society, Western Han politics became the enemy of good.

Argentina has a tradition of disavowed racism, with dominant narratives of the nation as racially homogenous due to mass European migration and the supposed disappearance of Indigenous, Black and mixed-race peoples. We argue that the arts have enabled critiques of the subtle ways that race is written into national identity. We analyse race and cultural production in Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, when critiques emerged of discourses of nationality articulated mainly around Europeanness. There are explicitly anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but, because of Argentina’s specific racial formation, we focus on cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people subject to an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have fostered strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. These multiple forms of artistic expression illustrate the shifting valences of race in Argentina in which racial diversity at times goes from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises, among the white middle and upper classes, paranoid fears about the Other that justify repression, but which also allow affective alliances in the face of racism.

The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.

Chapter 4 first tackles the early reception of the concept of Weltliteratur in German criticism. I argue that these discussions, informed by the emergent economic and cultural nationalism of the 1830s-40s, offered a protectionist critique of free trade cosmopolitanism. Based on the conviction that untrammelled exchange assisted the exploitation of less developed trading partners, protectionists such as Friedrich List agitated for the temporary restriction of imports in support of domestic productive forces. Echoing these doctrines, world literature was associated with an overgrown translation industry that advanced the expansion of already hegemonic foreign literatures, wiping out demand for home-grown products in budding national markets. This combination of commercial self-protection and cultural self-defence was taken up in wider regions of East-Central Europe, especially in Hungary. The second part of the chapter discusses the shifting positions of world literature in Hungarian criticism between the 1840s and 1860s, as represented by the work of János Erdélyi and Hugó von Meltzl and their alternate strategies of self-assertion and self-expansion from a minor-marginal position.

This chapter examines how Boccaccio, like Petrarch, initially hampered by his father in pursuing a literary career, wove the issue of filial freedom into several of his vernacular works (Filocolo, Ameto, De amorosa visione, Decameron) and in his Latin encyclopedia, the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. He deployed this theme to assert his “vocatio” (calling) by God to a literary life; launched it as a biographical trope in his Life and Character of Petrarch, influencing later biographies of Petrarch; and tied it to the fate of women, defending their right of marital choice and decrying forced monachization.

Early imperial officials, while enforcing the law, were paradoxically its victims too. They were keenly aware of the stark and ironic contrast between the theoretical design of the legal system and its practical enactment. The law’s meticulous statutes were designed to guide people on what to avoid, yet this led to an over-complication of the law such that commoners did not know what to avoid. The high performance mandated by the law to prevent negligence and laxity ironically ended up punishing those who were earnestly committed to their duties. The principle of assessing results according to predefined objectives was meant to hold officials accountable, but it ultimately stripped them of discretionary power and overlooked their intentions and efforts. Fearing the repercussions of absolute liability, officials might collectively resort to deceit. Furthermore, while severe punishments were intended to eliminate the need for future punishment and establish a crime-free utopia, they criminalized a vast swath of officials and commoners alike. Reforms aimed at simplifying the law were initiated by two different emperors, yet both seem to have failed.

This chapter explores the writings of working-class female activists during and after the 1984–85 miners’ strike, highlighting the numerous books and pamphlets produced that combined autobiography, group histories, photographs, and poetry. These works were primarily published by radical publishers, reflecting a boom in community publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, which sparked interest in working-class history and the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. The chapter investigates the writing and publication processes of these texts, as well as their intended audiences. It situates these works within a longer tradition of working-class autobiography and poetry, with roots dating back to the nineteenth century, often serving political purposes - such as the poetry inspired by the Chartist movement or the autobiographical accounts of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, like Maternity (1915) and Life As We Have Known It (1931).The chapter analyses the moral economy created by women’s strike literature, focusing on how personal narratives were used for political impact, even when the authors downplayed their political identities. It argues that through authentic expressions of personal experience and emotion, women sought to establish themselves as legitimate political actors, thus validating their political aspirations within the leftist discourse of the time.