In the Coda, I revisit the book’s main themes from non-European perspectives. I suggest that as much as the notion of world literature and the comparative philological apparatus underlying it were conceived and elaborated in European criticism upon late-enlightenment encounters with Oriental literatures, the reception of non-European economies played a comparable role in shaping European discourses of world literature. Directly or indirectly, each design discussed in previous chapters resonated with or drew on non-European conceptions of exchange, wealth, and property (or, rather, what was perceived as such in the encounters). These include the Oriental “bazaar economy”, the anthropology of the gift in pre-modern communities, the isolationist policies of Edo-period Japan, the cult of the indigenously produced in pre-industrial societies, and the dissolution of commons in colonial land reform. Based on these comparisons, the conclusion offers tentative suggestions about a global political economy of world literature.

This chapter elaborates the relevant policy implications of the new theory of sufficientarian justice, the umbel view, as it has been developed in the course of the book. The chapter begins by defining political deficiencism as its general political guideline. Political deficiencism says that political institutions should, other things equal, be designed to identify and minimize justice-relevant deficiencies. The chapter then argues that this implies a special focus on making cluster-breaking policies in reference to manifest deficiencies, that policies should be particularly accountable for the needs of the worst off in society, and that policies should take account of the important ways in which money matters. From this, the chapter proceeds to consider what the umbel view implies for three specific social policy issues: Universal basic income, health inequality, and extreme wealth. The chapter argues that the umbel view is well equipped to give plausible and progressive political guidance on all these issues, and that sufficientarianism, therefore, presents a sound a viable plan for political reform.

In the sixth chapter of the book, we use structured topic modeling to identify the number of different ways that elected officials speak about race in their press releases and tweets. This analysis allows us to explore what the most salient topics around racial rhetorical representation are in a pivotal period for racial politics (2015-2021). It also allows us to determine whether descriptive representatives engage in a more diverse array of racial outreach in terms of the number of Black centered topics they speak about in each session in press releases and on Twitter. Given that Black elected officials engage in both proactive and reactive racial representation at greater rates than non-Black elected officials, they also engage in racial rhetorical representation in significantly more categories than non-Black elected officials.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.

This chapter develops and defends a novel framework for a theory of sufficientarian justice. The chapters argues that a multiple-threshold framework is the best candidate for a theory of sufficientarian justice, and that such a framework is most theoretically plausible when combining central elements from existing theories. This combined framework adopts the idea of “shift thresholds” from Liam Shields’ shift sufficientarianism, the idea of vertically organized thresholds from Robert Huseby’s multiple level sufficientarianism, and the idea of horizontally separate spheres of justice-relevant values from Axelsen and Nielsen’s spheric sufficientarianism. In conjunction, these elements lay the foundation for a new theory of sufficientarian justice, which the chapter calls, the umbel view. The umbel view requires that no one is left with insufficient in any sphere of justice relevant value, which implies absolute priority to securing basic needs, indeterminacy in the non-basic space of incommensurable value spheres, and complete indifference to inequalities when, but only when, no one is below any relevant threshold.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Conservative Party and its intellectual publications from the 1940s to the 1970s, with a focus on articles, books, and pamphlets on Conservative ideas. The 1940s were formative, as Conservatives debated the importance of political writing, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) as the party’s in-house publisher. This allowed the Conservatives to position themselves as intellectual competitors to the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. The 1950s marked a high point, with groups like the One Nation and the Bow Group publishing influential works through the CPC, helping R. A. Butler establish a semi-independent framework for Conservative publications. However, from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, Conservative publishing became fragmented and was subjected to the ‘market test’. Under Edward Heath, a shift towards technocratic and market-oriented views weakened the CPC’s role in publishing ideological content.During the Thatcher era, Conservatives embracing neoliberalism saw the party as intellectually strong, but a shift towards relying on the publications of external think-tanks resulted in the narrowing of the field of Conservative writing and publishing.

This chapter examines how growing policy portfolios and administrative burdens affect environmental and social policy implementation in Denmark. Despite Denmark’s relatively modest overall policy growth, local environmental authorities face increasing overload, resorting to policy triage where tasks are postponed or selectively neglected. By contrast, central environmental agencies—the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Nature Agency, and Energy Agency — experience similar expansions in policy tasks but display minimal triage due to greater resource mobilization opportunities and a strong sense of policy ownership. In social policy, national agencies likewise show no triage despite decentralized responsibilities for unemployment and welfare programs. Notably, municipal job centers also avoid triage despite rising task complexity, leveraging clear political attention, central–local consultation, and reimbursement schemes that encourage sufficient funding. Taken together, these findings underscore that policy expansion does not uniformly result in triage. Instead, blame-attribution structures, resource mobilization channels, and organizational commitment determine whether implementers can compensate for chronic overload.