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.

This chapter examines how elite women used writing to establish expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Beatrice Webb (1858–1943). It considers the early work as a social investigator that she undertook before marrying the prominent Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The Webbs’ co-authored political writings are well-studied by historians, and Beatrice’s diaries and autobiography interest feminist scholars – this chapter combines these perspectives. It explores how Beatrice sought public recognition through writing, analysing her choice of topics, styles, and intended audiences. It also considers paths she avoided, shaped by the constraints of a woman writing on traditionally ‘masculine’ issues. Beatrice’s personal archive, particularly her diary, reveals her pursuit of influence and expertise on social and economic matters, from low wages to state welfare reform. Her approach highlights the challenges female authors faced when entering male-dominated genres like political economy. A final section discusses her autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1926), which became an authoritative account of the Victorian era. This work deepens our understanding of how Beatrice’s identity evolved as a writer and illustrates the complex relationship between gender, authorship, and expertise in political writing.

This conversation draws on an online discussion involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of the Brô MC’s duo, and Kunumi MC (a.k.a. Owerá). The Brazilian rap movement began in São Paulo in late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists, among them DJ Thaide and Racionais MC’s. As in other countries, Brazilian rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. Racionais MC’s focus on youth life in the peripheral areas of urban São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil. Performing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese, Brô MC’s emerged in 2009 as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, speaking to the violence and racism against Indigenous peoples that are particularly intense in the region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

The Conclusion summarises the arguments of the book and points to the anxieties that male and female family members felt about childbearing and their efforts to impose order on it. Childbearing was habitually represented as women’s work in prescriptive and personal writings. This was because this fitted with an idealised model of gendered domestic labour. However, male family members invested considerable financial, emotional and bodily energy into securing positive procreative outcomes. This was in equal parts motivated by the centrality of childbearing to male status and honour, and by its prominence in larger familial narratives about godliness and fruitfulness. The Conclusion suggests the important implications this has for history of medicine and everyday life in early modern England.