The Introduction tackles biases and lacunae in recent discussions about the effects of economic globalization on the world-literary circulation of texts. I highlight three arguments (Ph. Cheah, A. Mufti, E. Apter) that dismiss world literature as a procedure of exchange for surrendering to “neoliberal global capitalism” and confront them with the observation that even the critique of this systemic correlation loses sight of spaces other than that of the Euro-Atlantic world system (D. Ganguly, F. Orsini). Against this background, the Introduction claims that the political economy of world literature offers a more complex picture even within the confines of European capitalist modernity if we recognize the diversity of economic discourses surrounding its early theories. First, I attempt to historicize and diversify the notion of “the economy” by addressing semantic oscillations in the notions of ecology, circulation, and commerce. Then I outline the five “designs of circulation” the individual chapters will address and make preliminary suggestions about their pre-, non-, or anti-capitalist elements.

This chapter examines fifty years of state-led industrial reform in the Indian tea industry with an eye to how, where, and by whom notions of transparency were deployed and contested. For nearly 100 years, from the mid 1800s to Indian independence in 1947, tea was produced in India and shipped to London for valuation, auctioning, blending, and consumption. In the early 1950s, India’s new independent bureaucracy worked to make visible the workings of the colonial tea industry. They expanded India’s tea auction infrastructure, including the storage and transportation of tea. Central to this challenge to the opacity of colonial governance was the establishment of small, governable regional auction centers across India. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these regional auction centers had come to be seen by Indian bureaucrats and regulators as sites of invisible, corrupt dealings. This chapter, then, juxtaposes post-independence reforms of the 1950s with more recent attempts to re-spatialize the tea trade: to move it out of regional auction centers and onto a nationwide trading platform, all in the name of transparency.

How did early modern women and their families know they were pregnant? Childbearing guides of the period suggested that married women could know they were pregnant very soon after sex, and was related to moral and sexual continency. Women were encouraged to ‘keep accounts’ in their paperwork of their health and bodies, both as a tool to discover pregnancy quickly and as part of the broader culture of Protestant self-examination. Writing about conception and pregnancy sought to impose certainty on what was otherwise an ambiguous experience. Since keeping good accounts and records was linked to piety, orderly gendered labour and status, these records became examples of the respectability of families more broadly.

Newspaper obituaries of political figures are a distinctive, deeply British genre of political writing, yet one rarely examined. These obituaries trace the rise and fall of British newsprint around the turn of the millennium, a time when newspapers gained new freedoms in technology and politics, briefly flourishing before the internet signalled their decline. Traditionally, obituary writers were anonymous, though by the 1980s, an ‘obituarial turn’ reshaped the genre, widening its scope to include a broader range of lives and details. Obituaries began to embrace anecdotes, highlighting personal quirks and scandals, and thus reflected a broader shift in mores. A central paradox defines the genre: though obituaries appear authoritative in respected newspapers, they are subject to the editorial biases of the day. Shifts in editorship and political climates can reshape reputations, subtly influencing public memory. In the print era, obituaries seemed permanent, existing as clippings and archives. However, the digital age has transformed them: limitless online space has made their reach wider but less impactful. Today, obituaries serve not only as end-points but as starting points for biographical reflections on political lives.

The value of an international energy internship is multifaceted. It serves as a critical growth opportunity for the student, who experiences the professional applications of his or her classroom learnings and develops an understanding of the challenges and solutions evident in different countries’ political, socioeconomic and cultural frameworks. It also provides a potential post-graduation career entry point, through access to an international network of professionals and by showcasing career paths within the sector. Beyond the impact for the student, these internships also pay dividends for host companies in the energy sector, by injecting cutting-edge knowledge from the students’ academic studies and cultural perspective they bring. As students return to campus from their international experiences, their new perspectives frame their understanding of the dynamic energy ecosystem and the different types of energy solutions needed in different contexts. These experiences position students to shape meaningful and successful careers in this new and evolving energy future.

In Chapter 5, we examine whether Black and non-Black elected officials differ in their discussion of what Mansbridge (1999) describes as uncrystallized issues. Mansbridge (1999) argues that uncrystallized political issues are those which have not been on the political agenda for very long and politicians have not yet taken public stances. As a result, uncrystallized issues provide another good avenue to explore whether Black elected officials engage in more proactive racial rhetorical representation than non-Black elected officials. While Mansbridge’s (1999) hypothesis was theoretical, in Chapter 5 we set out to empirically assess whether descriptive representatives are the most likely to speak out on Black centered uncrystallized issues. We find empirical support for Mansbridge’s (1999) uncrystallized issues hypothesis using the hand coding of race-based appeals in press releases during the 114th through 116th Congresses and a case study of press releases and Tweets discussing racial health disparities in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I argue that the Qin and Han legal system excessively punished administrative errors as crimes. Performance-oriented legislation criminalized a large number of officials, including those industriously devoted to their jobs. Excessive punishments made officials guilty of administrative errors suffer the same bodily pain and economic loss as those who caused serious harm to society with intentional violence. This legal practice can be traced to its philosophical roots in Shang Yang and Han Feizi, who eloquently articulated the effectiveness of performance-based law and severe punishments. They asserted that heavy punishments aim to create a crime-free utopia. However, I demonstrate that when brutal instrumentalism and idealism were applied to real-world politics, they generated a monstrous legal system that distorted justice. Resentment arose against the law, and sympathy developed for the condemned. This prominent and unjust problem triggered heated criticism, but no legal reforms ever occurred. This chapter shows the dangerous application of perfectionism in the real world and explains some historical roots of the long-standing Confucian tradition against rule by law.

Chapter 1 revisits Goethe’s endorsement of a “free trade of sentiments and ideas” in the light of the free trade discourses of his age. First, I dissect these discourses’ complexity and doctrinal incoherence in eighteenth-nineteenth-century British, French, and German political economy. Then I explore the ambivalences in Goethe’s vague suggestion about a free trade world literature by addressing his peculiar attitude to commerce, his reminiscences of the administrative economics of Cameralism based on the heritage of the self-sustaining Aristotelian household, his aversions to modern finance, and his nostalgia for the medieval trade fair. Based on these decidedly antiquated considerations informing his understanding of the mediums, sites, and agents of commercial and intellectual exchange, I suggest that as opposed to Marx’s approach to world literature as an offspring of modern industrial capitalism, Goethe’s views were bound up with pre-modern merchant capitalism.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Social scientists’ writing, in general, is directed at their academic peers. Not all social scientists seek wider forms of influence, but between the early 1960s and the late 1980s those that did so had access to a mass-circulation weekly, New Society, designed specifically, in the words of its long-time editor Paul Barker, to ‘bridge the gap between thinkers and policy makers’. Our chapter examines how social scientists conceptualised writing as a practice in Britain between the 1960s and the 1980s, asking how they understood the challenge of writing to influence a non-specialist audience – whether that be Barker’s policymakers or the wider public. To do so, we draw on two main sources: the UK Data Archive’s ‘Pioneers of Social Research’ interview collection, and the pages of New Society (1962–88) itself. We use the ‘Pioneer’ interviews to explore why social scientists were drawn to write for New Society and how they viewed such writing, and we offer case studies of three frequent New Society contributors: the planner Peter Hall, and the sociologists Ann Oakley and Ray Pahl. We ask what techniques each social thinker developed to popularize their ideas and examine how their contributions interacted with the broad format of New Society.