Adopting a sociological perspective, Chapter 1 examines the rise of the professional public moralist and situates early India reformism among concurrent campaigns such as transatlantic abolitionism, free trade, and aboriginal protection. It addresses the reformers’ acquisition of social and symbolic capital, the possibilities for “link-ups” between groups, and the controversies that inhibited cooperation. Agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, for instance, clashed with the reformers over their approach to the abolition of indigenous slavery in India and their connections to the heterodox American Garrisonians. Delving into these conflicts demonstrates that early advocates of “conservationist” reform were an embattled lot, contending with the obstructionism of a reactionary Company-state and the derision of detractors within the metropolitan philanthropic community as well.

Chapter 2 probes early reformers’ modes of rhetoric. To raise awareness of distant injustices in the post-Emancipation era, they denounced the anomalous “virtual slavery” suffered by famine-stricken peasant cultivators, subordinated Indian princes, and the British working classes alike. This chapter clarifies how reformers were conceptualizing virtual slavery as an act of coercion and dehumanizing instrumentalization that was as injurious as chattel slavery. In so doing, they employed two rhetorical scripts: one that highlighted these virtual slaves’ degradation under colonial and monopolistic rule, and one that protested the conversion of native sovereigns into dishonored, disposable tools.

Chapter 7 delves into the reformers often-futile attempts to solicit potential non-official allies such as the Lancashire textile manufacturers and Anglo-Indian planters who sought access to raw cotton and land freeholds. While it initially seemed that the mobilization of the mill owners might deter arbitrary colonial governance, they failed to back the reformers’ radical efforts to alter India’s bureaucratic apparatus after the Uprising of 1857. Disappointed on a second front, reformers were also compelled to condemn the European planters whose exploitative tactics resulted in agrarian disturbances. As Manchester cotton lords in the 1870s continued to harp on the inequity of the colonial import duties levied on their textiles, reformers accused them of weaponizing free trade and stifling Indian competition. Recurrent famines also brought the efficacy of laissez-faire governance into question, which in turn led a faction within the East India Association to espouse a racialized variant of conservationism.

Amid the debates about the organization and unity of the church in third-century Carthage, Cyprian rose as a prominent and learned catechist. This chapter looks at several writings associated with basic education – Ad Donatum, Ad Quirinum, De dominica oratione – as well as letters from the ecclesiastical debates to shed light on the way these debates shaped approaches to teaching knowledge of God in catechesis.

This chapter argues that two Congresses coexist in Washington, DC. The partisan Congress, which receives the bulk of public and media attention, is characterized by polarization, gridlock, and partisan conflict. But there is also the collaborative Congress, in which members work together to find common ground. Chapter 1 draws on examples from media accounts, interviews with congressional staff, and a new dataset of congressional communications to illustrate what the collaborative Congress looks like in practice and introduce the central question of the book: Why do members of Congress collaborate? The discussion of collaboration is situated in the broader literature on Congress to explain why we know so little about it and why it matters. Conflict draws attention, and Congress is rife with highly visible disagreements, leaving little room for awareness of the members who are crafting policy through negotiation, compromise, and bipartisanship. But if the partisan Congress explains why Congress is broken, the collaborative Congress can help us understand why it works, improving Congress's capacity to legislate and address pressing societal problems.

As Christianity continued to transition from school churches to the monepiscopate, the role of hiddenness and openness in Christian teaching become an increasingly contested issue. Three writings associated with the so-called Hippolytan school – the Traditio apostolica, the Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, and De Christo et antichristo – shed light on the tensions between hiddenness and secrecy in baptismal instruction.

Chapter 6 examines the ways in which reformers and certain colonial agents were engaging with deindustrialization as an anomalous societal calamity. Many believed that prejudicial tariffs had resulted in the country’s exclusion from a system of “real” free trade, which in turn contributed to the near-collapse of the native handloom-weaving sector. Following initiatives first devised by the Bombay administration – which the Government of India quickly overruled – reformers hoped to stimulate alternative industries such as the cultivation and refinement of free-labor sugarcane. To provide immiserated weavers with agricultural employment on “fair” terms, they further advocated for radical tax reductions, challenged the state’s claim to be sole proprietor of all Indian lands, and publicly revealed its torturous revenue extraction practices. Reformers thereby held that mass poverty in a land as fecund as India could only be the result of European avarice and artificial constraints that inhibited trade.