Medieval economic theorists developed a theory of the just price – that is, a theory about what the fair or just price for any commodity should be. Nowadays the idea seems odd, since prices are set by markets. But is it that odd? For we still have strong intuitions about the wrongness of exploitation of labour, or the immorality of exchanges undertaken under duress. The central question of this chapter concerns what a plausible theory of business or economic ethics should say about prices and pricing behaviour. What should it tell us about the price of goods and of labour? We argue that the moral leeway approach helps us to strike a balance between the insights of both economics and ethical theory.

Eliot's ‘waste land’ is over a century old – but the ‘heap of broken images’ (1922: l. 22) that strung together the poetry of its desolation seems particularly apposite for a contemporary tale of ‘memory and desire’. This book must therefore begin in April 2022, telling the tale of yet another cruellest month.

‘Bulldozers in Performance, Police in the Audience’

On a Wednesday morning of that Indian summer – a hundred years away from Eliot's England – the predominantly Muslim residents of a North Delhi neighbourhood in Jahangirpuri woke up to news of the local municipal corporation's ‘encroachment demolition’ drive in their area. Almost all of them had been staying in the locality for decades, occasionally with members of their families migrating in search of work from districts in West Bengal and subsequently silting up their lives around small shops and cart-stalls attached to the houses.1 When, in December 2019, an amendment to India's citizenship laws inserted religion as a determining factor in the apportioning of citizenship rights – and specifically sought to exclude Muslims from the ambit of the legal claims-making process2 – these Jahangirpuri residents came to be publicly maligned as ‘illegal migrants’ from Bangladesh or as Rohingya refugees (Hossain 2022; A. Kumar 2022). The ruling Hindu right-wing government which authored the amendment was unsurprisingly also in charge of the local municipal body.

Chapter 6 turns to the Parliament as a newly created space for political negotiation. It considers the election and appointment of non-Muslim representatives and the debates surrounding their communities. This chapter revisits the issues discussed earlier in the book to assess how far they were addressed and reshaped in the parliamentary setting. It also explores the interplay between Islamic legal principles and constitutional law, reflecting broader struggles over inclusion and equality. The positions of both pro- and anti-constitutional ʿulamaʾ are analyzed, along with the legislative compromises that emerged from these debates. The chapter concludes with the dissolution of the Second Parliament in 1911, which brought disillusionment and a partial withdrawal of support for the movement among some non-Muslim communities. It compares the experiences of Bahaʾis, Armenians, and Parsis who lost hope in the Parliament. It provides an analytical review of the Constitutional Revolution and Parliament using Lefebvre’s ideas.

This chapter first situates the book’s argument in the context of two global phenomena: The proliferation of hybrid regimes and the diffusion of court-centric constitutionalism. It then shows why a normative look at constitutional courts in hybrid regimes is an important but overlooked topic in the literature. Next, the operating assumptions of the book are specified, and basic terms are defined, including constitutional courts and democracy. The chapter concludes by offering a roadmap of the book.

“What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” asks Achille Mbembe in his seminal essay, “Necropolitics” (2003, 12). While the chapters of the preceding part on “Life from Death” explored what we might call the living end of a necropolitical spectrum – Mbembe’s “subjugation of life to the power of death” (ibid., 39); bare, cruddy, abandoned, and precarious life – this part focuses more squarely on the dead (the necro) themselves as vessels of power, value, and signification. That is, on the production of power through the material destruction, or in some cases, fastidious management of human remains, from disinterred coffins to petri dishes of pulverized bone fragments, as well as of their memory. This is not to suggest these discussions are separate – on the contrary, as that’s the very argument Mbembe makes. It’s also a point Ruth Toulson explores in her ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (2024). Informed by that work, our choice to place these two parts back to back reinforces their theoretical and thematic connections and acknowledges the forks in the road of scholarship whereby applications of necropolitics have at times followed different, unconnected routes.

In the first half of the nineteenth century a great deal of polemical writing on religious issues was published, notably from two radical groups within English Christianity. Both groups aimed ‘to make religion a living power in a cold and gloomy age’, but adopted very different approaches, expressed not only in formal theological treatises but also in more ‘popular’ formats such as the periodical press. John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey – leaders of the Oxford Movement that emerged in the 1830s – tried to bring their own imagined version of the Middle Ages into the Church of England: a ‘vision glorious’ that to many smacked of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, others, who might be described as ‘evangelical’ (such as Edward Bickersteth, ‘the Keble of Victorian Evangelicalism’, or the charismatic Edward Irving), insisted on their own understanding of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In this chapter it will be demonstrated that the Late Modern English lexicons of both groups were profoundly impacted by Romanticism, as expressed most comprehensively in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.