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.

Germany’s traditionally robust public administration faces escalating challenges as policy portfolios expand, complexities increase, and resource allocations lag behind. This chapter examines how federal, state, and local authorities in the environmental and social sector cope with growing implementation burdens. While Germany’s federal structure can foster high-quality governance, it also enables policymakers to shift blame across levels. Consequently, local offices and agencies with weaker political leverage are especially vulnerable to overload. In the environmental realm, tasks increasingly cascade downward, forcing local authorities — frequently short-staffed — to engage in trade-offs that compromise monitoring and enforcement. By contrast, higher level bodies like state ministries and offices can still manage most obligations, typically deferring only nonmandatory or long-term planning. The German social sector displays a slightly different scenario: The Federal Employment Agency demonstrates strong resilience, leveraging flexible resources and effective crisis management, whereas the Pension Insurance and some regional welfare agencies struggle with increasing task loads. Despite generally moderate instances of policy triage, critical support and preventive planning are often neglected, fueling organizational frustration and jeopardizing long-term governance capacity.

This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

This chapter explores the pronounced divide in England’s environmental and social policy implementation, painting a highly diverse picture of policy triage across organizations. The Environment Agency, initially envisaged as an integrated “one-stop shop,” now exemplifies frequent and severe triage. Chronic underfunding, staff attrition, and politically induced blame-shifting in combination with ever-increasing workloads undermine its monitoring, enforcement, and crisis-preparedness functions. In contrast, most local authorities sustain only moderate triage levels, where increasing implementations tasks are mitigated by a broader range of financing avenues and political networks. In the social sector, the Department for Work and Pensions displays striking levels of triage despite minimal formal policy growth, as unrelenting welfare reforms, departmental downsizing, and inadequate cross-agency collaboration spur severe and frequent trade-offs. Meanwhile, The Pensions Regulator remains a near-anomaly, effectively managing regulatory expansion. The English case study thus underscores how variation in blame-shifting, opportunities for resource mobilization, and organizational overload compensation can yield a highly diverse triage scenario — even within a country.

This chapter distinguishes solidarity as a legal concept (LS) from solidarity as a social practice (SP). It matters for our understanding of the law to reflect on how, when and why law is able to interact with solidaristic practices. Section 1.1 explores the distinction. Section 1.2 stresses the ubiquity of solidarity in the law, from the traditional private law understanding of obligatio in solidum, to solidarity as a cohesive social force, to solidarity as a source of state duties. Section 1.3 shows that, despite its omnipresence, solidarity is an underinvestigated legal concept. Section 1.4 offers a typology of interactions between SP and the law, to show the many ways in which legal scholars may relate to SP. I list several types of interaction, and object to one. I argue that law cannot command us to act solidaristically since solidarity presupposes an intimate form of identification with others. But law may disrupt solidarities, sometimes in morally justified ways; it may compensate for the failing solidarity, recognizing and integrating it; and it may foster solidarity by its status-generative function, albeit merely in an indirect and not often controllable way.

This chapter expands our understanding of how continuous policy growth affects public agencies’ ability to implement policies. It introduces the concept of policy triage, wherein organizations must choose which tasks to prioritize and which to neglect when facing resource constraints and expanding policy portfolios. Triage reflects a trade-off that intrinsically undermines overall implementation effectiveness: Agencies systematically channel attention to some policy areas at the cost of others. The chapter develops a theoretical framework accounting for variation of triage levels across implementers. Three factors are central: whether politicians can shift blame for inadequate implementation (reducing their incentives to fund administrative capacity), the ability of implementers to mobilize additional resources, and the extent to which these organizations strive to compensate internally through a strong organizational culture and policy ownership. By highlighting both, top-down and bottom-up influences on policy implementation, this chapter emphasizes that an agency’s level of policy triage is determined by the configuration of these factors. The framework thus provides a robust lens for analyzing varied implementation outcomes among agencies operating under ever-expanding policy stocks.

Democratic governments continually expand their policy portfolios to address various challenges, a process known as policy accumulation. While doing so can ensure more comprehensive governance, it also puts the administrative agencies tasked with implementing new and existing policies at risk of overload. Without matching resources or capacities, these agencies may be forced to engage in policy triage, whereby they must prioritize certain tasks and delay or neglect others. Policy triage lowers overall implementation effectiveness, as attention devoted to one area can draw resources away from another. Yet, existing research on policy growth has largely focused on the causes and patterns of expanding policy stocks, while implementation studies traditionally analyze individual policies rather than the organizational challenges arising from larger policy bundles. By shifting the analytical lens to how organizations handle their entire policy portfolios, this chapter zooms in on organizational trade-off decisions that shape the success or failure of public policies.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the theoretical themes of the book: art, politics and anti-racism; emotion and affect in art and politics; Latin American racial formations. It outlines the research project on which the book is based: Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA).

Policy triage in Italy is widespread across both environmental and social policy, reflecting a sizable gap between ever-increasing legislative demands and stagnating or declining administrative capacity. Political incentives and unstable governing coalitions encourage policy overproduction, as politicians face negligible blame-shifting costs. Implementation bodies, on the other hand, have few avenues to mobilize resources. Austerity measures and rigid, centralized personnel controls leave many agencies chronically understaffed, while constitutional and administrative complexities create fragmented responsibilities and blurred accountability. Consequently, authorities at both national and subnational levels must constantly decide which tasks to handle superficially, defer, or in some cases disregard altogether. Nonetheless, the most severe failures are partially mitigated by strong internal efforts to absorb additional workload. Motivated staff often work overtime, team up to reassign tasks, and exploit external funding or outsourcing arrangements. Although these compensatory strategies keep disastrous implementation deficits contained so far, they come at the cost of quality, timeliness, and workforce morale. Overall, Italy’s case highlights how constrained resource mobilization and pervasive blame-shifting can promote frequent triage, while strong organizational commitment helps to avert total breakdowns in policy implementation.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.