This opening chapter outlines the main arguments of the book and introduces the histories of childbirth, domestic medicine and the family. It makes the case for seeing childbearing as a medical and social experience and shows that generation (the early modern term for childbearing) was of great personal, political and cultural significance in the period. The Introduction argues that childbirth was a family affair and shows that family paperwork – diaries, letters, almanacs, account books, commonplace books and other documents – were awash with descriptions of parts of the process of making babies. Generation was framed as being part of the domestic labour that had to be done by family members or by servants to run an orderly household, and was embedded within other everyday practices like healing, clothing and feeding individuals. The literate individuals who kept records in their paperwork were also the individuals who could afford to buy printed books on conduct and medicine that laid out ideal godly practice. By considering paperwork alongside this instructive material, this book uncovers the cultural and practical tensions between prescription and practice.

This chapter systematically teases out and reflects on the antinomies and aporias that characterize each of two broad sets of international human rights solidarity argumentation. These are the broadly shared discourses on the issue that emanate in each case from the Global North and Global South. Why do Global North States tend to accept and focus on binding international human rights obligations in the civil and political (CP) rights area, while demurring regarding similarly mandatory legal duties to express international solidarity in regard to economic and social (ES) rights? And why do Global South countries tend to argue in favor of such binding obligations with regard to ES rights but not nearly as much regarding CP rights? The chapter is mainly concerned with the rather ironic circulation and eclipsing of relevant antinomies and aporias in plain sight; their relationships to state sovereignty argumentation; and their connections to global power relations as ideationally constitutive forces. In the last respect, the key question is what the relative roles of values/norms in international human rights solidarity argumentation are, vis-à-vis global power relations. And these questions should highlight for scholars the imperative to track internationalist praxis over the longue durée.

This chapter explores the relevance of the Christian tradition to contemporary debates on solidarity in international law and human rights. It positions the genealogy of solidarity within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of suffering, love, and salvation are detailed. Linking the Pauline doctrine and writings of early theologians to the processes of modernity – of which notions such as the West, the Global South, good neighborliness, and human rights are a part – the concept of solidarity is traced to a particularly Christian dynamic. As such, the promise of solidarity in international legal discourse, human rights discourse, and refugee discourse is considered as analogous to the way in which forms of messianism manifest themselves through a Christian logic of love, sacrifice, and debt.

This chapter approaches the concept of transparency by examining the work of secrecy and occlusion in trade. Exploring the role of secrets in the Indian Ocean sapphire trade, where exchange is based on arbitrage, it seeks to understand Sri Lankan and South Indian gem traders’ emic notions of what it means to conceal and reveal knowledge and to tease out their conceptions of ethical conduct in relation to secrecy. It asks: How do we conceptualize transparency in relation to a trade where practices of concealment and disclosure are folded into the gestural, embodied, and affective landscapes that make up everyday modalities of negotiation, brokerage, and arbitrage? How do such forms of withholding contribute to making gems move? What are the ethical landscapes within which certain forms of secrecy are permissible and expected? Reading trading secrets as a part of the craft of trade, the chapter seeks to reframe the assumption that a lack of transparency amounts to deception and examines instead how practices of occlusion facilitate trade.

In exploring the politics of corporate versus small-scale mining of rubies and the ongoing struggles over a potentially enormous rare earth element (REE) deposit, this chapter hinges upon a critical analysis of transparency, opacity, and the politics of sovereignty in a country that is increasingly framed as a synecdoche for climate change in this century. Recent decades have seen the growth of two emergent forms in the international aid industry: (1) transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) that endeavor to bring aid organizations in line with standard expectations around their operations; and (2) modest, small-scale do-it-yourself (DIY) aid projects that emerge from and depend on trusting relationships between benefactors and beneficiaries. This chapter considers the ambiguous coexistence of these forms, drawing from ethnographic research with a small-scale healthcare project in Madagascar to illustrate how DIY aid can be effective (for better or worse) despite operating outside the purview of TAIs.

This chapter examines early modern expectations of delivery and recovery from childbirth by women. Medical manuals expected women would give birth painfully but without complication, stay in bed (or ‘lie in’) for a month, go to church to give thanks to God for their survival and then return to their normal selves. During this month, they were also expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. Examining doctors’ casebooks reveals that women often sought medical assistance for problems long after delivery. Certain postpartum ailments like breast problems were often perceived as untroubling in medical print, but paperwork reveals that this often meant women could not return to their normal selves for months after birth. Although prescriptive models contained in religious and medical print may have helped to frame women’s experiences of delivery and recovery, they rarely capture the reality of the emotional and bodily difficulties they faced.

Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.

Argentina has a tradition of disavowed racism, with dominant narratives of the nation as racially homogenous due to mass European migration and the supposed disappearance of Indigenous, Black and mixed-race peoples. We argue that the arts have enabled critiques of the subtle ways that race is written into national identity. We analyse race and cultural production in Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, when critiques emerged of discourses of nationality articulated mainly around Europeanness. There are explicitly anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but, because of Argentina’s specific racial formation, we focus on cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people subject to an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have fostered strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. These multiple forms of artistic expression illustrate the shifting valences of race in Argentina in which racial diversity at times goes from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises, among the white middle and upper classes, paranoid fears about the Other that justify repression, but which also allow affective alliances in the face of racism.