This article is a case study of the political economy of the Western Cape Winelands c.1900. The analysis covers three intertwined processes that were crucial for the advance of a capitalist mode of production: the making of capital, the making of a commodity market, and the making of a labouring class. The making of capital was achieved after the mid-1800s. However, even at the end of the century, the market for Cape wines and the making of a labouring class remained obstacles to the advance of capitalism. Some wealthy farm owners, though, were about to overcome these obstacles. A small group of them were of old Afrikaner origin, while others, mostly investor capitalists of British origin, were quite successful in establishing a capitalist mode of production on their wine farms. In particular, drawing on a vast array of primary sources, we discuss the many labour recruitment programmes that were organized as private and state initiatives.

This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

More than half a century has passed since C. Vann Woodward penned his iconic monograph, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and legal segregation continues to compel. Recent works have reassessed Jim Crow's birth, its life, and its aftermath, suggesting that the system was at once more implicated in the reproduction of racist ideas than had been previously assumed, and also more fluid: a variegated landscape of rules and norms that lent themselves to various forms of political, legal, and cultural resistance.

The rise of extraterritoriality in the nineteenth-century has been described as a transitional phase that laid the ground for the construction of territorial sovereignty. Yet in Egypt, where a particularly extensive extraterritorial regime emerged in the mid-century, the expansion of European jurisdiction underneath national sovereignty became entrenched with the creation of international mixed courts in the 1870s. This outcome, the article argues, was the product of a complex compromise between European empires, which upheld different conceptions of extraterritoriality, and the government of Egypt. While Britain refashioned its own extraterritorial judicial system as a means of promoting legal reforms in the Ottoman world, France aggressively pursued the expansion of extraterritorial rights as an instrument of informal domination and economic exploitation. The creation of an international type of jurisdiction, less susceptible to French political pressures but applying a French system of law, proved acceptable to all parties, although it severely constrained Egyptian sovereignty from within, even after Britain took over the reins of government in 1882. Extraterritoriality was not merely a transition, but an original feature of the global legal order, arising out of modern imperialism and imperial rivalry and yet conducive to the forging of new instruments of international law and governance.

Moral theories that demand that we do what is morally best leave no room for the supererogatory. One argument against such theories is that they fail to realize the value of autonomy: supererogatory acts allow for the exercise of autonomy because their omissions are not accompanied by any threats of sanctions, unlike obligatory ones. While this argument fails, I use the distinction it draws – between omissions of obligatory and supererogatory acts in terms of appropriate sanctions – to draw a parallel with psychological perfectionism. Through this parallel, I demonstrate that requiring what is morally best is in fact counter-productive. Thus, by its own lights, a theory that wants us to do what is best ought at the very least to tell us to believe that some actions are supererogatory. As the old adage goes, the best is the enemy of the good; I argue here that the supererogatory is the solution.

This article focuses on the mobile peoples who engaged in piracy on the borders beyond the territories negotiated by the imperial Chinese and colonial Spanish and Dutch powers, and by doing so, reframe our perception of early modern imperial and maritime history. In pre-modern times, the control of territory within the administrative borders was incomplete, and small pockets of territories with porous borders were beyond governmental rule. The people and the groups that lived along the coast of the northeastern South China Sea were, at different times, recognized differently and many of their activities were at times sanctioned and at other times outlawed. This article reveals a facet of how the non-stateless peoples lived on the borders beyond, claimed their own order in their own way, and worked and became naturalized or classified inside the strengthening borders in pre-modern societies according to the agenda and discourses of the dominant powers. I argue that the coastal societies had their own “order” that created groups “beyond control” or “being registered gradually.”