Halfway through Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief, the unnamed protagonist, recently arrived from New York, goes to a market in Lagos, Nigeria. The market excites him; he describes it as “the essence of the city … alive with possibility and danger.” As he navigates the “hysteria of car horns and engines” and haggles with vendors, he recounts a scene that unfolded in the market six weeks earlier. A young boy was accused of stealing. A “furious” mob gathered. The boy was stripped and doused in petrol; a tire was flung around his body; he was lit on fire and burned to death. Afterwards, the air was thick with the smell of “rubber, meat, and exhaust.”

It is an atrocious story. Even more atrocious is what follows: nothing. The crowd disperses. The story barely makes the news. Nothing to see here, least of all by the market, which has already “seen everything,” the market whose appetites must be satisfied, the market that “must eat.” The narrator, too, moves on swiftly into the next chapter's musings on the writing life in Nigeria, then a trip to the National Museum, then a visit to a tony cultural center, and then drinks with a friend. He marvels that “fascinating” stories like the lynching of the boy, stories full of “literary” merit, “fly at [him] from all directions” in Lagos.

Once upon a time, at the start of the twenty-first century, there was a widely shared dream that the internet would save us from ourselves. Social media platforms such as Facebook would enhance human connection, communication, and community. In the early 2010s, Twitter was held up as proof of the internet's democratizing tendencies, as it enabled revolutionary movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, recalling the optimism of the time, “What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?” I took a college class on internet policy, circa 2005, and I still recall my professor Kenneth S. Rogerson's indefatigable enthusiasm about “the long tail” of cultural production we were all poised to enjoy and his exuberant account of the new possibilities for robust civic engagement in the digital public square.

That all feels rather quixotic today. Social media, we now know, is just as often “antisocial.” In the post-truth era of rampant mis- and disinformation, deepfake videos, and fake news spread by AI chatbots, as internet titans such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg flagrantly refuse to moderate content on X and Instagram, it is clear how easily the relatively unregulated infrastructure of the internet was seized by monied corporations, global media tycoons, and bad actors seeking to maximize clicks, likes, retweets, and shares – all with the alibi of maximizing human connection. When Facebook hit two billion users in 2017, founder Zuckerberg emphasized exactly that commitment: “We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together.”7 In 2021, Facebook, Inc. rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. with the tagline, “We believe in the future of connection in the metaverse.”

The opening years of the seventeenth century saw several companies awarded royal charters to found the first colonies of English North America: the Virginia Company in 1606, the Plymouth Company in 1606, the Newfoundland Company in 1610, the Somers Isles Company in 1615, the Council for New England in 1620, the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, and the Providence Island Company in 1630. Except for the latter two chartered under King Charles I, this flurry began with King James I. The towering significance of the Hudson's Bay Company in what became western Canada would begin some generations later, after the English Civil War (1642–51), with its 1670 royal charter issued by King Charles II. Charters were more extensive than patents in that they conveyed both rights over land and governance.

The early seventeenth century was largely associated with indenture and serfdom for skilled and agrarian work. The gentry was a formidable political class. The monarchy was forced to navigate uneasy relations with Parliament and suffered difficulties in raising revenue and maintaining allegiance. The merchant class was embryonic, mainly tied to guilds and regulated trade, cloth being England's central export. Overseas voyages were typically ones of “exploration” (privateering), with mercantilism dictating a pessimistic view of international exchange given the associated depletion of gold bullion from national reserves. By the middle of the seventeenth century, England was in civil war and Charles I had been executed. At the end of the century, the monarchy was restored, the Glorious Revolution united bourgeois interests and created a new foundation of state power epitomized by the creation of the Bank of England (1694) and the London Stock Exchange (1698).

EVIE's STORY

Fizzing sounds of sparklers and starbursts of gold danced across the screen of Evie's phone. These special effects embellished a video of her jangling keys outside her new front door. She hadn't known what to expect before moving into the freshly built social housing. It had to be accepted “sight unseen”. But she’d been the lucky one, Evie thought as she stood there. Her friends couldn't say the same. With no alternatives offered, they had been forced to take social housing tenancies in areas they didn't know, and in properties full of mould, cracks and vermin. Some had gardens, but these were more like swamps than safe places for their children to play.

After proudly messaging the video to friends and family, Evie slid the phone into her pocket and took a moment to take in the surrealness of her hopes met. A place for her family to root, to grow, to rebuild after years of exhaustion – wedged into cramped hotel rooms and temporary flats with three children and all their belongings.

Evie turned the key in the lock and opened the door for the first time. She took off her shoes and stepped in. An icy coldness greeted her feet. The house had no flooring. In that moment, Evie had a flashback to a former tenancy with only stone-cold concrete. Her youngest son Josh smiling and running towards her. The fall on the hard stone floor. The broken tooth, the inconsolable cries she tried to comfort. Perhaps this new house was not the promised-for end of her journey through poverty, debt and mothering on the edge.

It was one of those large public debating festivals held usually during the warm months in Britain. A packed schedule of events over two days, addressing issues from the US election to the impact of artificial intelligence – a smorgasbord of argumentation and intellectual manoeuvring by speakers and their audiences. Panels with invited experts on specific themes spoke for a few minutes each and then there were moderated question and answer sessions with the audience. I was glad to have been invited just as an academic attendee. Academics were at least spared the full onslaught of public indignation and rage because we were regarded as experts present to give balance. Polemicists, controversialists, politicians, and self-publicizers were not so lucky. But then, in an odd way, brutal treatment by their audiences seemed to be what they were there for. They had the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's famous dictum engraved on their hearts: what didn't kill them was going to make them stronger; they seemed to be there to survive and then get more powerful.

Academics are supposedly custodians of neutrality. That is our claim about ourselves at least. And these days, the title “Professor” still (just about!) gives some pause for thought and restraint on whomever you are facing publicly and grants a little bit of mercy. My session was about the impact of the rise of China. The argument I used was one that I had deployed at similar events throughout Europe and the rest of the world over the previous months and years: like it or not, China was going to be part of our global economic future and probably our geopolitical and social one. Even if we were not going to it, it was coming to us – through investment, finance, students and tourists.

The Debt Trap

I am here today to tell you about my lived experience of homelessness and debt.

A Bit of Background

I was working in the primary school my children attended. My son was around six years old and in Year 1. My daughter was around five years old and in reception class.

Domestic Violence

In 2009 I left the marital home with my two children as I feared for our safety. The key workers at the refuge insisted on using the term Domestic Violence – two words I would soon come to realize encapsulated the life I had been living. We arrived at the refuge with just one suitcase and remained there for 18 months waiting to be housed and trying to rebuild our lives.

School

Initially, when we moved to the refuge, I left my job and enrolled the children into a primary school closer to where we were staying, but we were all very unhappy. With the help and support of our previous headteacher, I returned to my job (part-time) and took the children back to the one place that would be familiar and stable for them.

Homeless and in Debt

Shock #1

The tenancy was in his name only.

He had previously convinced me that only one signature was required for a married couple on a Tenancy. I had been deceived.

Shock #2

I now had a £13,000 debt solely in my name.

During our marriage I had been coerced into taking out various bank loans (as he was not eligible) to cover shortfalls in rent, bills and daily living costs. He continuously promised he would pay it off when he found a job – he never worked!

Once colonies were created to support exploration, trade, and settlement, history took a turn and the legacy of joint-stock royal charter companies in English North America began to extend far beyond commerce at the shore given their role in extended forms of settler colonial governance (Craven 1964). Extra-economic motivations expanded colony-making to meeting domestic interests like ridding England of its “offals” by exporting orphans, vagabonds, and other undesirables from the realm (Walsh 2010; Mancall 1995). Later in the seventeenth century, joint-stock royal charter companies were formed to monopolize the African slave trade (French 2021). Creators of states and markets, colonizing companies not only received land rights enabling the dispossession of Indigenous territory, within-colony the companies themselves created legal, governmental, and economic structures to dole out substantial acreages to investors and settler laborers through patents and subdivisions as unique forms of proprietary settler colonialism. Orchestrated by companies as law-makers and political units, their corporate activities laid the groundwork for the royal colonies and sovereign states that would follow. In short, colonizing companies had a very big impact on transatlantic political economy and settler colonialism far beyond the timeframe between being chartered and being dissolved.

The activities of joint-stock royal charter companies like the Hudson's Bay Company and Virginia Company were nothing short of foundational for North American political economy, implicated as they were in dynamics of land, labor, and capital. These companies formulated their own laws and governance structures, created a workforce, and organized relations of private property as risk-taking and market-monopolizing financiers, merchants, and export–import traders.

Before I knew what community was – what it can, might, and should be – I thought it was my job to resist it. I was 22 years old and about to assume the editorship of an Indian American monthly magazine called India Currents. It was July 2007, and the magazine, founded in San Jose, California, was two decades old. When I got to my desk on my first day, I learned that I had inherited all the feature stories and op-eds that my predecessor, Ashok Jethanandani, had lined up for the August issue. Ashok had planned a cover story on the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, which was then (and remains) the largest Indian community center in North America.

I didn't want to run a story about a community center. I had just written an undergraduate honors thesis on the trap of ethnic identification, and assuming the mantle of ethnic magazine editor had already sent me into a state of cognitive dissonance. But I didn't have a choice. Editor of a community magazine apparently meant editor of a cover story on a community center. In the editorial column I wrote for that issue, I tried to articulate the ambivalence I felt about both the institutional formation of the “community center” and the premise of “community” itself. I titled my editorial “Call it Community.”

The human costs of living in temporary accommodation are the focus of this chapter. Families are caught and imprisoned in a limbo that is fundamentally antithetical to their happiness, health and life chances. As London councils recognize, having “secure and stable housing is fundamental for accessing opportunity and maintaining wellbeing”, yet the reality of what is transpiring deviates so far from this ideal that it constitutes a “national emergency”. In 2023 a collaboration was born from this emergency, between the housing charity Shelter and IKEA UK. The organizations teamed up to design a “Real Life Roomset”, to be displayed in IKEA stores. Hiliary Jenkins, sustainability business partner at IKEA and Ireland, explained to us why they chose to recreate temporary accommodation in four of their English stores:

The roomsets bring family homelessness “out of the closet”, aiming to offer customers a disturbing visualization of this emergency. They are part of Shelter and IKEA UK's collective call for the government to build more social homes. We visited the Swedish brand's inner-city Hammersmith store in London to take a closer look.

This book is an account of the events and personalities which, by 2022, had turned Britain into an arena of seemingly self-perpetuating political turmoil.

Superficially, it seemed that a country renowned for political stability had experienced an abrupt and dramatic transformation. Over slightly more than 28 years – between early in May 1979 and late June 2007 – just three individuals held the office of British prime minister. In electoral terms, the bald record over the years since the advent of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 creates the same impression of prolonged continuity; the Conservative Party won four successive contests (1979–92), Labour bagged the next three (1997–2005), before “the natural party of government” resumed office in the “hung parliament” of 2010, governing until 2024 (albeit initially as the dominant partner in a coalition).

But a deeper perspective exposes unmistakable symptoms of incipient instability. Margaret Thatcher and John Major, in office during the 18 years of single-party Conservative rule after 1979, were both subject to bouts of profound unpopularity with their own MPs as well as the general public. For most of his first term (1997–2001), Labour's Tony Blair enjoyed considerable public approval; but even in those early days it was apparent that some MPs and party members would have preferred the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, as prime minister, and this feeling increased after September 2001 and Blair's fulsome (if not unconditional) British support to America's “War on Terror”