One of the advantages of the ‘big picture’ approach adopted by Barry Buzan (and his collaborators) is to be able to grasp the profound, macro-changes of social and inter-polity relations over history. This approach is particularly helpful when it comes to the structures of international society, its actors, its fundamental normative architecture, and the main trajectories of its changes and developments. Arguably, the big picture over time is also a big picture of insides and outsides, with standards of civilisations being some of the most crucial markers of those belonging to a given (historical) social order, and those not. The chapter intends to reflect on Barry Buzan’s view of the Standard of Civilisation as a concept and as a practice from a ‘big picture’ perspective, analysing its fundamental components but also engaging with the limitations and the lacunae that such a view inevitably entails.

Flow is a concept used in studies of electronic dance music to articulate a range of social and bodily experiences on dance floors, centred around the musical performances of DJs. It is also used in other scholarly fields and applied in therapeutic and corporate contexts. The catch-all, plural, and positive quality of the concept makes flow easy to apply to many settings and phenomena. This chapter examines flow experiences on dance floors in conjunction with existing notions that club cultures epitomise neoliberal conceptions of creative labour. Overall, it suggests that capitalist logics of flow configure a social environment on dance floors where people can enjoy themselves with others while looking inward, rather than reaching outward in the pursuit of action and social change.

Abstract: Dewey’s critique of capitalism centered on the concentration of economic power, the commodification of education, and the corrosive effects of consumerism. However, as McVea argues in this chapter, Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy aligns with alternative economic approaches, such as Austrian economics, which emphasize the entrepreneur’s role in navigating an evolving, uncertain world. As McVea shows, a Deweyan perspective highlights the role of imagination in entrepreneurial decision-making. Entrepreneurs, like artists, engage in dramatic rehearsal, mentally simulating potential futures and harmonizing their ventures with stakeholders and changing environments. This imaginative deliberation is not fantasy but a grounded, experimental process that fosters ethical engagement and continuous adaptation. Rather than maximizing financial returns, the pragmatist entrepreneur seeks to create and recreate harmony among stakeholders. McVea concludes that by integrating ethical reflection into decision-making, entrepreneurs can drive innovation while fostering human flourishing. This approach challenges conventional university business education, calling for new curricula that cultivate moral imagination and responsible value creation.

World-gothic as a project (where the hyphen indicates a world-systems relational perspective) is not meant to simply expand our horizon, by studying gothic that arises beyond the culture industries of the United States and Europe; it looks to redraw the terms and frames of reference used. A world-gothic approach does not simply seek to highlight non-American-European productions within already existing Eurocentric literary categories, lineages of influence, and definition by generic traits. World-gothic looks instead to change our perspective of how we understand gothic, even for those works already long studied and taught. Using the example of the undead, this chapter examines the time and place of gothic as registering the spasms of the capitalist world-system.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

The chapter examines Israeli poetry of the 1980s within its historical context, highlighting the era’s distinctive characteristics. While many critiques of this poetry overlook historical considerations – a phenomenon termed a “dead-end” in national historical thought – the chapter uses Kfir Cohen Lustig’s framework on the interplay between literature, the nation-state, and capitalism, adapting it to the analysis of poetry. The chapter posits that in the 1980s, amid the rise of global capitalism and the prevailing trend of autonomization (notably its dominance over state power), the fundamental poetic form was metonymy. This structure, based on the physical proximity among signifieds, establishes diachronic, horizontal relationships between signifiers. The operation of metonymy is illustrated through two poems by Rammy Ditzanny. Furthermore, by examining several other poets through the lens of various scholars, it is argued that metonymy’s foundational poetic principle underlies the diverse poetic styles of the period, including Imagism, collage poetry, and “object poetry.” This principle frequently coincides with the devaluation or negation of the subject and a rejection of the Oedipal structure.

Modern Hebrew literature has been driven by a call to productivity from its inception. Zionist history was born out of a break with its traditional and religious past, a historical transformation that coincided with the birth and perseverance of the productive Jew. However, even well into twentieth and twenty-first-century Hebrew literature, these tensions remain active. They illuminate not only the ways in which capitalization and secularization are ongoing processes but also latent yet available possibilities of resistance to the demands of productivity. The chapter focuses on the figure of the Shabbat and other forms of inoperativity and nonwork inherent within it in the poetry of Zelda Schneurson. It offers a reading of Zelda’s poetry from a materialist and political-theological perspective to locate her poetry and her depictions of nonwork within the intertwined histories of Zionism, secularism, and capitalism.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

This chapter analyses Karl Marx’s concept of use-value and explores the viability of a post-market economy based on the exchange of use-values.

The Epilogue discusses how the narrative and arguments of the book can help us revisit the debates in Ottoman intellectual historiography over the concept of order (nizam), underlining how labor history and class perspectives can expand the scope of questions and offer new agendas for Ottoman and global histories of the modern era. It offers a conceptual discussion of reform, and highlights the distinctive characteristics of Ottoman Reform in the long nineteenth century, by focusing on its connections with modern capitalism. It emphasizes the capitalist characteristic of the order which the reformist elites struggled to institute throughout the nineteenth century. It underlines how focusing on a specific worksite, and, in particular, studying relations of production within an Ottoman military-industrial site, could help us to reveal these capitalist patterns and class dynamics in Ottoman reform processes. It points to the necessity of the dialogue between labor/social history and intellectual history to better understand how these capitalist practices shaped or were shaped by the mentalities and ideas of Ottoman state elites during this period.

The introduction presents the aims, scope and structure of the book and discusses major historiographical issues: the role of empires in global history; that of slavery in the Atlantic world and that of serfdom in Eurasia; the great divergence debate; the historical meanings and practices of emancipation in a global perspective. The introduction then discusses the question of scales; the role of gender and law; the definitions of institutions, empires and capitalism as well as the qualification of coercion, resistance and agency.

This chapter asks how ‘the people’ has been mobilised in contemporary literature as an anti-hegemonic category for imagining collective life in times of crisis. Reading a handful of poems written by Sean Bonney, D. S. Marriot, and Andrea Brady, the chapter’s hypothesis is that poetic address – the axis of communication, the deictic situation that obtains between articulation and understanding – acts as a cipher for the people in moments of social upheaval. Specifically, this chapter shows how poetic form bears witness to the people as an antagonistic social force defined by class, race, and gender, but also as a category that disarticulates – or has been forcefully disarticulated from – labour and its traditions and cultures.