Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which frenzy was weaponized during the many religio-political upheavals of the period. As a figure of speech, it offered rich material for English polemicists, who knew that questioning their opponents’ sanity was more effective than simply refuting their claims. As a literal diagnosis, frenzy also had a practical use: it could silence politically inconvenient people without making a show. This chapter shows how its conferral was used to justify the incarceration of prophets, mystics, and kings. Yet the diagnosis had one serious drawback: it gave its recipients the gift of innocence. Frantic persons were incapable of crime, and could neither be convicted nor punished for their actions. If a recipient later became not just inconvenient but too dangerous to live, any previous diagnosis – no matter how spurious – had to be redacted from the record. This was a problem for the religious polemicists too: the aim was to pathologize ‘heretics’ ‘papists’, ‘puritans’, and ‘sectarians’, not to excuse them from all wrongdoing. Eventually, this chapter argues, that flaw drove Anglican polemicists to abandon frenzy for a new diagnosis: ‘melancholy enthusiasm’.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hong Kong, where there were 261 death sentences but no executions after 1966. Chinese hostility to democratic reforms prevented the constitutional advances that occurred in other colonies in this period and left the British government vulnerable to parliamentary scrutiny in the wake of an execution. Previous studies argued that Britain required Hong Kong’s governors to commute death sentences from the mid 1960s, but colonial correspondence shows that clemency was not automatic until a decade later. Clemency appeals were judged on a case by case basis, even after Governor Murray MacLehose’s decision to uphold Tsoi Kwok-cheung’s death sentence was overruled by the British government in 1973. MacLehose thereafter played a central role in negotiating the Hong Kong Executive Council’s support for reprieves and eventually oversaw de facto abolition, as he strived to prevent capital punishment compromising his administration’s reform agenda. MacLehose also set a precedent for future governors by opposing reforms to the death penalty in other British Dependent Territories, which he feared would draw unwanted attention to Hong Kong’s anomalous position.

Chapter 3 shows that although urban denizens increasingly sought to prevent loss, possessions still went missing on London’s streets. In response, Londoners established and developed systems of reclamation. Institutions such as the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Bank of England were important in developing systems for dealing with lost plate and bank notes. However, alongside these systems, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the capital’s residents also benefited from the great age of print culture. Londoners printed handbills and had them pasted up around the city, but a big change took place with the onset of newspaper publications. Newspapers such as the London Gazette and daily newspapers such as the Daily Courant included advertisements for lost watches, strayed dogs and servants who had runaway. As the chapter shows, the efficacy of such notices was at times bolstered by thief-takers, but as the century rolled on, the advertisement themselves became more popular. The chapter shows how urban denizens often sought to simply reclaim their possessions rather than pursuing the prosecution of the thieves who so often ‘found’ them.

The manageability of the technical obstacles set out in Chapter 4 established, this chapter turns to the adaptive challenges amalgamation faces – most notably its inconceivability to the judiciary. The chapter details the maladaptive constraints that underlie the constitutional drafters’ and legal establishment’s resistance to embracing vernacular law as part of South Africa’s ‘law of general application’ or ‘common law’, as well as the urgency of overcoming such resistance. Depicting the severe decline in institutional trust and rising support for undemocratic governance amidst the public’s waning hopes of material security, the chapter argues that, to strengthen South Africa’s rule of law, constitutionalism must be founded on the vernacular legal traditions that resonate with everyday South Africans, who often feel alienated by a legal system rooted in ‘uncommon’ law. Alter-Native Constitutionalism offers a sustainable path to transformation that would counteract public disillusionment with a constitutionalism that embraces rigid colonial precedents and simultaneously restore trust in the judiciary as the last line of defence. The chapter therefore argues for judicial praxis that re-envisions courts as mediators supporting collective agency, rather than mere adjudicators, thus fostering a relational approach aligning with Ubu-Ntu and honoring the country’s diverse normative traditions and social justice aspirations.

To explore what it meant to own and possess in the eighteenth century, Keeping Hold looks to instances in which people lost possessions and how they responded to such experiences. Chapter 2 begins the book’s focus on loss and does so by looking to urban sites. It looks to the city of the eighteenth century: London. The capital was of growing importance in this period as an economic powerhouse and social hub. Guidebooks emerged as an important genre for those seeking to comprehend London’s densely filled and ever-lengthening streets. The chapter explores these sources and finds how the capital was increasingly imagined as a site of deception and loss, where possessions might be pickpocketed or simply left in the bustle and in which servants and apprentices regularly ran away. The chapter examines how eighteenth-century Londoners responded to such perceived threats by utilising technologies of security, such as pockets and collars. By doing so they worked to prevent loss.

Chapters 1 and 2 suggest that prostitutes not only had a significant presence in the north Indian military cantonment, especially in the hybrid space of the sadr bazaar, but exercised an outsized degree of social influence. This is confirmed by police records from north Indian cantonment towns, including Meerut, examined in this chapter. While the historical literature on colonial India to date has emphasized the official subjection, suppression, and immiseration of prostitutes, especially in the wake of the contagious disease acts of the 1860s, a survey of police records from the 1850s suggest that prostitutes possessed a secure place in the cantonment, and in the official mind, and were even deemed worthy of official protection from criminal persecution. These points are situated in the context of violent crime against women generally, in which the state took an active interest, as well as the officially disfavored slave traffic in girls and young women. The 1850s emerges as an extended moment of transition between the early-modern figure of the urbane tawāif (courtesan) and the marginalized, scandalous figure of the cantonment kasbi (prostitute).

Drawing from ca dao vùng mỏ (the lesser-known writings of anonymous Vietnamese miners), the vibrant Vietnamese print press of the 1930s, and other archival sources, this chapter offers insights into the internal workings of large-scale coal mining enterprises, which were founded on racial, professional, and gendered power structures. In addition, this chapter describes the formation of a strong oppositional and distinctive Vietnamese miner subculture, forged both within and beyond the mines. Outside the mines, far from company surveillance, miners engaged in collective acts, such as theft, fraud, and illicit recreational activities, such as opium smoking, gambling, and smuggling, to supplement their wage income or to simply decompress after a hard day at work in the company of their workmates. The relative autonomy and strength of this miner subculture reveal the failure of the internal working regime of coal mining companies to impose uniform working patterns on their employees. Instead, workers banded together and utilized their networks and autonomous culture to contest and exploit the limitations in French labor management for their own personal gains.

This chapter examines the non-violent and violent actions of laboring people against injustices perpetrated by those in power prior to the American Revolution. It takes a transatlantic approach to examine riots, mutiny, piracy, and insurrections by free and enslaved peoples. The chapter takes a dialectical approach to when and how laboring people acted out against authority. Reduced economic opportunities, attacks on the moral economy, and food shortages often led to riots or more extreme insurrections on both sides of the Atlantic. Attacks on individual freedom, such as the institution of naval and military impressment or taxation, tended to meet petty resistance in Europe and lead to more severe action in the Americas. Meanwhile, enslaved people resisted at all levels and sought to take advantage whenever cracks in the system appeared. Together, the resistance of laboring people generated examples of action and a language of liberty for rebels in North America seeking independence from the British empire on the eve of the American Revolution.

This chapter analyzes the popular dimensions of Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution, using an original dataset of protests during the post-revolutionary transition. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionaries were unable to consolidate the social support of the revolution, and that this failure allowed counterrevolutionaries to channel broad disaffections with revolutionary rule into a popular movement for restoration. The dataset covers the final eighteen months of the transition and includes approximately 7,500 contentious events sourced from the major Arabic-language newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal, first, the extent to which social mobilization persisted after the end of the eighteen-day uprising. The transition period was awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, infrastructure problems, and unmet labor demands. Second, statistical analyses show that this discontent came to be directed against Mohamed Morsi’s government. The earliest and most persistent anti-Morsi protests emerged in places where the population had long been highly mobilized over socio-economic grievances. Later, they also began to emerge in places with large numbers of old regime supporters. Ultimately, these two groups – discontented Egyptians and committed counterrevolutionaries – came together to provide the social base for the movement that swept the military back to power.

Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.

The experience of being tied up in Tehran while eating tangerines, and what it signifies as narrative, metaphor, and theoretical intervention. The chapter combines a personal story about a home invasion with an analysis of social and property relations in the space of the local neighborhood. The author establishes her identity as an arous farangi (a “foreign bride”), meaning both an insider and an outsider in the Iranian cultural community. In parallel, analysis of the history of the burgled house and the changing geography of its residential neighborhood reveals the complex transformations in Iranian class positions and urban spatial organization since the revolution. Whether tragic or absurd, the experience of being tied up in Tehran sets the narrative and interpretive paradigm for the rest of the book.