This chapter argues that our subjective experiences – how we experience the world and understand ourselves within it – are just as closely governed as our objective conduct, discussed in Chapter 5. Whether they realise it or not, contemporary teachers are expected to play a significant role in this form of regulation. After all, teachers are now not simply responsible for transmitting a given curriculum and keeping children in line; they are de facto psychologists, responsible for the mental health, regulation and development of their pupils.

The British Raj had favoured open trade and a small state. Economic development was not a major priority. This changed after independence. State expenditure as share of GDP increased in both India and Pakistan, with the goal of reducing poverty and inequality. Still, the trajectories of India and Pakistan and then Bangladesh varied. Especially in India, policymakers favoured inward-looking economic policies, and were sceptical of trade and foreign investment. The private sector was constrained by regulation. After 1991 Indian economic policy shifted sharply, deregulating and becoming more open to the global economy. Bangladesh and Pakistan moved in the same direction, but less sharply, partly because they were less statist to begin with. Other factors mattered besides government policy: the Internet boom and the service exports it facilitated; substantial remittances by migrants to the Middle East; and the protests of workers, women and other marginalized groups. In this chapter we highlight key elements of these narratives and flag the chapters that discuss them.

Chapter 1 discusses three distinct types of systems: mechanical, living, and sociocultural. The systems are analyzed based on their primary proprietary features, but all are neg-entropic in seeking to maintain order and resist chaos. Four features of complex systems are emphasized: openness, purposefulness, emergent property, and multidimensionality, and examples are provided from the realm of religious ritual life. Systems are subject to internal conflicts or dissonance, with the most basic being the tension between too much control and too much chaos. The chapter concludes with a discussion of such dissonance in religious systems and the nature of mitigation as a human response to the signal generated by the dissonance.

This chapter provides an analytic account of the evolution of India’s industrial sector in the context of the overall performance of the economy in the post-independence era. Since trade policy has had a determining impact on overall growth as well as on the structure of the industry, special attention is paid to it. The chapter first reviews the performance of the industry as a whole during the seventy years from 1951/1952 to 2019/2020, dividing it into four distinct phases. It argues that the pursuit of self-sufficiency, specialization in heavy industry and a heavy hand of socialism were at the heart of growth below 4% during the first four decades after independence. Subsequently, liberalizing reforms did accelerate growth, but the slow pace of the removal of multilayered regulation of the early decades remained in the way of East Asian-style rapid transformation of the economy from a rural and agricultural structure to an urban and industrial one.

The rise of public regulation of private law relationships has resulted in a thorny legal landscape across regulated markets shaped by the complex interplay between multiple actors, including legislators, regulatory agencies, and courts, and fraught with tensions between public and private interests. This chapter sets out the book’s purpose, namely, to offer a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between market regulation and private law that is built on the claim that these two forms of legal discourse are two sides of the same coin that can be reconciled with each other. The chapter explains the background to this study and the research design, focusing on the interaction between EU private law as a subset of market regulation and traditional national private law. It begins with a brief account of the growing role of market regulation in the private law domain and then proceeds to identify the core questions that the collision between market regulation and private law gives rise to, which underlie the book. The chapter further explains the novelty of this work in relation to existing literature on private law and regulation, as well as its approach to the subject.

This concluding chapter brings the separate lines of inquiry developed throughout this book together to present a holistic analytical framework for analysing the relationship between market regulation and private law within the EU multilevel system of governance and beyond. This novel framework sets out three main models of this relationship – separation, substitution, and complementarity – and elucidates their key strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on these findings, the chapter shows how regulatory discourse and traditional private law discourse can mutually influence each other in a way that enables reconciliation between them, and provides a road map to such reconciliation in standard-setting and enforcement. It suggests that public regulation of private law relationships and traditional private law should be seen as two sides of the same coin that can be aligned with each other. To reconcile those two forms of legal discourse is to enable them to work in tandem, while acknowledging their distinctive characteristics and, where necessary, making trade-offs between the competing values that underpin them. While private law discourse should be receptive to the public interest–driven logic of market regulation, regulatory discourse should be receptive to the relational logic of traditional private law.

This chapter explores emerging regulatory, ethical, and design frameworks for managing the expanding influence of both digital and chemical mind-altering agents. It reviews current efforts at neuroethics, platform governance, and pharmaceutical policy, highlighting both successes and failures. Key topics include the addictive potential of immersive AI, digital feedback loops, and synthetic neurochemical enhancers. The chapter evaluates international disparities in legal treatment, focusing on how cultural assumptions influence what is considered ’mind-altering’ or harmful. Case studies include data on AI companions, cognitive profiling, and attempts to legislate digital well-being. The concept of ’cognitive sovereignty’ is introduced — the right to autonomy over one’s attention, emotion, and self-perception. In conclusion, the chapter advocates for a post-disciplinary approach combining neuroscience, design ethics, anthropology, and legal studies.

This chapter analyses the historical transformation from ritualistic and therapeutic use of mind-altering substances to their global regulation and criminalisation. Focusing on the colonial and industrial eras, it highlights how opium, coca, and alcohol were recontextualised as economic commodities and instruments of empire. The chapter tracks the emergence of international drug control regimes, moral panics, and racialised legislation — particularly the British Opium Wars, US Harrison Narcotics Act, and global treaties. The intersection of state regulation, corporate profit, and public health is critically examined through case studies including the US opioid crisis. In parallel, sugar and caffeine are discussed as ‘soft’ stimulants that escaped moral scrutiny despite their neurochemical effects. The chapter concludes with a comparative look at regulation and commodification, showing how different substances became entangled in legal, moral, and economic narratives.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Commission as a technology regulator, outlining the development of the EU’s technology policies and laws, from their beginnings in the late 1970s until the late 2000s. Reflecting on the limited interventions of the Commission during the period referred to as one of ‘Eurosclerosis’, and the beginnings of distinct technology policies and positive acts of integration around technology in the 1990s. It explores how during its development, EU technology policy was marked by a distinction between economically oriented developments, such as around intellectual property rights, and security-related ones as in the case of cybercrime and cybersecurity. However, in the period of the late 2000s/early 2010s and the EU ‘polycrisis’ of financial crisis, legitimacy crisis, and populism crisis, and concerns over the power of the private sector in technology governance, the groundwork was laid for seeing technology control in terms of interlinked economic and security goals, a growing distrust of ‘Big Tech’, and concerns about the need to externalise the EU’s rules and values, including through the Brussels effect.

The treatment of alleged “spiriting” victims in London courts versus colonial American courts further reveals presumptions of consent to work. The lower courts in London offered redress to people targeted by illicit transatlantic servant brokers when they escaped before transportation. Early modern notions about how people’s behavior flowed from their intentions meant that contemporaries sympathized with rescued or escaped spiriting victims in London precisely because they had avoided transportation. By contrast, spirited servants who arrived in the colonies struggled to shift the perception that the mere fact of their arrival indicated that they had wanted to come. The colonial magistrates presumed that newly arrived servants had been complicit in their own transportation and oversaw the belated creation of servants’ indentures. Far fewer servants found redress for spiriting in the colonies than in London, because of this presumption and further procedural obstacles.

Chapter 4 covers the policy agenda of the von der Leyen Commission as it relates to technology, identifying the concerns over ensuring digital sovereignty and maintaining strategic autonomy as central rationales for Commission action. Chapter 4 focuses on ‘technological systems’ in which the EU has sought to increase its control and regulatory oversight through regulatory mercantilist means. Analysing the Commission’s actions in technical standards for technologies such as digital communications, life-cycle cybersecurity for internet-enabled products, and the fostering of an EU industrial policy for semiconductors and microchips, this chapter highlights how concerns over foreign manipulation and excessive strategic dependencies has resulted in the Commission proposing legislative interventions in order to guarantee sovereignty and strategic autonomy through increased Commission and regulatory body oversight, the explicit linkage of economic and security concerns, and active promotion of technology industrial policy internally, and exporting of norms and values through ensuring a positive regulatory balance of trade externally.

Chapter 5 focuses on the regulation of social media platforms and platform architecture, with changes in EU perceptions regarding the reliability of these platforms and the values of their owners. It examines the shift from economically motivated self-regulatory regimes in these sectors based in logics of efficiency to a digital sovereignty-motivated move to a logic of security in regulation. It identifies the explicit linkage between economic and security concerns, particularly as it relates to disinformation and political advertising, with the promotion of co-regulatory regimes with significant levels of oversight provided by the Commission. It explores the approach to regulatory export adopted in these initiatives, with an emphasis on control of platforms regardless of where they are based, so long as they offer services in the EU.

Chapter 7 considers the developments that have taken place since the beginning of the von der Leyen II Commission, identifying how there has not only been continuity in the EU’s approach to technology control and its links to digital sovereignty but also an expansion and reinforcement of the approach. Faced with increased instability and geopolitical threat, the linkage of security and economy has become even more explicit for the von der Leyen II Commission, with the Competitiveness Compass taking an approach that appears to be a more assertive form of regulatory mercantilism, in which the element of defence is specifically incorporated into the EU’s rationale for action, with an expansion of technology controls including the development of an explicit push for defence technology industrial policy, the increased control over external dependencies and supply chains through its Preparedness Strategy, and an AI policy for Europe that includes significant investments for AI gigafactories.

This chapter explores how multinationals have collectively defended their interests by actively participating in clubs and associations at both national and international levels. It highlights how multinationals pragmatically adapted their political strategies to sustain global operations, from the age of empires in the nineteenth century through the collapse of the first globalization, World War II, decolonization, the second globalization, and the resurgence of economic nationalism after the 2010s. Political challenges, including wars and pressures from governments and international organizations—such as the 1970s attempts to regulate multinationals —were key drivers of their political activism. The chapter examines the broader societal impacts of these efforts, including the consolidation of business influence in host and home economies, the global diffusion of standards, the institutionalization of regulations that facilitated and protected international investment, and tax reductions, particularly through the elimination of double taxation.

This chapter demonstrates that multinationals have been major contributors to environmental challenges. Before 1960 multinationals were clustered in natural resources and in developing countries, where they contributed to deforestation, poisoning soil and water systems, and the creation of monocultures resulting in biodiversity loss. Oil companies were a driver of climate change because of the industry’s role in greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile the spread of consumer goods multinationals encouraged conspicuous consumption and wasteful packaging. After 1960 rising environmental awareness and government regulations in the West led some multinationals to adopt sustainability policies, yet major oil companies deliberately obscured climate science to delay regulation. After 2000 many multinationals engaged in greenwashing while continuing harmful practices. Despite corporate commitments, shareholder value maximization often overrode genuine environmental responsibility. Environmental damage committed by multinationals continued, especially in countries where regulation and enforcement were fragile.