In this chapter, the contrast between two models of expatriate masculinity developed earlier is brought to a head, with a fresh twist on the history of masculine identity. In retirement William Cooper indulged his passion for global wanderlust at the expense of his family, whereas Edgar Wilson happily abandoned his expatriate frustrations for a conventional model of settled suburban domesticity with his wife in England, spurning the mobile attractions of the cosmopolitanism they had long nurtured, but with Winifred continuing to exercise her public activism and independence. Ironically, the domestic model, rather than William’s continuing mobility, was most closely associated with the lower middle class, recalling Edgar’s origins and early white-collar labours. The disparity is underlined by a tragic account of William’s last years, interned by the Nazis in wartime Paris after an ill-advised excursion across France. Wartime domesticity for Edgar and Winifred was a struggle, only relieved by a comfortable inheritance from William. Winifred’s Will reflected her long commitment to chosen causes like the Mothers’ Union, a statement of her lifetime priorities.

William Cooper’s rise from working-class living in London was steeper than Wilson’s but followed an equally complex pattern of social mobility generated by expatriate employment. The chapter charts his career and social journey from telegram-boy in working-class Bermondsey, underlining cultural factors supporting his rise in status. He progressed to junior telegraphy work on several Persian Gulf stations, then to supervision of a station in Russian Georgia on the Black Sea, and finally in Tehran, directing his company’s entire Persian telegraph operations, acquiring elite trappings of the Edwardian gentleman abroad. Telegraph management worked around the impacts of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Persian constitutional revolution of 1905-09, bringing him into close contact in Tehran with diplomatic and Persian elites, aided by his Bermondsey wife who earned a reputation among expatriates as an accomplished hostess. His elevation to elite status was underlined by his family’s adoption of an expatriate middle-class identity, and his middle-class masculinity and fatherhood practices, marked an intimate father-daughter relationship alongside firm patriarchal rules of behaviour.

Introduces the themes of empire and overseas enterprise, specifically shipping and telegraphy, as engines of social mobility, of expatriate opportunities for the British working and lower middle classes, and a related love story created by conditions of expatriate life in the Middle East, particularly Persia. It reviews imperial historians’ focus on informal empire, stressing Robert Bickers’ concept of non-elite ‘other ranks of empire’. David Lambert and Alan Lester’s concept of imperial ‘careering’, and of expatriate experience forging a ‘transformation of identity’, points to the book’s key characters as ‘agents of imperialism’: William Cooper in telegraphy, Edgar Wilson in river shipping and William’s daughter, Winifred Cooper, exploiting expatriate opportunities for independence, and eventually married to Edgar. The key source, a rich British Library archive, yields intimate insights, through letters and diaries, into familiar social history themes like class, marriage, gender and sexuality, and an argument about expatriate social mobility into retirement.

Expatriate success stories did not always run smoothly; this chapter shows how Edgar Wilson’s class transformation was beset by anxiety around real and imagined tensions with elite management figures in London and Persia. It also charts a delayed pre-war honeymoon trip to England through Russia. But work stresses on Wilson’s career extended to his marriage, forcing long periods of reluctant separation and hazardous risks to the family in southern Persia during World War One. It elucidates a key stage in the progression of the Wilsons’ social mobility under expatriate conditions, charting events impacting Middle East shipping during the war and after, told through Edgar and Winfred’s correspondence and diaries, including sexually explicit love letters, and a perilous family trek on mules across Persian mountains. For Winifred, the experience of childbirth in Tehran early in the marriage and in England, her experience of stepmothering without Edgar, marked a steep learning curve, influencing the marriage for years ahead. Spousal correspondence is a highlight of this chapter, with intimate insights into marriage and its cosmopolitan growth under the influence of expatriation and marital sexuality.

After World War II, Britain’s CEOs faced major economic challenges. International competition increased, and Harold Wilson called for a managerial revolution to exploit the white heat of new technology. This chapter examines whether this revolution occurred. Engineers, including Leonard Lord and George Harriman of the British Motor Corporation, and accountants, like John Davis of Rank and Leslie Lazell of Beechams, made up an increasing proportion of top CEOs. These trends increased social diversity with over 70 per cent of CEOs rising through merit rather than social position or family. Yet, British CEOs had significantly less formal education and specialist management training than their competitors. In 1950, 36 per cent of British CEOs had an undergraduate degree. The equivalent figures were 75, 75, and 95 per cent in the United States, Germany, and France. Although training in accountancy and engineering brought a focus on optimisation and efficiency, it lacked more holistic approaches to management, resulting in bureaucratic organisations and siloed thinking. The managerial revolution failed, innovation and productivity suffered, and economic malaise set in.

Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

This chapter discusses corruption in the United States. In recent decades, as a narrow view of corruption has taken hold, the United States has experienced a significant increase in economic inequality and a decrease in social mobility. Despite the growing public discourse on economic inequality, concerns about the viability of a democratic system in the face of extreme economic inequalities have a long history. In recent years, corruption has been frequently invoked to describe the state of American politics, with business corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners indicated as possible culprits. In the United States, the notion of corporations having a corrupting effect dates back to the early days of the Republic, when it was feared that corporate charters could be granted by state legislatures as rewards for favors or bribes. This chapter’s main conclusion is that while illegal forms of corruption may be uncommon in the United States, its legal variants are widespread, and is further discussed in Chapter 9.

This chapter recognizes that definitions of corruption depend on a normative view of the polity, and such dependence should be recognized when debating corruption. In the context of a discussion of corruption in the United States, this chapter argues for the relevance of new “geographies of corruption,” and in particular, of legal forms of corruption. My interpretation of legal corruption in the United States is framed within a dynamic relationship between economic and political inequality, which may be mutually reinforcing.

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.