This chapter moves from low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats to higher-ranking officials and their ‘great projects’ (al-masharī‘ al-kubra) – the revolution’s signal achievements in governmental media. The chapter describes how this type of achievement was considered extraordinary, given the struggle to coordinate across fragmented and conflicting state institutions. Moreover, the chapter analyses one of the Ministry of Culture’s greatest and longest-lasting projects: to build a new Egyptian human being (binā’ al-insān al-miṣri). I argue that the need to cultivate the Egyptian masses was not purely born from a desire to civilise, but by a political imperative to build a new people to be governed by the revolutionary command. In contrast with Younis’s pejorative description of the people envisaged by the Revolution as a ‘mass’ (gumū‘) or a ‘herd’ (qatī‘), this chapter presents the meliorative side of the same project: the yet-to-exist People as a collection of ‘righteous citizens’ (muwaṭinīn ṣāliḥīn).

The introduction begins with the book’s central argument: Egyptian cultural and media institutions have constructed a coherent state project after the 1952 revolution through a praxis of ‘achievement’ (ingāz, pl. ingazāt). Inspired by the anthropology of bureaucracy and the state, the book intervenes in the longstanding historiography on the Nasser era to show how low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats affiliated to the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance have worked to create a unified state-idea after 1952, while constituting a bureaucratic corps on a similar ideological basis. Such bureaucrats, as well as higher-ranking officials and ministers, are central actors in the book’s narrative. The introduction also reviews the book’s main sources and methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival visits in institutional repositories and personal libraries, as well as regular dives into the second-hand book market in Cairo.

At the turn of the twentieth century, agriculture in the Gulf was characterised by pastoralism, oasis horticulture, and irrigation systems. As a result of the emergence of the region’s nation states and the oil economy, these activities underwent decline and were replaced by forms of agribusiness and large-scale agriculture. The most conspicuous result of this was the establishment of large enclosures in which members of the ruling class were allocated large areas of land and water resources. The scale of these projects was vast and ambitious. This frontier provided an opportunity for enormous enrichment, but it also led to the exhaustion of non-renewable water reserves. As a result, domestic production was scaled down by the 2000s, leading to an impetus for a greater emphasis on external imports.

Soon after independence, the relationship between private enterprise and the state changed. The industrialization policy made certain sectors of high priority – machines, metallurgy or heavy chemicals – and made it easier for them to access scarce capital and foreign exchange. On the other hand, traditional businesses in textiles, plantations and commodity trades were deprived of access to capital and modernization opportunities, or even banned, along with moneylending. As some of the highly protected priority industries failed to become profitable, and bankruptcy accumulated in the low-priority sectors like textiles, the strategy became unsustainable. After a sharp break around the 1980s or 1990s, private enterprise faced a more liberal environment where it was easier to access capital and technology abroad and invest in offbeat fields. New patterns of inequality in the corporate sector developed again, now due to the challenges of operating in a globally connected and integrated world. The chapter presents this two-stage transition in a chronological narrative.

Although rarely acknowledged, Buddhist monastics are among the most active lawmakers and jurists in Asia, operating sophisticated networks of courts and constitutions while also navigating – and shaping – secular legal systems. This chapter surveys the entanglements of Buddhist monastic law and state law in Sri Lanka while also providing a general overview of Sri Lanka as a multi-religious, multi-legal site. It introduces readers to the key methods and arguments advanced in this book, including arguments about how and why one should analyse legal pluralism ‘as a practice.’

How is monastic law practised in modern-day Sri Lanka? How do contemporary monastic jurists reckon with multi-legality? This chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research with Sri Lanka’s third-largest monastic community, the Rāmañña Nikāya, to answer these questions and explore the operation of monastic law today. It introduces readers to the Rāmañña constitution, court system, judicial training materials, jurisprudential texts and other features of monastic legal practice. It argues that monastic judges practise legal pluralism in ways that both resist and embrace the parallels between monastic and state law, engaging in a form of ‘double speak’ that, on the one hand, places monastic law ‘on the scale’ of Sri Lankan law while, at the same time, highlighting its superior, more-than-human status.

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

Chapter 2 continues to dig into the Roman rhetorical tradition in order to clarify some aspects of the intellectual history of a pair of terms, forma and materia, which recur throughout Machiavelli’s political philosophy, allowing him to talk about the shape or form – as well as the stuff, or material – of the entities he is analysing. One prevalent assumption to be found in various parts of the relevant scholarship is that Machiavelli’s use of forma and materia indicates his reliance upon Aristotle. By way of contrast, this chapter argues that we have to turn to consider the historical fortunes of an entirely different set of classical resources. Classical Roman thought deployed the pair of Latin terms materia and forma in rhetorical, literary, architectural, and moral theory within a theoretical landscape far removed from any Aristotelian commitments. This chapter brings a greater measure of historical depth and conceptual precision to the pre-Machiavellian career of these ideas in classical and Renaissance political thought in order to illuminate what Machiavelli is doing with them, and to show why they should be identified as the theoretical foundation of ‘l’arte dello stato’.

How does the encounter between monastic law and colonial law look from the perspective of Buddhist monastics? The chapter offers an alternative legal history of the nineteenth century, drawing on a largely unstudied archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language legal sources written by Buddhist monks. Using these sources, I highlight the creativity and productivity of Buddhist monastic lawmaking during the nineteenth century. A close analysis of monastic legal texts from this period also reveals key differences in the ways that monastic jurists understood and enacted legal pluralism when compared with colonial officials. Rather than treating the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the Crown as conflicting, as the British tended to do, monastic jurists purposefully aligned them. Rather than hardening legal boundaries between monastic and colonial regulation, monastic jurists pushed in the direction of integration, borrowing and exchange between local and imported laws.

This chapter frames the debate between those who think that Kant’s philosophy of Right is in some way independent from his moral philosophy and those who do not in two ways. First, the chapter argues that Kant recognizes only two forms of practical reason, namely the pure practical reason of morality and the empirical practical reason of prudential self-love, and that if his philosophy of Right is not to be a version of Hobbesian prudence, it can only be a part of morality – namely, the coercively enforceable part. It argues further that the moral foundation of Kant’s philosophy of Right is the innate right to freedom, itself the correlative of our obligation always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, since humanity is equivalent to the ability of each to set his or her own ends, that is, freedom. In the second part of the chapter, it is argued that the duties of individuals and rulers alike to both institute and maintain the civil condition, namely the state, make sense only as moral and indeed ethical duties, although not duties of virtue to promote self-perfection and the happiness of others.

When authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote about what it meant to have rights, they discussed a great diversity of ways in which that concept could be understood, but they almost always concurred on one point. It was vital, they argued, that right should never be conflated with power. As Hugo Grotius put it, we must never agree with the claim that might is right. The twenty-six essays in this volume show that the idea of rights was widely used in the early modern period to resist and limit power. Accordingly, modern liberals have portrayed the period in terms of a struggle for rights against arbitrary power. However, the authors in this volume question that the story of rights as resistance was the dominant narrative of rights. If there was a dominant discourse of rights in the early modern period at all, it was one in which rights were coextensive with power.

Hu Jintao took over in 2002 and during his first term he sought to alleviate the rural plight bequeathed by his predecessors. His leadership cut taxes on agriculture and fees on rural education and health and rural economy began to turn around, as indicated by a pickup of rural income growth. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Hu Jintao leadership reprioritized policy back to the preexisting urban bias of the China Model. The stimulus program, commonly known as Siwanyi, funded infrastructural development, technology programs and urban real estate projects, leading to productivity decline and a massive debt accumulation, which Xi Jinping inherited in 2012. Xi made some adjustments and stepped up income transfers to rural households under his “Common Prosperity” program but his overall policy program and approach have been heavily statist and detrimental to growth. He downplayed economic growth as the objective function of the Communist Party of China and his crackdowns on private-sector businesses, escalation of geopolitical tensions, and draconian COVID controls weakened the confidence of investors and consumers alike. Chinese GDP is registering its lowest growth rate since 1978.

The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.

How did ambitious projects of wetland improvement give rise to a new kind of environmental politics in early modern England? This chapter first asks how such projects reconfigure understandings of when, where, and how environmental change took place in this period. Environmental acts were political, it argues, because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. It next explores what kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting wetland improvement. In emphasising material and institutional progress, studies of ‘improvement’ and ‘the state’ have often overlooked the contingent processes through which productivity and power were made and disputed on the ground. Mobilising custom as a practice and right, wetland communities played a vital role in the trajectory of improvement. Conflict over improvement exposed the contested nature of political authority in seventeenth-century England and generated material landscapes of flux. Finally, this chapter examines how speech acted and actions spoke to remake wetlands via print, maps, institutions, and environments.

Chapter 2 provides the image of the incentive bargaining of the firm with the state (or government) as the fifth player in the three countries. Section 2.1 compares the industrial policy, which is a typical measure for the state to directly affect the incentives of management, of the three countries. Historically, all three countries have extensively used industrial policy to stimulate industries from a macro perspective and motivate the management of individual firms to take risks. Section 2.2 compares the three different incentive mechanisms of the firm, including the state. The incentive mechanism of the US firms can be expressed as a monitoring image incentive pattern, or the principal-agent model. The incentive mechanism of Japanese firms can be expressed as a bargaining image incentive pattern, or the company community model. The incentive mechanism of Chinese SOEs can be expressed as a party-state model. The incentive mechanism of Chinese POEs can be expressed as an owner management model.