Soon after the establishment of British colonial authority, south India underwent institutional changes in the administrative, military, educational and other spheres. In the countryside, the furthest-reaching of these changes was the introduction of the raiyatwari and zamindari land settlements, which granted a particular class of people in rural society exclusive landownership. The period covered in this chapter, 1850–1950, saw the consequences of these early institutional changes unfold and the emergence of new processes in the urban and service economies, including in transport, trade, finance and industry. The chapter discusses these general trends, paying particular attention to the countryside.

That obtaining a driving license in India is all too easy is a public secret; the prime reason behind this “ease” is the ubiquitous and ambivalent figure of the broker who, as public understanding goes, is enmeshed in a system of bribery at the Regional Transport Office (RTO). This chapter explores why brokerage and bribery have become institutionalized at the RTO. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over three years in the southern city of Hyderabad, I analyze the frameworks through which the act of hiring a broker is rationalized and articulated by Hyderabadi motorists. I show how brokerage is justified and even actively desired through two central framings both of which emphasize that brokers act as buffers in mediating between motorists and the RTO: one, brokers act as an insurance against an arbitrary state and, in doing so, make the state legible to motorists and vice versa; and two, brokerage enables a distancing from corruption and blurring the line between legality and illegality. All these factors contribute toward a quiet but potent institutionalization of brokerage at the RTOs in Hyderabad and, on one level, become caught up in the complex contestations around the very function and purpose of a driver’s license.

Perceptions and bias help explain animosity over food supplies between urban and rural civilians. While differences in rural and urban hunger existed in some places, caution should be exercised when attributing the destitution of urban dwellers to greed or acts of self-preservation by rural farmers. Greater proximity to major food sources did not always equate to greater access to food. Furthermore, proximity to food in both urban and rural areas was not fixed, but changed over the course of the war and its aftermath. People fled or were forced from their homes in both urban and rural areas. This movement of people blurred rural and urban distinctions as people from the countryside flocked into cities and people in the cities took shorter trips to the countryside to search for food. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of predominantly urban children travelled temporarily to rural landscapes in the early 1920s. Analyses of anthropometric measurements of school children in Germany and Austria suggest that rural and urban differences were small. During the War, children in Vienna may have suffered more nutritional deprivation overall then in other parts of Austria, but after the War, Viennese children had the fastest rate of recovery.

Through mapping the sociological origins of Palestinian doctors: their birthplace, class and family origin, early educational background, and university education, this chapter shows the social transformations of Palestinian communities during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. It traces the development of the professional classes, from landed, mercantile, and religious notability, which converted, and sometimes supplemented, existing economic and cultural capital into professional education. It argues that throughout the Mandate period, the social origins of the professional community diversified to include families and individuals who gained mobility through sociocultural and economic capital. The chapter also looks at secondary and higher education as a meeting ground for the formation of lifelong professional and personal networks on a regional scale, as doctors were one of the only groups educated outside Palestine. The chapter builds on quantitative analysis of biographical data of about 400 doctors who worked in Palestine. Sources include biographical dictionaries, biographies and autobiographies, and various educational and employment lists.

This chapter explores the development of funerary archaeology in Late Antiquity, examining how burial practices evolved and how they have been interpreted over time. It argues that these practices were far more complex than previously assumed, shaped by a range of factors including religious beliefs, social status and local traditions. The chapter challenges earlier assumptions that grave goods were exclusively linked to pagan burials, demonstrating that Christians also placed objects in graves. It also examines the influence of nationalism and antiquarianism on the interpretation of burial sites, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of its key conclusions is that burial practices varied significantly and cannot be neatly categorised along religious or ethnic lines. Additionally, cemeteries served not only as places of interment but also as spaces for reinforcing social identity, political claims and communal memory. By integrating modern archaeological techniques with historical analysis, the chapter offers a more nuanced understanding of late antique funerary customs, moving beyond simplistic narratives of religious transformation.

Since the 1990s, there has developed an increasingly sophisticated ecocritical approach within Irish literary studies. Ecocriticism may not seem entirely relevant to analyses of O’Casey’s Autobiographies nor to his ‘Dublin Trilogy’. But this chapter argues that the critical resources of the field can productively re-orient our appreciations of writers who seem to ‘pre-date’ climate change and environmentalism. The chapter suggests how it might be possible to read O’Casey’s work in terms of its engagement with human and non-human relations, with the urgencies of social and economic injustice, and with the politics of representation as they are germane to non-human ecologies.

This chapter examines the various tropes and representational strategies used by writers to depict urban and rural spaces and their dynamics, highlighting the constructed nature of place and the intimate relationship between history, place-making, memory, and representation. Drawing on key cultural theorists and urban geographers, most notably Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, Yi-Fu Tuan, Susan Buck-Morss, Kristin Bluemel, and Michael McCluskey, and literary texts such as Dung Kai Cheung’s Atlas: An Archaeology of an Imaginary City (1997), I discuss different imaginative and creative impulses that underlined the discursive construction of place and space. And with reference to texts published in different cultural contexts and historical moments, such as Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897), and Shen Congwen’s The Border Town (1934), I examine not only the various manifestations of urban/rural dichotomies as invoked in literary works, but also moments when these dichotomies are unsettled or blurred. The last section of the chapter focuses on Alicia Little’s A Marriage in China (1896) and Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark (1934), exploring the ways in which the rural/urban constructs engage with questions of colonial politics, resistance, and the ideas of home and (un)belonging.