This chapter explores the interplay between China’s economic transformation and its shifting demographic landscape over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It examines how an initially favorable age structure and abundant labor drove a period of material abundance and rapid growth, yielding a significant lifecycle surplus. Using a lifecycle approach with National Transfer Accounts, the authors analyze changes in labor income and consumption profiles, revealing that while early decades witnessed rising surplus driven by robust income growth and low dependency, the 2010s saw consumption outpacing income amid accelerating population aging. This resulted in a sharp contraction of the aggregate lifecycle surplus and a declining effective support ratio. The analysis further decomposes the impacts of changes in per capita income–consumption patterns versus demographic shifts, projecting that continuing aging will likely exhaust the surplus in the coming decades, posing critical challenges for China’s future economic and social policies.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, politicians operated within an increasingly hybrid system of media politics. Media became a mass phenomenon, gained commercial and journalistic independence, and assertively claimed to represent public opinion. This chapter sets the scene by describing this diversifying media environment in which politicians operated. It highlights the technological advances that enabled ‘mass’ media; censorship and freedom of the press; media landscapes including political and religious newspapers, as well as regional, national, and transnational news flows; the commercialization of media; and changing journalistic cultures. These developments interconnected with social changes such as increasing literacy and urbanization; democratization and a bolstered notion of public opinion; and a reflexive modernity. Media became increasingly hybrid in terms of interacting media technologies and formats, political and commercial newspapers, and their social and political functions. This media hybridity defined the new transnational system of media politics that political figures inhabited around 1900.

This chapter explores the economic recovery of Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, often referred to as the Dark Ages. It highlights the role of technological innovation and the division of labour in revitalizing European economies from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, building on insights from the work of Adam Smith. The re-establishment of long-distance trade routes and the revival of urban centres were critical factors in this recovery. The chapter also explores the restoration of monetary systems and the development of a more complex economy characterized by the growth of cities and increased production. By focusing on how Europe transitioned from a period of obscurity to one of gradual economic resurgence, the chapter underscores the importance of trade, technology and labour specialization in driving recovery and growth.

This chapter explores favela upgrading in the communities of Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo in the wake of a terrible mudslide in 1983, under the administration of socialist governor Leonel Brizola. The chapter explores the huge ambitions of Brizola’s administration and the linked upgrading projects in Pavão-Pavãozinho in particular, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of those projects, and places this in the context of larger economic, political and demographic transitions in the city.

Municipalities deflect demands for benefits instead of meeting them or denying them outright to resist and undermine elements of the central government’s urbanization strategy. This diffuse promise of phantom services operates at what is experienced by local officials and migrants as the person-by-person micro-level of provision. Urban authorities sometimes do so by establishing nearly impossible eligibility requirements or requiring paperwork that outsiders struggle to obtain. At times they also nudge migrants to seek health care or education elsewhere by enforcing dormant rules or by shutting down a locally available service provider. Local officials use these ploys for both political and practical reasons. Limiting access isolates and disempowers migrants and is cheaper than offering benefits. Phantom services are a consequence of the localization of the household registration system and a sign that new axes of inequality and gradations of second-class citizenship have emerged.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

Toward the end of the Iron I, the vast majority of the many rural villages excavated in the highlands were abandoned. At the same time, a handful of settlements began to grow into fortified towns. Why did these dramatic changes take place at this time, and what is the relationship between these two phenomena? The chapter reviews the evidence and evaluates the various possible explanations for such widespread abandonments, including climate change, nomadization, incentives to move to other regions, forced resettlement, death, and security (external threats), and concludes that the first phase of this abandonment could have only been a result of an external threat (the second phase of the abandonment will be discussed in subsequent chapters, and especially Excursus 12.1). The chapter then identifies the threat with the Philistines, analyzes the nature of Philistine–Israelite interaction, and assesses the impact of the Philistine pressure on social complexity in the highlands and the emergence of leaders there. This is also the phase in which the first Iron Age fortifications appear in the highlands. Taken together, these changes signify the emergence of the Israelite monarchy toward the end of the Iron Age I and the transition into the Iron II.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

The chapter examines the growth of German cities and patterns of social differentiation within them, and municipal government.

The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

Chapter 1 draws on settlement archaeology, urban infrastructures, and architecture to evaluate the hypothesis that Chang’an was an unprecedented imperial capital at the apex of the junxian system. Also subject to appraisal is the role of interregional networks and urban nodes in the spatial reworking of contentious territories into the constitution of an imperial core.