Kenya’s labour movement was deeply embroiled in the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and the colonial campaign against the insurgency between 1952 and 1956. Militant labour leaders were integral to the growth of the rebellion in Nairobi, but the colonial government sought to use the opportunity presented by the State of Emergency declared in October 1952 to bring the entire labour movement to heel. This created an opportunity for a young Tom Mboya, who became leader of the Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions, later renamed as the Kenya Federation of Labour. Mboya used the organisations links to the British Trades Union Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to campaign for the release of wrongly arrested moderate trade unionists, and to develop further opportunities for trade union training, including a scholarship for him to study in Oxford and his attendance at an ICFTU seminar in India. However, Mboya became frustrated with the limited appetite within the ICFTU or TUC to support the adoption by the KFL of an avowed anti-colonial stance, which in turn pushed him towards the United States.

Ten years on, I’d still make the case for leaving the EU. On reflection I’m proud that a majority of voters valued democratic accountability over short-term practical and economic advantages. I regret that Leave supporters were labelled old, stupid, little Englanders. This was about identity, community and belonging. It’s better to acknowledge that this is something we all need, rather than sneer. Could we have taken a more pro-active part in shaping subsequent events? The government of the day called the referendum, and the government of the day owned the outcome. Arguably something like Change Britain might have come into being immediately after the referendum, but practically it’s hard to see how the cross-party nature of the organisation could have been maintained, or indeed financed. The EU referendum could have been planned better both before and after the votes were counted. Professor Alan Renwick at UCL convened a group of politicians, academics and practitioners to reflect on what might be considered good practice in the future. Direct participatory democracy can unleash forces which become difficult to reign in, even in mature parliamentary democracies.

All we had to operate on was gut feeling. My gut feeling was that we were in deep trouble, and that the confidence, indeed the arrogance, of the Remain campaign was being fuelled by a failure to speak to enough voters outside London and the other big cities. I spent the day of the referendum in my constituency getting out the vote. On Upper Street, every single person was wearing an ‘I’m in’ sticker. I spotted the one and only man who wasn’t and offered him one. He said that he was happy to wear it in London, but would be taking it off when he went home to Peterborough. Again, I saw that you could be caught up in the bubble in London and assume everything would be fine, but the moment you stepped out you could see that it wasn’t. I went into that evening with a really heavy heart. I was sent out on the media round, to a massive great barn in outer London from which the BBC was hosting its referendum coverage. I was waiting in the wings at 4:40am when David Dimbleby announced ‘We’re out.’

This chapter offers a survey of the jus gentium in South East Aasia between the fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It starts by providing an overview of the region and elucidating the challenges inherent in its study. Subsequently, the examination follows three lines of enquiry: first, it explores basic values and principles governing inter-ruler and interpolity relations on the eve of European colonialism around 1450–1500 by discussing and problematising tributary relations. Second, it examines the uniqueness of these relations when juxtaposed with Europe, highlighting key facets such as hierarchy, the prioritisation of people over land, and the forging of alliances with communities of the sea and land. Finally, the chapter plots the transformative impact of European colonial policies and practices, such as the militarisation of maritime spaces, the use of sea passes and the introduction of written agreements and commercial treaties.

I begin by narrowing down the realm of human ‘production’, the requirements it places on our faculties and why humans are essentially productive animals. I then move on to three philosophical accounts of human productivity: those of Aristotle, Marx and Gwen Bradford respectively. Aristotle’s account is marred by class prejudice, Marx’s by a hyper-focus on the conditions rather than the results of ‘labour’, and Bradford’s by an over-formal analysis of production that has too little to say about products. By contrast, I propose a comprehensive account that has substantive things to say about producers, processes of production and products. My account distinguishes two productive ‘poles’, namely: (1) those powers engaged in the producer (productive ‘inputs’); and (2) those powers engaged in the consumer (productive ‘outputs’). Production is good overall to the degree it protects and promotes the perfection of both producers’ and consumers’ powers. I round off Chapter 9 by tackling the ‘anti-work’ critique, arguing that it fails to show work as such is a bad. Indeed, production remains perfective of humans in virtue of their productive nature.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of achievement books is crafted through images and numbers as well as words. I argue that these media have two purposes. On one hand, they act as symbolic fragments of the nation, constituted by a recognisable Nasser-era iconography. Peasants and workers, students and soldiers, factories and machines, land and buildings – all these elements are marshalled to depict a cohesive national mosaic. On the other hand, each photograph and statistic acts as an index of the state’s achievements; the picture and the number become, on their own, an inarguable demonstration of the state’s ability to achieve. After describing the typical content of Nasserist iconography, the chapter moves to analyse it in relation to the master narratives of industrial modernisation and revolutionary responsibility. The chapter concludes with an analysis of what images exclude, what lies beyond their frame, and how these exclusions are telling about what constitutes ‘the state’ under Nasser. Governmental images and numbers are not a peripheral epiphenomenon to Nasser-era politics, but they are symbolically and indexically central to the state’s construction.

This chapter describes the history of the industrial labour force as it emerged in South Asia, mostly in current India, since the middle of the nineteenth century. New export-oriented industries created employment for many workers, mostly migrants from often remote rural areas, and mostly men. Despite this growth, the labour force structure did not ‘transform’. Industry never employed more than 10% of the labour force, only a small proportion of that was employed in large-scale enterprises, and many workers remained circulatory migrants. The chapter shows that it is imperative to understand this industrial labour force and forms of worker organization that emerged in the interaction of the nature of capitalist production with a large agrarian and impoverished economy, and of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ social relations and identities.

Chapter 5 begins to draw the reader into the core case studies of the book. The movement of colonial education into the provincial countryside is revealed with a focus on the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. This helps to build a local-regional component into the theory of learningscapes in An Unholy Pedagogy. Education is shown to be an introduced and foreign system of instruction, though it incorporated indigenous practices from collegians’ influence, and this didactic trajectory bordered the wholistic and preordained expertise of Ibero-Christian systems of learning. Though examining Christian official records, the chapter also seeks local identity and community efforts to navigate regional impacts with the introduced, augmented systems. One core note is that locals participated in the Mesoamerican countryside’s encounter with texts and architects. Against a tragic backdrop, towns established convents via skilled labourers’ hands under the discretion of Indigenous church people. The chapter studies the concept to placemaking in an account of Motolinía, reading against the hagiographic take to note how these active decades of church growth identified local participation and agency in planning developments and using the grounds of new convents and courtyards. A new provincial learningscape takes shape in this portion of the book, with the shining examples drawn from the Indigenous towns of Huexotzinco, Calpan, and Quauhquechollan.

A great deal of the scholarly debate and discussion on independent India’s history of employment is centred on why modernization and diversification of the economy did not draw more people out of agriculture, which was one of the key aims of economic policy at independence. Starting with that issue, the chapter analyses long-term data to reveal a number of ways employment, wages and working conditions changed. These trends include impressive growth in service sector employment, a recent rise in the share of the formal sector in employment and rapid growth in real wages in agriculture. However, the key question remains why manufacturing continues to take a relatively small share of the addition to the labour force.

This chapter discusses the employment of poor and labouring women between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. In this period, they suffered first a loss of their independent occupations in manual manufacturing and then exclusion from mechanized large-scale industry. This marks the beginning of a persistent and long-term pattern of low female workforce participation in India. The discussion is organized around multiple themes of marginalization, quantitative and qualitative: first, the question of numerical decrease in household industry, craft production and the small-workshop sector; second, the ideological exclusion from mills and mines, which were emerging as preserves of adult men earning family wages; third, resistance to women’s long-distance employment on contracts in plantations, which was perceived as a challenge to familial control over their labour; fourth, commercialization of women’s reproductive work in sectors such as midwifery, domestic work and sex work, providing increasing employment but under stigmatized conditions. These themes are linked to questions of regulation by family, caste, community and the state.

The Indian economy has grown rapidly since it began to liberalize in the 1990s, but industrial growth has fallen short of expectations. Curiously, Indian industry did not perform particularly well even during the colonial period, when the state’s approach was close to laissez-faire. How can we explain this? This chapter first shows that colonial India’s industrial stagnation is well represented by the slow progress of labour productivity of leading industrial sectors, which coincided with slow capital formation and slow total factor productivity growth. The chapter then shows that the slow growth of capital and total factor productivity were related to inflexibility in policy choices under the laissez-faire economic policy framework, and the shortcomings of institutional and organizational settings.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.