This chapter analyzes the “Negro Plot” of New York in 1741, in which numerous black slaves and free people, as well as Catholic whites, were accused of conspiring with and corrupting others to commit a series of arsons in New York City over a bitterly cold winter and amid the threat of war. The chapter shows how corruption accusations surrounding the plot were “promiscuous,” in the sense that, as embedded in the colonial politics of the day, accusations made in terms of corruption escalated to increasingly implausible targets, even as they served to legitimate unlikely accusations. I show that this very promiscuity linked with the construction (and disintegration) of political narratives and official careers and was tethered to moralized visions of social order.

A view of corruption as disembedded from society and history is predominant today. In this view, corruption is basically the same thing everywhere and inherently a bad thing because it gets in the way of proper processes. In opposition to this view, we argue for understanding corruption as socially and historically embedded. While there are many viable ways to embed corruption, we advocate a comparative historical sociology of corruption in particular. This approach has in mind a view of corruption as “a moving object,” that is, as subject to variation across social space and transformation over time. It focuses on the processes through which a course of action is worked out in relation to historically specific structural conditions. By tracing these processes and embedding “corrupt” practices in the situations where they were developed and make sense, we gain a deeper understanding of these practices and are in a better position to evaluate them.

Through a case study of the T’aegǔkki rallies beginning in late 2016, Chapter 6 examines why and how senior citizens took to the streets in large numbers to protest the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and oppose the democratic and peaceful candlelight demonstrations. Analyzing the widespread emotions and narratives expressed by these older protesters, I argue that right-wing elites and intellectuals marshaled citizens by evoking historical experiences that aroused intense fear and outrage among older generations. In this chapter, I describe why the protests resonated so deeply with elderly citizens by focusing on their lived experiences during the Korean War and postwar industrialization and how the rise of new digital media inspired them to take to the streets on a large scale. Through grassroots organizing and by harnessing feelings of victimhood and fear among ordinary citizens, rightists cultivated a fertile ground for conservative mobilization.

July 1914 escalates because of a deterrence failure. Germany and Russia were playing a game of chicken. The kaiser stood firm; he believed that Russia was not prepared for war and would therefore back down. The tsar likewise stood firm; he vowed not to back down again after the Bosnian Crisis – and he thought that Germany would ultimately back down because it would not want to fight the combined power of Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. With neither side yielding, the crisis continued to escalate. A second dynamic contributed to escalation as well. At some point – probably on July 30 – the actors changed strategy. Instead of using coercion to deter their opponent, they started taking coercive measures to increase the likelihood that they would win a war, if one began. Each side mobilized, and mobilization led to war. Beneath all this lay rivalry and the repetition of crises between the major states. Finally, once war broke out between Germany and Russia, the alliance structure caused the war to spread rapidly. From this crisis, we learn many lessons, including that a balance of power and relatively equal military capabilities are associated with war onset; they do not prevent war.

Antiwar sentiment grew during 1967. Divided over some issues, the movement’s decentralized nature resisted control by any one faction and it advanced along coexisting paths. Liberals appealed to moderates through Vietnam Summer and Negotiations Now, but by autumn, leftist influence was more pronounced. Frustrated over continued escalation, some activists engaged in more direct confrontation. Students challenged university connections to the military-industrial complex, draft resistance proliferated through organizations and individual conscience, GI dissent gained momentum, and radicals increasingly adopted civil disobedience, most evident at the March on the Pentagon. New layers of moderate antiwar opinion worked through the democratic process and street demonstrations worked in conjunction with government critics. Government officials tried to undermine this loyal opposition. Harassment ranged from infiltration and sabotage to politically influenced trials. President Johnson responded to antiwar pressure with an optimistic progress campaign that would have serious future repercussions. The movement endured these assaults as a coalition of diverse organizations and perspectives.

This chapter illuminates the impact of the 1948 war on the Palestinian medical community and locates its role in assisting their communities during the Nakba. Within a few months, the British administration withdrew its funding from all governmental health services, most Palestinian Arab doctors were displaced, and casualties mounted. Observing the medical profession during the war, this chapter follows heroic stories of perseverance. Lacking any state structures or national independent institutions, however, these efforts were necessarily localized and short-lived, suffering from a severe lack of supplies. Largely dependent on private practice, the Arab medical profession in Palestine began unionizing only three years before the war and had limited resources of its own. The chapter reviews the resources mobilized to deal with these challenges and the community’s fate following the Nakba.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

This chapter explores the possibilities and dilemmas that civil society actors face in resisting and reversing democratic backsliding through examples from around the world. It examines the conditions that shape civil society activism under backsliding and the roles it has played in containing or reversing autocratization. As it shows, in a number of cases civil society resistance has been critical in restraining and reversing backsliding. But it has been better able to counter backsliding when popular support for the backsliding leader has eroded and the opposition is able to work through institutions rather than having to work against them. As backsliding proceeds, institutional channels for influence deteriorate. As a result, there is a critical window during which civil society resistance stands a better chance of containing backsliding: before electoral processes and institutional constraints on executives are fully captured. Once capture occurs, civil society resistance moves to the much more dangerous and difficult task of confronting rather than preventing dictatorship.

A realistic utopia is a utopia that respects basic constraints imposed by the Human Condition. This chapter explains why some kinds of political manipulation are not bad or wrong at all, and would accordingly remain operative in a realistic political utopia. The legitimacy of manipulation is first demonstrated with respect to five categories of the non-deliberative dimensions of political life: mobilizing, participation, negotiation, ruling, and ensuring stability. It is then demonstrated with respect to political deliberation itself. All of this applies to manipulation’s function in the two faces of democratic politics: cooperation and competition. The need for the “social lubrication” functions of manipulation is especially acute in politics, given the intractability of the coordination challenges on a society-wide scale. Specifically, manipulation is, at certain junctions, a necessary tool for overcoming motivational obstacles to the flow of political information in a way conducive to rational persuasion. In such ways manipulation is integral to the very idea of a functioning democracy.

The homeowners’ movements in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen differ by both the scope of their property rights claims and the concomitant ways in which they claim those rights. The leading homeowners in Beijing are political entrepreneurs, devoting themselves more to systemic change and even Chinese democracy than to the self-governance of their individual neighborhoods. The leading homeowners in Shenzhen are social entrepreneurs who navigate through the social, legal, and bureaucratic maze to claim absolute homeownership sovereignty. The defining characteristic of homeowners in Shanghai is respect for laws and rules.

The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

The War of the Pacific (1879-1884) is the war among South American states with the second highest casualty rate in the nineteenth century. This chapter provides a detailed case study of this war while offering a long-term narrative of state building in the South Pacific (i.e., Bolivia, Chile, and Peru). The comparison between Chile and Peru is illuminating, since both countries were comparable in important confounders–e.g., their armies, navy, bureaucracies, and budgets–and were impacted similarly by important economic confounders such as economic booms and crises. In this chapter I depict the evolution of war and the balance between central and peripheral elites from independence to the mid-century. Then I illustrate how preparation for war led to state formation, and looks at the details of the campaign, battle by battle. These two sections already serve the purpose of debunking some myths in this literature, like the idea that Peru did not mobilize for the war, and that the war did not lead to extraction in Chile Finally, I discuss how war transformed state institutions, and determined diverging, long-terms trends in state capacity.

This chapter covers the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867), two of the deadliest wars in nineteenth-century Latin America. A blowing defeat, and a glorious victory, these wars set Mexico in a road to anarchy and state consolidation, respectively. The chapter starts covering early episodes of war in New Spain, like the Mexican victory against the French in the Pastry War (1838-1839), which provided initial impulse for centralizing projects. It then turns to the Texan Revolution and the Mexican-American War, and corroborates the predictions of the theory in the behaviour of all actors and on each phase of the war. Leaving Mexico in the state of total anarchy and state collapse expected after a defeat, I then take a detour to discuss how victory in the Filibuster War (1856-1857) impacted Costa Rica, providing a tentative answer for the mystery of its comparatively high political development until our day. Finally, I return to Mexico and cover the Second French Intervention of Mexico, a blessing in disguise, for the victory against the French ushered the period of more spectacular stability and growth in Mexican history.