When the Hindu College (called simply the Vidyalaya to start with), the first such institute of higher education anywhere in the world, was founded in Calcutta in 1817 at the insistence of Indian “gentlemen of distinction,” they urged Chief Justice Edward Hyde East that they wanted their children to have “a liberal education” and that “they should wish to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt.” What followed has been characterized as “a global phenomenon” that was “chronologically … perhaps the earliest manifestation of the revolution in the mental world of Asia's elite groups.”

This chapter will show that the Hindu College was the first educational institution of its kind—not just in Asia, but anywhere in the world. A close examination of the founding and initial years of the college in relation to developments in education in England itself, Europe, and even distant America shows that the values that underpinned its establishment were what we might call modern, rational, and progressive, to an extent, in fact, that was unrivalled on the world stage till then. In the event, as we shall see, a handful of Indians succeeded in establishing, in 1817, an educational institution that was unprecedented in its form—with no links to either church or state, funded by “subscriptions,” and run by Indian managers on their own terms—setting up parameters for higher education that would in time become the norm globally.

All societies mobilize resources for different purposes. The product of human labor, these goods and services become especially important in the formation and support of multi-scalar organizations that include communities, regional polities, and beyond. The labor and its resources must be mobilized to finance these organizations as they are developed and maintained across time.

This chapter examines the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which rely primarily on sociotechnical infrastructures supplied by blockchain technology and consist substantially of combinations of shared computer code and shared data. The chapter considers DAOs using the governing knowledge commons (GKC) research framework, contrasting the GKC perspective with long-standing views of the corporate form as a nexus of contracts, as an instance of hierarchy and decision theory, and as a complex system. The analysis is set against the context of earlier work on the corporation as commons. The chapter concludes that the GKC framework focuses attention on elements of governance that often are not salient in conventional accounts. This is especially true of the important question of how governance responds to and generates social dilemmas associated specifically with practices of sharing knowledge, information, and data.

We start by considering the complementary relationship between the goals of self-sufficiency and specialization in human economies. Self-sufficiency seems to have often been a goal to retain control and independence for a social unit, but as we describe, specialization was frequent because of the complexity and risks of tasks and the availability of lower-cost options through exchange. Among households, self-sufficiency in production for internal consumption was a reasonable objective of many traditional economies. Households often sought to retain economic independence for most subsistence foods and some everyday technology. Marshall Sahlins (1972) captured this traditional objective as the domestic mode of production (DMP), and it is foundational for Kenneth Hirth’s (2020) analysis of traditional economies. The independent household was idealized in early Western philosophy. In the Archaic period of Greece, the autarkic peasant household was desirable, and many ancient farmers produced most of their own food. In Politics written in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle maintained that, although the individual could not be self-sufficient, households could and should achieve it for daily needs. The village community could then be self-sufficient in more than basic needs.

Attracting “youths of good promise from every part of the [Bengal] Presidency, including the most remote provinces,” was the founding mandate of Presidency College that was supposed to distinguish it from “the very small circle of districts heretofore connected with the Hindoo College.” The district constituencies of the Presidency College stretched far and wide, and this vast hinterland—indiscriminately clubbed as “mofussil” in the official documents—presented a set of peculiar predicaments to the institution. On the one hand, the claim of serving the mofussil equally with the metropolis of Calcutta was the formal justification for many of the unusual institutional privileges that the college came to enjoy. On the other hand, the college authorities never tired of complaining that this very responsibility of serving the mofussil held the institution back from realizing its full potential. To the Presidency College's evolving metropolitan selfimage, the mofussil was both a supply house of talent and a rustic source of cultural embarrassment. It was a distant exterior that, in the form of migrant students, was also an intimate presence. For such students, again, the mofussil was an identity that had to be alternately performed and concealed in the urban theater of bhadralok modernity. In examining the evolving institutional, spatial, and experiential registers of this unresolved tension from 1855 to 1920, this chapter attempts to suggest one way of uncocooning the history of Presidency College.

Chapter 1 discusses Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poems on Black youth, which intone a politics of resistance in the 1970s and early 1980s in the contexts of anti-Black violence, aggressive policing, and riot. For Stuart Hall, “policing the crisis” is tantamount to policing the category of “Black youth” as the social category through which the structural features of crisis become violently inflicted. LKJ’s dub poems “sound the violence” across Dread Beat and Blood, Inglan Is a Bitch, and his landmark poem on the 1981 Brixton Uprisings, “Di Great Insohreckshan,” which I read in the pages of Race Today (1982), where it was first published. The chapter concludes by discussing the poet’s literary acclaim with the Penguin publication of Mi Revalueshanary Fren in 2002. The arc of LKJ’s career – from a space of autonomy and advancing a politics of resistance to his literary recognition and canonization even as his writing illustrates how racial violence and social inequality persist and deepen – distills the movement of this book as a whole.

Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.

Reminiscences of teachers by former students pervade accounts of the Presidency College, whether they are articles in the Presidency College Magazine, Autumn Annual, or autobiographies and other kinds of recollections. Not all teachers, however. A select list of names recur repeatedly in memories of the college. My effort in this chapter is to understand why it is that some individuals stand out over hundreds of others. A teacher, I argue, gains a storied reputation though several types of collective memorywork. First, there are some teachers who are remembered as transformative pedagogues, both inside and outside the classroom. Second, there are some whose names are associated with movements of political and cultural import that reach far beyond the college's walls, such as nationalism and modernity. Third, and most important, a remembered teacher is someone about whom there are anecdotes that get handed down generations and eventually make their way to us in writing. While there may be many teachers who are privately remembered by individual students, only some generate a trove of anecdotes that become part of institutional lore.

In an essay on the anecdote as a critical resource in Bengali history and public culture, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that a narrative that is based primarily on anecdotal evidence is different from historical biography. The latter are more exhaustive about the life of their chosen subjects while anecdotes are, by definition, fragmentary. Their fragmentary character allows anecdotes to travel between orality and writing.