Thirteen scholars using original and thorough historical information have worked together to consider variability across thirteen cases of premodern economies representing a worldwide distribution, contrasting sociopolitical scale, and forms of organization. In Chapter 1, we defined economies as organized to extract resources, mobilize labor, and make things and distribute them for consumption. This consumption meets the ever-changing demand of human populations and their institutional formations that create the diversity of material life of human societies. With extended interactions, our comparative study probably represents the best available overall consideration of economic variability in premodern societies. We do not see our book as a final statement with evident conclusions of premodern economies, but as a substantial step forward.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

This chapter examines decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as emergent forms of software or knowledge commons, applying the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. It argues that DAOs, characterised by their reliance on blockchain-enabled smart contracts and elimination of hierarchical management, represent a novel form of collective decision-making and governance. The analysis distinguishes between on-chain and off-chain governance models, evaluating their effectiveness in ensuring decentralisation and addressing internal conflicts, with particular emphasis on the unique conflict resolution mechanisms available to DAOs (such as "forking" and "rage-quitting"). An important insight is that the rules-in-use in on-chain governance and off-chain governance are likely to be very different. The chapter also considers the robustness decentralised systems in managing common-pool resources.

The earliest successful and sustained venture in the promulgation of a Western-style, liberal arts education in colonial India that continued into the postcolonial period, the Hindu College—established in 1817 and later renamed in 1855 as the Presidency College—is the subject of this book. The institution made extraordinary contributions to both education and public life. We examine critically the ideas that shaped the institutional imagination of this enterprise, its historical development, the multifarious challenges it faced along the way, and the ways that teachers and students experienced and memorialized the institution. We map the traffic of ideas that led to Presidency College's flourishing and the interventions and experiments that contributed to its distinct image as a “center for excellence” but without the neoliberal associations with which the expression is loaded in modern-day academic parlance. We also analyze the ways in which the college became the preeminent birthplace ground of a modern middle class and a harbinger of secular values in colonial and postcolonial Indian modernity.

Histories of educational institutions in the erstwhile colonized parts of the world are inevitably caught up in concerns about the implications of colonial modernity for their academic vision, functioning, and agenda. If earlier histories from the 1960s to 1970s critically addressed decisions of the colonial state in India favoring Orientalist or Anglicist policies in education and their fallout on the colonized, recent work has focused closely on individual educational institutions where these debates were played out.

Chapter 5 studies the ways in which Bhanu Kapil and D. S. Marriott, two innovative British Asian and Black avant-garde writers based in the US, renovate lyric to invent a poetics of riot in the twenty-first century. The surplus of crisis – or what Joshua Clover has theorized in Riot. Strike. Riot as the new era of uprisings due to surplus economic immiseration disproportionately affecting racialized populations – appears in experimental form, which I call “surplus lyric.” In Ban en Banlieu, Kapil composes a cross-genre experimental poem to mediate instances of racialized violence against women spanning London, New Delhi, and the Bay of Bengal. In contrast, Marriott gives lyrical expression to a poetics of riot through his adaptations of the London-based underground musical genre of grime in his collection Duppies. Kapil and Marriott hold in common a political stance that envisions not progressive transformation but rather a radical abolition of the structures that perpetuate racial violence in Britain and elsewhere.

Introduction: Derivative Anxieties?

In the first decade of its establishment in 1817, the Hindu College, Calcutta, was seeing a steady growth in terms of both the number of students and the introduction of new courses. “A Drawing class was added in 1827,” the Presidency College Centenary Volume observes, “but a more significant development was the creation of a professorship of Law and Political Economy so that in a few years the college came to have two branches—the General Department and the Law Department.” Although the Centenary Volume mentions 1831 as the year in which the instruction in law and political economy started, the college might not have had a teaching position specifically for it before 1840. In October 1840, the General Committee of Public Instruction wrote a response to the Governor-General Auckland's minute on education. In the response, the General Committee acknowledged the necessity of lectures on jurisprudence, ethics, and political economy and asked for the provision of “the services of a Lecturer on the Principles of Jurisprudence and Political Economy” at the Hindu College. The letter further mentioned the plan to start the lectureship also at other institutions under the Committee's jurisdiction.

The decision to introduce a course on law and political economy was underpinned by deliberate reasoning.