Judging by rates of criminal recidivism, the very trauma that leads to American incarceration only amplifies inside facilities whose purported mission is to rehabilitate. Using psychiatric, literary, and sociological studies alongside three twentieth-century prison memoirs written by American men of color – Jarvis Jay Masters’s That Bird Has My Wings (2009), Shaka Senghor’s Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013), and Ravi Shankar’s Correctional (2022) – this essay examines the use of bibliotherapy as a means of processing traumatic memory, reconnecting with community, redressing harm, and reclaiming control over one’s story to help stimulate and accelerate the process of healing and recovery. Life writing, and memoir specifically, allows for the transfiguration of generational, localized, and institutional trauma while bearing witness to the inner workings of carceral spaces, which are disproportionately populated by men of color and intentionally kept concealed from public view.

Travel manuscripts and printed books tell us how scribes and printers had to think carefully about representing foreign lands. Sometimes this meant turning the ordinary into the marvellous to capture the imagination of their readers; at other times this meant turning the strange into the recognisable. The manuscripts and printed books they produced translated tales of the unfamiliar into material palatable for domestic readers, which often required a careful balance of accuracy in relating travellers’ accounts and imagination to satisfy readers’ appetites for novelties. This essay looks at how travel literature circulated in manuscripts, how printers took advantage of the appetite for travel narratives, and what hybrid forms of manuscript and print tell us about who was reading them and the way travel literature was being read. As travel literature is a broad category that encompasses marvellous accounts, diaries, itineraries, letters, guidebooks, devotional aids, maps, and other narratives, my aim is not to offer a comprehensive overview but a few examples that demonstrate how the material context of travel literature can reveal much about their reception, use, and development.

The Introduction outlines the central themes of economic history, focusing on the efficient use of resources and its implications for welfare. It explains how societies have historically used natural, human and manufactured resources to improve living standards, exploring the critical roles of technology and institutions in driving efficiency and growth. The chapter introduces the concept of total factor productivity as a measure of economic efficiency, and emphasizes how historical developments have shaped the wealth of nations. It also links economic history to contemporary concerns by discussing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and their relevance to resource management and welfare. By tracing historical improvements in efficiency and productivity, the Introduction sets the stage for understanding how economic history informs modern debates on sustainability and inequality.

This chapter examines economic growth in pre-industrial Europe, focusing on the agricultural sector as the primary driver of progress. It explores how technological innovations in farming, such as crop rotation and selective breeding, allowed for sustained economic growth despite limited resources. The chapter also discusses the Great Divergence, a period in which Europe’s economic development began to outpace that of other regions, and investigates the factors behind this phenomenon. By analysing the nature of pre-industrial growth, the chapter demonstrates how advances in agriculture and slow, but continuous, technological progress in other sectors provided the basis for Europe’s later industrialization. It highlights the importance of both internal and external factors in shaping Europe’s economic trajectory.

This chapter explores housing as a foundation for wealth accumulation, emphasizing its dual role as both a consumable resource and an investment. My theoretical contributions are twofold: First, I argue that property rights can transform in-kind transfers into flexible, reliable wealth transfers, enabling recipients to invest in themselves and their children, regardless of the housing’s location. Second, I demonstrate how housing transfers reduce uncertainty and encourage future-oriented investments, thereby driving long-term wealth accumulation. Using three housing programs as case studies, I show that beneficiaries invest in human or physical capital, improving their employment prospects and income. I also examine mechanisms such as relocation, borrowing capacity, and time horizons, finding strong evidence for the latter two. Overall, the large changes to beneficiaries' economic behavior and outcomes suggest the possibility for important psychological, social, and political effects, which I explore in Chapters 4 and 5.

In this chapter the choreography of the minuet as it was performed in late eighteenth-century Vienna is reconstructed. Unlike previous iterations of the dance, the minuet in this context was performed as a group dance, undertaken by many couples dancing simultaneously, and the minuet’s development as a group dance is considered in relation to its previous history. The choreography is reconstructed from German-language dance treatises written around the end of the eighteenth century. The minuet step is explained, and readers are taught how to perform it. The main figures of the minuet are given – the Z-figure, the révérences, the giving of hands – and comparative schemes for these figures from the different treatises are set alongside each other. The overall structure of the dance is established, and practical logistics of performing the dance alongside other dancers in a crowded space are considered. The minuet’s association with the enactment of ‘nobility’ is interrogated.

Most analyses of Indian housing policy focus on central-level programs in urban areas. I broaden this scope to examine both central and state-level policies in rural and urban areas over time. This approach reveals that, alongside policies accommodating informality, governments have consistently pursued initiatives to subsidize the construction and sale of formal-sector housing. I then explore why governments might pursue formal-sector housing. One explanation is its alignment with broader planning and development agendas. Another is that it is electorally strategic to create and allocate housing. A third explanation that is relevant considering the focus on ownership in Indian housing policy suggests that some leaders may have an ideological commitment to homeownership. After establishing the broader context of Indian housing policy, I detail the three policies examined in this book. Two policies are based in urban Mumbai, while the third is a national rural policy. Finally, I assess how these policies improve basic housing quality. I find that each policy achieves its immediate goal, with Chapters 3, 4, and 5 exploring the broader economic, social, and political impacts.