This chapter aims to chart the dominant narrative of decline within leftist. Writing an intellectual history of the left inevitably involves the construction of narratives. The chapter also aims to excavate the utopian desires of critical theory with a view to reigniting an affective politics centred on hope. The utopian images and productivist dreams of building a better future are supplanted by consumerist nightmares of coercion, conformity, indifference, and subjective deformation. The chapter provides an engagement with the work of Ernst Bloch, since no discussion of the politics of hope can afford to ignore Bloch's major contributions to the topic. Bloch characterizes hope as an expectant emotion. His three-volume opus The Principle of Hope is an imposing, esoteric, unpredictable, often rambling and repetitive text, which spans the fields of anthropology, social and cultural history, philosophy, and theology.

The chapter provides an overview of the multifaceted cultural significance of Allen Ginsberg. While Ginsberg appeared in numerous works, performances, and actions from the late 1950s until his death in 1997 (and continues to enjoy an afterlife in popular and literary culture), in every case these appearances mean something. Hypersensitive Beatnik misfit, spokesman for the Summer of Love, conduit for Eastern mysticism, drug advocate, punk rocker, itinerant scholar, and gay-rights champion (to name only the most prominent of Ginsberg’s manifestations), Ginsberg’s lasting representation – that of the gifted and innovative poet – is the one that will linger.

Until the nineteenth century the fauna of southern Africa was richly diverse, highly prolific, and widely dispersed. Indigenous hunting techniques were varied and effective and game meat constituted a source of protein for almost all the peoples of the sub-continent. Dutch hunting parties were leaving the Colony for hunting grounds in the eastern Cape from the early eighteenth century, and a number of freeburghers made a career as professional hunters. As the animal resources of southern Africa became more important to the international economy in the first decades of the nineteenth century they came to be studied and hunted for science and sport. Cornwallis Harris lamented the decline and disappearance of game in the Cape Colony, and suggested that African hunters, confronted with vast herds in the interior, were bent on extermination.

This chapter examines the chain of events at Spithead and then at the Nore Mutiny to see how each set of incidents shaped the other and how their relationship to each other defined the limits of change. Responses to the actions initiated by sailors at Spithead in the spring of 1797 highlight many of the themes of eighteenth-century politics and life. The debate between Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Thomas Paine over the meaning of the French Revolution for Britons centered on questions of rights, representation, nation, law, and empire echoed through the reactions to events at Spithead. In 'A New Song Called True Blue' the sailors declared that 'No faction seperates our love, From British and her laws. The song enunciates justice and law as the core values for which the sailors believed they fought.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers an overview of the persistence of imperialism in popular culture in the post-1945 era. It examines the remarkable coincidence of the coronation and the conquest of Everest, an event that became heavily imbued with late imperial hubris. The book also examines the ways in which Britain's steadily dwindling imperial power was mirrored by the demise of English cricket. It also offers an entirely different perspective on the culture of imperial decline, namely that of popular children's literature. The book explores the nostalgic trail of post-imperial British travellers. It looks at one of the undisputed enduring legacies of empire: the migration of British subjects to and from the British Isles. The book also looks at the theme of 'India in Britain' in a different context.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the three separate modes by which gender and the imperial politics of British India were intertwined during the period of intense scrutiny and debate about the future of the Raj. It also examines the marriage and the home in the political life of the Raj. The book analyses the discourses and practices of violence that came increasingly to the forefront of British imperial politics. It discusses how Anglo-Indian women situated themselves, both practically and ideologically, in relation to the discourses and the actuality of violence in the empire. The book evaluates the 'race' and its interactions with ideas of gender and imperial politics. It also analyses how Anglo-Indian women resisted the devolution of political power to Indian men.

This chapter argues that the sociological interest in anthropological concepts and the renewed interest of anthropology in Western economies through ethnographic investigation may generate a terrain upon which further and fruitful collaboration can be established. It provides insights as to how shifting values and new social arrangements may have initiated 'dis-embedding' processes from which 're-embedding' mechanisms are yet to be seen in their entirety. The dis-embedding/embedding mechanism of the double movement operates at different levels: it can make sense of both a large-scale event, as well as the dynamics in small-scale settings. Versatility makes the analytical tool adaptable both in sociology and anthropology. Abstract theoretical tools were turned into methodological concepts to reveal the extent of the embeddedness of the economy in contemporary societies. The chapter shows how the Polanyian metaphors shed new light on work-related social practices and their meaning in an Italian setting, the Brianza.