Chinese law provides compensation to enterprises when their financial interests are affected by legal transitions. While statutes broadly guarantee this compensation, court decisions on such matters vary from case to case. Empirical evidence suggests that courts generally offer stronger protection to enterprises in the manufacturing and real estate sectors than to those in the coal mining industry. This chapter applies the theory of regulatory costs to explain these varying levels of protection across different sectors. It argues that in sectors where the boundaries between public power and private property are more difficult to define, regulatory costs tend to be higher, leading to weaker legal protection. Consequently, the protection offered to private enterprises is hierarchical rather than equal – it is stronger in some sectors than in others, depending on the need for intense regulation and frequent policy adjustments. Under China’s legal system, the regulatory costs are likely to be borne by private investors in the regulated sectors, which discourages private investment and amplifies the role of state-owned enterprises.

Lamb’s essays and letters describe various instances in which sharing a book with someone results in feelings of embarrassment or exposure. He describes reading in the public setting of a reading room, the professional context of the period’s review culture, as well as the more intimate, semi-private, and domestic settings in which he reads alongside friends or his sister Mary. Where public and professional contexts promote an element of performance which helps to shield from exposure, Lamb suggests, it is those more intimate forms of shared reading which in fact prove far more personally revealing. As Lamb recounts these moments in a parodic, part-defensive and part-confessional manner, he reflects on what such social phenomena as embarrassment and blushing have to say about sharing more generally.

The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

This chapter examines the foundations of Sarah Wambaugh’s political thought and attempts to reconstruct her world view. Wambaugh’s avid support for the League of Nations was premised on her understanding of it as a new scientific way of conducting international politics. Key to her faith in political science, and later forming a key part of her prescriptions for the plebiscite, was her belief in the importance of neutrality, a concept of international law then in flux. Alongside neutrality, the concept of public opinion was also in flux, with debates as to its relationship to democracy and expertise. The chapter points to the way in which public opinion and perceptions were also integral to her later normative prescriptions for the plebiscite, and ends with an examination of Wambaugh’s own public relations campaign for American entry to into the League of Nations.

Coetzee’s assimilation of photography in prose – through references to images, by way of ocular metaphors, or through an attentiveness to framing, point of view and lighting – owes a debt to a very early and enduring fascination with the camera. He grew up in a family in which photography was ubiquitous, with his mother, the family photographer, making a visual record of domestic life. The family photograph albums, now preserved in the Texas archive, are testimony to the way the family recorded their life across generations. In one of these albums, titled in Coetzee’s own handwriting ‘Photos Ancient and Modern’, there are pages full of photographs of the young Coetzee growing up. But the experience of the child being the object of the camera gaze was also inverted in at least one fascinating moment: it is a remarkable, imperfectly framed image of the mother, captioned ‘Snap of Mother, taken by John. 16th July 1942’. Already at the age of two years, if we take the caption at face value, we must assume that the young Coetzee was a photographer. In taking the Brownie camera – with which he was incessantly being snapped by his mother – into his own hands, the child reversed the roles and turned the lens back at the photographer.

This chapter applies the rent-conditional reform theory to the case of Nigeria across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It illustrates how, under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Goodluck Jonathan’s government coupled company creation liberalization for would-be entrepreneurs with generous awards and support for strategically placed business magnates and interest groups. Once the price of oil began to fall, and the disintegration of the PDP’s elite coalition gathered pace, Jonathan’s government quickly jettisoned the reform initiative within the Corporate Affairs Commission to placate rapidly defecting business magnates. Following the election of Muhammadu Buhari, the business creation reform agenda was similarly manipulated to develop an alliance between his nascent government and the elite business class. Once that relationship was in place, and oil rents were recovering, generous privileges were once again afforded to key magnates, and corporate regulatory liberalization went into overdrive in 2016, culminating in 2020 with the reform of the thirty-year-old Companies and Allied Matters Act.