How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

How did new forms of mass politics and culture that included and gave voice to all men and women finally develop in Britain between 1885 and 1931?

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

The chapter introduces the book, its main claims, and arguments. It is concerned with setting the agenda for how to take labour seriously in Gulf development discourses and the value of centring labour from the margins. The book argues that Oman’s labour market is global and that Omani labour needs to be understood globally and relationally within and beyond the segmentations that divide the labour market. The chapter situates youth and their economic dreams and experiences at the heart of the story of development, discusses how to understand labour within the rentier state, and lays out the framework and empirical analysis to follow.

This chapter is concerned with recentring labour in regional development accounts and framing the claim of the book that the labour markets of Oman and the region are global. Most development accounts articulate Oman’s labour market as an object of development, a self-contained unit to be regulated and deregulated toward developmental ends. Development policy and academic discourse, in short, treat the labour market as a bounded, local space with enclosed, segmented social relations. In contrast to this development planning imaginary, this chapter argues that the labour market needs to be interpreted in global context and with a view of how regulation and relations transpire within, between, and across segmentations. The labour market is a place in which you can clearly see the outcomes of global market pressures and the competing poles for labour’s management and (de)regulation. These come from within but also outside national and regional boundaries. In combination, by looking from the bottom up, the labour market offers a space where we encounter humans in the economy and can more clearly visualise the human impact of economic transformations and choices.

Chapter 6 analyses narrative representations of local women, who feature throughout UN mediation texts as ‘the women’. This subject position is multifaceted and articulated differently according to different logics of UN mediation. Especially within the logic of UN mediation as a science, ‘the women’ are expected to play a legitimating, information-providing role to support the UN. This is an extractive, rather than an empowering, relationship. UN narratives position ‘the women’s’ labour as central to mediation effectiveness, but they also question their abilities and authenticity as representatives of their communities. Capacity-building training is one method that the UN, and particularly gender advisors, use to discipline women into appropriate forms of participation. The logic of UN mediation as an art has less use for 'the women' in its narratives and instead questions whether they are 'political enough' to be appropriate representatives in negotiations. In turn, local women resist and navigate the subject position of ‘the women’ through strategic essentialism, critique, or opting out.

The British State intervened in the Port of London in 1800. It did so again a hundred years later by appointing a Royal Commission, which provided the basis for eventual reform in 1908. The immediate reason for the Royal Commission was a dock proposal to abolish free entry to docks by river. But the wider context was long-standing, loudly voiced, shipping company grievances about river governance, licensing of lighterage and compulsory pilotage. The Commission’s conclusion that London should have a port authority was generally accepted. However, issues of constitution and compensation bedevilled the Conservative attempt to legislate. In the event, it was a Liberal government, with all-party support, which established the Port of London Authority, effectively nationalising London’s port. In an ironic coda, the port unions soon discovered their new public employer to be a more formidable opponent than their dock company predecessors had ever been.

London’s seasonal foreign trade reflected its access to northern and continental Europe and the City’s association with the East and West Indies, but coal and other coastal trades dominated daily port activity. London was a tidal river port centred below London Bridge, with waterfront industry spread more widely. Organisationally, it was complex, with many different interests. As foreign trade increased, legal restrictions on landing places for foreign produce were blamed by merchants for congestion. A campaign by mercantile interests for the introduction of docks followed. The author examines the motives here. For leading West India merchants, specialised dock facilities would enable them to control and discipline a directly employed labour force, reducing theft. The eventual outcome, the construction of docks by joint-stock companies, owed much to State support. Its involvement went beyond the introduction of docks. For the government, this was an element of a warehousing scheme designed to develop London as an entrepôt. General port efficiency would be promoted by appointing the Corporation of London as harbour authority.

Besides mercantile, shipping, legal, insurance and financial services, the capital’s maritime connections extended to large-scale manufacturing like shipbuilding, ship repairing, marine engineering, sail-making and sugar baking. Shipping investors, almost exclusively involved in some aspect of sea trade, varied from those holding a few shares to the relative few reliant on ship owning for their income. The wealthiest shipowners and merchants, as well as the Royal Navy, were among the customers of London’s shipyards, clustered along the waterfront. Subject to severed cyclical swings, shipbuilding was a highly skilled, unionised occupation. Many of those employed in port industries lived in London’s then quite socially mixed waterfront parishes of East London. Seamen ashore in colonial and foreign trades also gathered here in response to a sailor economy serving their need for credit, lodging and entertainment.

Nineteenth-century London was not only the greatest city ever known but it also had an immense port. Sarah Palmer explores how London’s maritime dimension, which included major industries, shaped London physically, economically, socially and profoundly affected the lives and livelihoods of many inhabitants. Until now, the relationship between London and its port has not been sufficiently explored by either the many London historians or by the relatively few historians of the Port of London. Port engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and port labour have received much attention, but are generally considered in isolation from the wider London context. She draws on such existing studies, as well as much new material based on archival research, to provide a wider perspective.

The East India Dock Company followed and by 1810, there were also three on the south bank. Investment came predominantly from the capital’s wealthy mercantile and shipping communities, with slave trade interests strongly represented in both the West India and London companies. Wartime conditions failed to affect investment or impede the capital’s remarkable dock boom. The design for the downriver West and East India systems presented few problems, unlike the constricted setting of the London Docks. Labour shortages, bad weather and material scarcity affected construction by generally experienced contractors, but all docks were operating by 1806. The final costs exceeded estimates but only in the case of the London Docks by a large margin. Clearing housing and industries in Wapping burdened it with long-term debt. All the north bank companies chose a hierarchical employment structure. In contrast to strict supervision in the West India Docks, London replicated the traditional system on the quays, allowing its managers considerable autonomy. In their new regulated workplace, labourers faced restrictions, discipline and the loss of traditional perks.

At mid-century, the north bank companies faced two main problems: wharf competition and the failure of earnings to keep pace with an increase in the shipping and cargoes handled. Adding to these challenges from the 1860s was accommodating steam shipping by investment in facilities, including new docks, and in the 1880s, a resurgence of fierce rivalry between themselves and a financial crisis created by the new Tilbury dock resulted in effective amalgamation. Their common response to diminishing profitability was the introduction of sub-contracting – to the detriment of the lives and livelihoods of a resistant workforce. Skilled port workers were unionised, unskilled generally not, but strikes by particular groups were not uncommon. Port-wide action by dock workers in the 1850s failed but stoppages in the early 1870s achieved wage rises, as also did the port-wide 1889 Great Dock Strike.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

After a few years of competition following the end of monopolies and exacerbated by the new St. Katharine’s Dock Company, rivalry was muted by rate agreements and the amalgamation of the East and West India Companies. However, except in the Baltic trade south bank docks, regional cargo specialisation to a large extent came to an end. All north bank companies had a core of permanent employees, but most were casually employed. Company records reveal how managers organised, motivated and disciplined their labouring workforce and also how those men with particular skills resisted such control. Relations with the Customs could also be difficult. In 1848, both the London and St. Katharine’s companies were raided, accused of defrauding the revenue by passing off sugar as waste. After a very public row, significant reputational damage to the companies and the intervention of a parliamentary committee, a compromise was reached.

Marketers are, generally, paid workers. While this may seem self-evident, for us to fully understand the hybrid combinations of devices, individuals and organizations that partake in marketing work and in the configuration of market actors, we must acknowledge the impacts of working relationships that are deeply embedded into marketing practice. A Marxist analytic lens helps us to do this. It encourages us to explore how the organization of marketing work produces and exploits value from marketing workers.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

How should we best characterise the UK party system in the wake of nearly a decade and a half of Conservative government? Has it undergone a significant and enduring realignment, or merely amounted to passing turbulence, after which things have returned to the seemingly eternal verities of stable two-party competition? The question for us to consider in this chapter is whether we can regard the period since 2010 in such terms: in particular, does the general election of December 2019 constitute a moment of critical realignment? Or is it more sensible to view this as the mere culmination of a relatively prolonged period of Conservative Party ascendancy based on a regular swing of the electoral pendulum – a swing which will inevitably reverse itself as the centre of electoral gravity shifts in favour of Labour once more? In other words, a simple affirmation of the age-old dynamics of the two-party system.