By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

The epilogue critically assesses how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, laborers, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It also invites global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.

Chapter 4 studies the political, cultural, and economic impact of foreign machetes and other agricultural tools. It shows how popular men and women’s expert knowledge about these goods was not transferred from above or received from abroad but inherited and acquired in practice. Peasants and muleteers used machetes to clear the land, grow their crops, and travel the country; artisans, bogas, and smallholders, to defend their honor, their lives, and their property. As this chapter shows, over the course of the nineteenth century, foreign tools, especially the machete, reshaped these popular actors’ collective identities and underscored their contribution to the nation’s material improvement and progress – not only as part of the country’s labor force but as consumers themselves. Although these Plebeian consumers might have had limited choices due to their limited purchasing power, this did not preclude them from appropriating foreign tools, expressing dissatisfaction with certain agricultural implements, and seeking ways to access the ones they liked and preferred. Most important, machetes allowed them to shape and reiterate their citizenship on the ground. As such, Colombia’s popular consumers became not only critical agents in the global market but active and productive citizens of the new republic.

From the liberated zones of the adivasis in central India to the oil pirates of the Niger Delta to the successionist fighters of lower Burma and to the Frankenstein rebels of Iraq and Palestine, this chapter brings together various insurgent figures to examine the moral burden of using and abusing violence by nonstate actors in the name of self-defense and self-preservation. Drawing from the theoretical work of Eric Hobsbawm, James Scott, and Eric Wolf on peasantry, banditry, and the moral economy of the peasant, the chapter concludes that between killing and dying, the insurgents do everything to avoid fighting and to eke out a mere livelihood.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.

Chapter 4 examines the tradition of Gandhian political thought. It explores the critique of liberal parliamentarism in the writings of M. K. Gandhi and those of his supporters.

Chapter 4 provides a rich ethnographic analysis of everyday transnational practices of relatedness, including calling, texting, visiting, and sending remittances. It begins by considering power and affect in moral economies of transnational kinship, along with various communicative means of staying in touch across space, to illuminate the factors, contexts, and modes that inform the ways in which kinship dilemmas are experienced. What follows is a look at interactions and exchanges in which kin draw on the discourses and logics of ‘tradition’ and born-again Christianity to negotiate what being related means and entails. In considering specific familial dilemmas, I show how they call into question ideas of migrant personhood and who is materially responsible for whom, illuminating the moral, affective, material, and existential stakes of these transnational practices.

Much migration research takes as its point of departure the migrant and the act of migration. In contrast, the Introduction foregrounds migrants and their families, treating migration projects like those at the heart of the book as domains of interaction between those who move and those who stay. It introduces and situates key concepts and topics, including ‘moral economies of transnational kinship’, imagination and distance, Christianity, and generation. The Introduction also discusses migrants’ arrival in the United Kingdom and the immigration context at the time, as well as the methodology used in conducting multi-sited fieldwork. It concludes with an outline of the book’s six chapters, which consider moral economies of transnational kinship from multiple perspectives and angles, from multiple social and geographic locations.

The connections between senses and morality are located in politics, religion, music, food, and other practices and metaphors of consumption. Such associations point to desired or positive values that are demonstrated through particular sensory behaviour. These together form social structures that reflect propriety and moral decorum. The governance of good behaviour and subscription to moral codes similarly extend to the metaphysical world of spirits through a variety of corporeal and cognitive modalities. Building upon the phenomenological anthropology of morality, I show how the senses serve as intermediaries of moral binaries. Cases are drawn from myths, legends, folktales, poetry, and ethnographies. Overall, varying sociocultural associations of the different senses with morality, virtue, and disposition present a type of sensory attunement to apprehend moral economies and social structures. I argue that sensory moral economies are, in effect, the product of specific sensory action. Social actors are expected to perform particular ways of being that actualise alignment with ideal, righteous states or dispositions mediated through the senses. The outcome of such sense acts is a combination of immaterial interests and moral sentiments. As sociocultural arbiters, the senses bring to light the moral organisation of society.

The British world was not just an assortment of widely dispersed peoples but also an empire of trade goods. Over time, the goods themselves became freighted with the ‘moral economy’ of imperial partnership. As the empire unravelled and the verities of global Britishness were called into queston, therefore, humble trade commodities were not immune to the contingencies, unable to rely on older consumer loyalties in the face of tectonic shifts in the terms of trade and the attractions of new markets outside of the British orbit. Britain’s decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community in the early 1960s represented not just a major rupture in the traditional patterns of trade, but also an audit of the emotional balance sheet. Everyday consumer items with little in the way of obvious emotional ballast — wheat, butter, lamb, tinned fruits, and especially sugar — would play a crucial role in denaturalising Britain’s place in Commonwealth markets and vice versa. Viewed from the perspective of disparate communities heavily reliant on goods for export to the UK market, Britain’s European aspirations ignited passions and resentments that could not simply be explained in terms of lost export opportunities. That such appeals to a wider moral economy ultimately failed to prevent the UK from taking the plunge — albeit delayed by a decade of false starts and endemic ill-feeling — suggests that the diminishing returns of greater British goods was a reliable index of an imploding British world.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

For over five centuries, wage-earners have used food activism to improve their sustenance. This form of mass mobilisation may be perceived as an attempt to reassert previously established entitlement known to be breached, mainly dearth or inflation in food prices. From the 18th century to contemporary times, the poor and working class have used this strategy to call for (re)regulation of food systems, just allocation of resources and policies responsive to their socio-economic needs. But what factors enable such collective action? Put starkly, what theoretical or structural elements incite the lowest rank of citizens to galvanise in the face of dearth or price inflation? While some observers attempt to shedlight on this question, there remains insufficient in-depth assessment of the socio-economic and political factors which underpin such mobilisation. To fill this void, the chapter draws on historical scholarship and emerging perspectives on rural–urban food activism in order to inform on-going debates on policy reform. It concludes by arguing that poverty alone does not incite the poor to mobilise, but rather consciousness of a breach of entitlement caused by exploitation, neoliberalism and racketeering.