Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

This chapter discusses corruption in the United States. In recent decades, as a narrow view of corruption has taken hold, the United States has experienced a significant increase in economic inequality and a decrease in social mobility. Despite the growing public discourse on economic inequality, concerns about the viability of a democratic system in the face of extreme economic inequalities have a long history. In recent years, corruption has been frequently invoked to describe the state of American politics, with business corporations and their ultra-wealthy owners indicated as possible culprits. In the United States, the notion of corporations having a corrupting effect dates back to the early days of the Republic, when it was feared that corporate charters could be granted by state legislatures as rewards for favors or bribes. This chapter’s main conclusion is that while illegal forms of corruption may be uncommon in the United States, its legal variants are widespread, and is further discussed in Chapter 9.

This chapter recognizes that definitions of corruption depend on a normative view of the polity, and such dependence should be recognized when debating corruption. In the context of a discussion of corruption in the United States, this chapter argues for the relevance of new “geographies of corruption,” and in particular, of legal forms of corruption. My interpretation of legal corruption in the United States is framed within a dynamic relationship between economic and political inequality, which may be mutually reinforcing.

In this chapter I read a range of Zadie Smith’s fiction and nonfiction prose to look at how Zadie Smith’s corpus testifies to an agon between the writer’s prerogative of impersonality and elective affinities and the “dark and unarguable blackness” that relentlessly attaches to raced bodies. The novels and non-fiction ask to be read not as global theory or interventionist polemic but as battlefields in themselves. Reading Zadie Smith according to the terms set up by Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall could also be crucial for decolonizing hard-bitten reading habits in the classroom that treat Black literature as interchangeable with Black culture and society. While Smith’s writing of this culture and society is immersive, she routinely and systematically problematizes the category of Blackness itself, choosing instead to imaginatively recreate the vicissitudes of identity at the intersections of race and class.

This chapter introduces five families whose histories each exemplify parts of the British non-elite experience of India. The Keen and Wonnacott families experienced opposing forms of social mobility in India where their social status, bolstered by the presence of native labor and constrained by the strictures of military hierarchy, changed dramatically. John Brand waited with his regiment for a conflict to fight in, experiencing India, like many other soldiers, as a place of stasis and sickness. Ned Crawford, who came to India as his search for work along the east coast of Britain failed and expanded to the empire, sought to maintain connections to both his brother and British political culture. And George and Lucy Cole, whose marriage suffered when George sought employment in India, reveal the effects Indian service could have on family units across imperial distance. These themes of upward and downward mobility, attempts to create community, both local and intraimperial, and the fallout of Indian and imperial separation on intimate relationships recur throughout the book.

Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

The chapter investigates how youth respondents of higher- and lower-income levels negotiate and contest everyday citizenship. In examining citizenship-from-below, the economic precarity that lower-income respondents face leads them to stress citizen actions that foster reliance on others and collective activities. In contrast, higher-income youth stress productivity and self-reliance as citizenship components, and survey findings reveal their limited engagement in community groups (except in Uganda). Upon examining acts of citizenship-from-above such as paying taxes, higher-income youth are more concerned about the legal compliance of others, while lower-income youth are more concerned about being accused of legal violations. Surveys indicate more lower-income youth vote in Ghana and Uganda, but income differences on other acts of state-targeted participation are negligible. Our respondents do not explicitly link income or poverty to political engagement, but Tanzania and Zambia case studies demonstrate that paternalism, derision, and envy within and across income groups can shape citizenship identities.

Chapter 1 considers the historical links between physical and social mobility among Kenyans, arguing that becoming ‘someone’ has long been entangled with migrating ‘somewhere’. In doing so, it underscores the shifting centrality of kinship ties to individual and collective well-being against the backdrop of historical and ideational change. It examines the role played by education, which itself is closely entangled with Christian missions, in shaping people’s imagination about what their futures might hold. To understand why families began to look beyond Kenya to secure their futures, it also considers the political, economic, and social uncertainty of the 1990s and early 2000s and the ensuing crisis of social reproduction.

Defoe’s views on education were conditioned by – and part of – his broader views on the early eighteenth-century social order. Coming from a commercial family, and as a Dissenter from the Church of England, Defoe did not, himself, have access to the most socially prestigious forms of education offered by the elite grammar schools and English universities. In various writings, Defoe advocates a form of education prioritizing ’useful’ knowledge (of languages, geography, mathematics, the natural sciences, and history) over the esoteric mastery of Latin and Greek learning that was the domain of ’mere Scholars’. Defoe thought that education should give students knowledge not simply of words, but of the world, and that it should suit them to act in the world. This model of education, for Defoe, was one suited for merchants as well as ’gentlemen’, and (with some differences of emphasis) for women as well as men.

Higher education in the United States advanced democracy during the much of the twentieth century by fostering social mobility and by deepening students’ understanding of democratic citizenship, as well as strengthening their capacity to participate in a democratic polity. Concurrently, higher education enjoyed widespread esteem in the United States, while colleges and universities became highly stratified by financial capital, or endowment size, which was closely correlated with prestige. Yet, this financial stratification widened into a yawning "wealth gap" that precipitated a decline in public esteem near the end of the twentieth century. This historical chapter explains these developments and argues that wealth concentration in higher education and wealth inequality in the US population are interrelated, and this interrelationship weakens social mobility and democracy in the twenty-first century.