In this chapter I consider two controversies over the taxation of urban land at the twilight of Ecuador’s Citizen’s Revolution. The first is the campaign by the Pueblo Kitu Kara, an organisation representing Indigenous peoples in Quito, for recognition of communal property and territory, together with its constitutionally guaranteed freedom from taxation. The second was a highly controversial (and short-lived) tax on capital gains from real estate, promoted by the post-neoliberal president Rafael Correa as a counter to speculation, corruption, and unearned gains from the land market. Taken together, these conflicts illustrate the historically limited reach of hegemonic processes of state formation in Ecuador, and how those limits also open up opportunities for introducing and (sometimes) sustaining institutions distinct from the normative forms of the capitalist state, even as they present marked political challenges for transformative state projects. The trajectory of both controversies also highlights the contradictions and dangers of a top-down and technocratic approach to social and economic transformation in a polity shaped by profound inequalities of class and coloniality.

Over the past decade, ethnographers have increasingly paid attention to the ways in which practices and principles of financial speculation have been adopted in the governance of public and private resources. Those interested in matters of tax and taxation have typically associated speculation with tax evasion and fraud, paying less attention to other ways in which speculative thinking has entered the relationship between the taxpayer and the state. In this chapter, I examine the design and public reception of the Slovak National Receipt Lottery, one example of the way speculative logic has become part of governing the fiscal subject. I show how the Lottery both reflected and challenged established ideas of fiscal citizenship and redistributive justice, triggering novel anxieties about fraud, disclosure, and privacy amongst citizens and policymakers alike. It revealed a profound disconnect between the way policymakers imagined taxpayer behaviour and motivation, and citizens’ own perception of themselves as morally and socially embedded subjects. Finally, I suggest that the National Receipt Lottery is an example of speculative governance: a particular way of administering public life which combines elements of audit culture, behavioural policy, and gamification to generate social goods and shape citizen subjectivities.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

September 1830 saw the first purpose-built passenger railway open between Manchester and Liverpool, followed by a proliferation of local, national, and international lines. Yet the integration of railway infrastructures, perspectives, and plotlines into writing was slow. This chapter examines terminology, speculative journalism, and early engagement with railways in fiction to demonstrate how writing across genres extended the emergent ‘railway imaginary’ well beyond the scope of its built referent. Yet gaps in spatial and temporal perception opened up by the railways posed a challenge to those plotting long-form fiction that relied on a sense of momentum towards a definitive ending. While selected works, including the Mechanics’ Magazine, Railroadiana, and The Pickwick Papers, stop short of representing railways as an inhabited system closely entangled with the familiar rhythms of 1830s life, they do take seriously the task of establishing a dynamic relationship between railway and narrative form that matched technological and literary ambition alike.

Chapter 6 traverses the aftermath of Mughal rule as members of the Maratha confederacy, led by the Gaekwads, and officials of the early colonial state in the form of the British East India Company sought to capture Ahmedabad and strategic routes connected to the city. It was in this context that the sons of Khushalchand, Nathushah (1720–1793) and Vakhatchand (1740–1814), became entrenched in financing new forms of political organization by guaranteeing loans to groups seeking the purchase of revenue farms from emerging stately authorities. I call this phase of political-business relations competitive coparcenary. By becoming speculators in land revenue farms and advancing capital to those seeking to establish state power, the Jhaveris tactfully adapted their expertise to new political circumstances. This was a major departure from the high tide of Mughal rule in the seventeenth century when power manifest through warfare. Now, principles of the market and revenue sharing diplomacy became the hallmark of political organization, and the later Jhaveris were central to such emerging diplomacy.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was Britain’s first modern financial crisis. This chapter uses digital tools to study the development, during the early eighteenth century, of a conceptual framework describing bubbles in the financial market. It traces the emergence of the phrase ‘South Sea Bubble’ in the months and years after the crisis, alongside the more complicated patterns of evolution in what that phrase describes, ultimately arguing that there is little resemblance between the ‘South Sea Bubble’ of the 1720s and that of the present-day historical imagination. The chapter’s final claim is that the conceptual framework underpinning how we understand present-day financial crises has its origins in the latency of the words used, at the time, to describe the emerging and interlinked crises of 1720.

This chapter explores future orientations for gender and sexuality in anthropology. After a brief incursion into anthropological engagements with future-making, modernity, and the straightness of settler time, the chapter turns to queer and feminist science and technology studies work on the projection of anthropocentric understanding of gender and sexuality onto natural worlds. Despite the exuberance of nonhuman sexualities, sexual reproduction is still seen as the apex of evolution and the social sciences still struggle to fully think gender and sexuality outside (biological) reproduction. The chapter then turns to a discussion of Haraway’s and Clarke’s call for a multispecies reproductive justice that takes on the vexed question of overpopulation. This call, while important in its quest to free kinship from chrono-hetero-normative reproductive imperatives, leverages apocalyptic futurisms and overlooks the myriad ways Indigenous and Black communities have long been in relation with human and more-than-human kin. It concludes with reflections on the importance of resisting grand explicative gestures characteristic of patriarchal logics and technological solutions, positing livable future as the capacity to thrive and regenerate through the heinous violence that continues to mark the world. It invites anthropologists to ponder what futures the work they do perpetuate or make possible.

What kind of discourse was Freud’s psychoanalysis? A typical late-nineteenth-century positivist, Freud claimed that it is was a scientific, empirical psychology based on the always revisable observation of clinical data and distinguished it sharply from the a priori, meta-physical “speculations” of philosophy. Except that the ultimate object of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, is by definition beyond consciousness and therefore also beyond observation. So what distinguishes Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations and “constructions” from philosophical speculations? In the end, what distinguishes his “metapsychology that leads behind consciousness” from a metaphysics? This is the question that this book attempts to answer by following Freud’s way of thinking, step by step and as closely as possible to the texts.

Chapter 2 explores the patterns of late nineteenth-century global capitalism through which a progressive, moral middle class built a system of professions. It uses the 1880s Melbourne land boom to show the sustained effect of the ‘great heaves’ of investment from the City of London into Australia, Canada, and the United States. This financializing economy – unlike earlier, short-term bubbles like Chicago’s in the 1830s – stimulated the global expansion of professional occupations. Older moral values infused the professions across the Anglo world as they grew and institutionalised. Retaining capitalism’s model of return on investment, the professional class made investment in humans the central professional ideal. Their class status was often concealed beneath layers of rationality and claims to expertise, but in the settler colonies they transformed capitalism into a form of moral investment for social return in ways that served their own interests first. As part of a global bourgeoisie, these transformations at the periphery of the Anglo world were soon also felt in the British metropole.

Gambling in this period was never just about gambling; it always represented something else or spoke to some bigger set of concerns. It was thought to be a neutered form of aggression, made socially acceptable through the relentless power of the civilizing process but flowering in the novel context of the resort casino. Gambling was a way to connect to prior forms of existence, and it functioned as a substitute for socially unacceptable practices. Gambling is also contrasted with other forms of risk: insurance and speculation. Some observers took a pro-gambling approach, noting the unique skills it cultivates or its basis in nature.

This chapter argues that it is difficult to think about Afrofuturism without considering diaspora. At the same time, it shows how speculative writing reimagines diasporic paradigms derived from historical trauma. It begins with the search for an alternative epistemology in early twentieth-century African American speculative writing, where a turn to an African utopia promises relief from anti-Black historical violence, figured as the healing of a scattered Black family reunited after a long estrangement. Such diasporic fantasies are frequently challenged by African thinkers, who refuse to let their homelands become fodder for imaginative projection alone and underscore fractures in transnational encounters. Tracing the flourishing of Afrofuturist paradigms since the 1990s, devoted to visions of a future where race neither magically disappears nor becomes all-encompassing, this chapter identifies currents of alienation and prophecy, dismemberment and remixing in a range of Afrofuturist projects, ending with the recent boom in African-centered perspectives.

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s assertion that the short story must be read in a “single sitting,” short story theory has focused on the importance of endings as a hallmark of the form. This crystallized, in the 1980s and 1990s, in the rise of closure studies, a critical field that sought to taxonomize the ways stories end and its effects on the reader. This essay examines a feminist countertradition of short story writing that uses grammar as a tool to disrupt the form’s inbuilt narrative teleology. By interrogating the short story’s narrative temporality, writers such as Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, and Lorrie Moore use grammar to situate themselves, in distinctly gendered ways, in and against broader systems of time. Through a close examination of these writers, the essay explores how grammar offers a way of assessing not only the short story’s closures but also its various expansions and radical possibilities.

This chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of the eighteenth-century financial system and how that system came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a political category. The 1780s witnessed a series of financial scandals and speculative bubbles, many of them organized by Clavière. These scandals delegitimized the last attempts to reform the old financial system, precipitating the outbreak of the French Revolution. Ensuing changes to the legal category of property rights, the issuing of the assignats in 1791, and the sequester of foreigners and foreign property under the Terror of 1793 broke the mechanisms of financial capitalism. The Terror, and especially the suspension of the Constitution of 1793 in favor of rule by penal code, marked the emergence of a new kind of purely political groups who existed outside the law, including various forms of financial criminals. The existence of a central bank in England meant that economic impunity became subordinated as a tool of political necessity; in France, economic impunity was coded as an enemy of political virtue. The Revolution was precipitated by financial scandals, tried to eliminate them, and ended up producing new ones.

Homeless squatting on empty land is a local challenge, replicated on a world-wide scale. While some have argued that neoliberal globalization has had a homogenizing effect on domestic legal systems generally, and on states’ responses to squatting more specifically, domestic institutions retain significant capacity and capability to govern; and their resilience critically determines economic success and political stability and nation-states adapt to changing circumstances. This chapter frames our analyses of state responses to homeless squatting on empty land in the context of nation state norms and narratives: what we describe – adapting Robert Cover – as the property “nomos” of each jurisdiction. We argue that state responses to squatting are framed by the “foundational” regime goals through which the state’s role and relationships to citizens with respect to property were articulated and understood, and examine how these foundational goals with respect to private property, housing and citizenship emerged in each of the five primary jurisdictions from which we draw insights and illustrations in this book: the United States of America, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and England and Wales. In doing so, we aim to better understand how domestic institutions, norms and narratives in each of these jurisdictions have shaped the nomos within which “the state” acts in response to homeless squatting on empty land.

This chapter begins by noting the key ingredients in Akerlof and Shiller’s bestseller Animal Spirits but goes on to cover a far wider range of macroeconomics issues, including a detailed coverage of Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” that prefigures their work. After examining alternative theories of how speculative markets work and discussing herding behavior via both information and decision rule cascades, the chapter considers Keynesian view of animal spirits in relation to liquidity preference, leading to a discussion of Katana’s work on the impact of consumer confidence on discretionary spending. Next comes analysis of saving behavior in relation to innovative mortgage products and the impact of evolving bank lending rules on housing affordability. After considering Minsky’s work, material from earlier chapters is used to provide new perspectives on involuntary unemployment, inflation, exchange rate determination and the importance of non-price factors in the determination of international trade (with a discussion of the limited ways in which exchange rates shape trade). Finally, behavioral analysis of decision-making is applied to the making of macroeconomic policy.

Focusing on the Christian concept of sin, this chapter explores the way in which Anti-Climacus in Part Two of The Sickness unto Death analyzes the concepts of despair, selfhood, spirit, sin, offense, faith, paradox, and God from the standpoint of a Christian understanding of these concepts in contrast to that of classical paganism and Christendom, especially the way in which these concepts are rooted scripturally in Christianity in not willing or doing what is right rather than not knowing or understanding what one should do, as in paganism. It focuses in particular on the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin and the paradox that sin is not a negation but a position before God that cannot be comprehended but must be believed through a revelation from and relation to God, thereby creating the possibility of offense.