Well documented in the lives of people with intellectual disability are greatly increased occurrences of adverse life events, exposure to abuse (emotional, physical, sexual), neglect, exploitation, victimisation, and hate crimes, in contrast to the general population. Shockingly, abuse has been reported in developmental service systems at even higher rates and in specialist treatment units such as Winterbourne View and Whorlton Hall. People with intellectual disability also experience trauma associated with physical restraint to manage behaviours that challenge services, negative consequences of psychotropic medication, greater exposure to painful medical procedures consequent to health issues, particularly in early and late stages of life and greater than typical discontinuities in care related to hospital admissions, respite, and staff turnover in group and institutional living. The evidence to support medication treatment in post-traumatic stress disorder is reviewed.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift in the understanding of domestic service from a problematic institution intrinsically connected to inequality and exploitation to an acceptable practice in the 1920s. These early conversations revealed the two main tensions in the understanding of paid domestic labor after the revolution. The first involved class. While quick to reimagine domestic servants as domestic workers, the Bolsheviks struggled to articulate a coherent position on the class affiliation of their employers. Even though employment of household workers did not constitute exploitation in the strictly Marxist sense, the practice had a distinctly petty-bourgeois character in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. The second tension had to do with gender. The Bolsheviks had no resources to fulfil their vision of socialized housework but still sought to mobilize urban women for work outside the home and for political life. Rather than encouraging redistribution of labor in the home, the state saw employment of female migrant peasants with no professional qualifications in Soviet homes as an acceptable solution to the problem of housework.

Chapter 3 carries out a critical review of environmental strategies, from reactive postures, such as pollution control, to the most proactive and advanced ones, such as pollution prevention and product stewardship. In doing so, the literature review shows the main theoretical streams used to frame different environmental strategic positionings, such as the institutional theory, the natural resource-based view, a new stakeholder theory or the microfoundations of strategy. To carry out a critical review of existing typologies of environmental strategies, they are deconstructed into their main features and dimensions following two research traditions: strategy (defenders, prospectors, analysers and reactors) and innovation (exploitation, exploration and ambidexterity). We conclude that these conventional approaches can be catalogued as ‘business-as-usual’ environmental strategies and finally present a disruptive alternative called the regenerative strategy.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

Advanced age affected the performance of mastery, and some slavers saw the declining fortunes of another as providing them with the opportunity to rise at their expense. Concerns with – and contests over – the authority of aged enslavers did not end at their death. Wealth generated by slaveholding needed to be passed on, and the quest for profit and status that animated southern enslavers saw ferocious disputes erupt over the transferal of property between generations. Contests over wills and inheritance help reveal the complex and contested relations between enslavers, intergenerational tension in the American South, and shifting social hierarchies shaped by the passage of time. Antebellum enslavers prized the presumption of authority and craved respect from family, kin, and community. And yet, in legal challenges to wills, deeds, and bills of sale recorded posthumously, antebellum southerners revealed the disregard they held for aged enslavers’ claims of dominion, and their willingness to trash the reputation of fellow “masters” both before and after death.

In this chapter, we explore this possibility when it comes to the three most known exploitative work forms slavery, serfdom and wage labour. It turns out that they all have an attached ideology, explaining why respective way of organising work is the only morally good and therefore meaningful one. Each work form is portrayed as the single one being beneficial to all involved and thereby meaningful to all. Slavery is good for slave owners as well as slaves, serfdom for feudal lords as well as serfs, wage labour for capitalists as well as wage labourers. Each ideology also says that all other work forms are morally reprehensible and therefore meaningless. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate that the theorisation of the concept of work in the way we suggest opens up the possibility of comparative studies of the meaning of different work forms.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners adapted to, resisted, and failed to overcome changes associated with age, both real and imagined, and the extent to which these struggles intersected with wider concerns over control, exploitation, resistance, and survival in a slave society. In doing so, it asks future scholars to rethink static hierarchies among Black and white southerners, to incorporate age into their work as a category of analysis and as a relation of power, and to address the contingent and contested networks of solidarity and support among enslavers and enslaved in the American South. Age shaped slavery, both as a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, in crucial ways. Albeit never on equal terms, both Black and white southerners had to grapple with the realization that “old age [was] creeping up on me so fast,” and their efforts to do so were entwined in the wider struggles within and against slavery. The ravages of time came for all, and the conclusion reiterates how recognition of this fact shaped the dynamics of American slavery, and the lives of enslaved people and enslavers alike.

Historians have long stressed the significance enslavers accorded to public demonstrations of authority, dominance, and independence, as well as the wider significance of these ideals to the dynamics of slavery. Recent work on the violence and exploitation of slavery has reiterated the terrifying power enslavers wielded, and the harm this caused to enslaved people. In presenting enslavers as such dominant figures, however, there is a danger that we confirm their own self-image as masterful even while rejecting their claims of benevolence. A more nuanced narrative becomes possible when we consider how the performance of mastery came under pressure – both internal and external – as enslavers aged. Enslavers could not stop time from marching on and the pressures associated with aging – both real and imagined – wreaked havoc on their public and private claims of dominance. Enslaved people understood that mastery was never ordained, but instead embodied. Bodies, Black and white, enslaver and enslaved, were all subject to the “ravages of time.” Knowledge of this fact was applied when enslaved people crafted individual and collective strategies for survival and forms of resistance.

This chapter shows how the push for profit and dominance, and the dynamics of slavery, affected white southerners’ dealings with elderly “masters.” As enslavers aged, they could be forced to fight against the rising generation who looked at them and saw dependency and submissiveness, instead of autonomy and mastery. These traits – and general binaries of power/powerlessness – were understood as bound up with the racializing discourse of slavery and the gendered dynamics of patriarchy. Elderly enslavers – both men and women – sometimes came to believe that advanced age was a relation of powerlessness that marked them as closer to enslaved than enslaver and which served to unsettle existing power relations in the community. Those who fought against such depictions confronted communal perceptions of their inability to enact mastery, and these battles had particular emotional effects. Cross-cultural scholarship argues that communal assumptions of incapacity can be humiliating, and this chapter emphasizes how aged enslavers grappled with these perceptions. These old slavers are not objects of pity, but their experiences reveal the culture of exploitation that drove antebellum slavery.

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

Intergenerational disputes shaped by white southerners’ hopes to profit from slavery did not end with the death of an enslaver. These contests became particularly virulent when the matter revolved around posthumous manumissions, and this chapter shows how elderly enslavers who sought to emancipate enslaved people in wills had their actions challenged by rivals who utilized the discourse that conflated old age with weakness, both of body and mind, to diminish their reputation and deny their mastery. The aging process had public and political ramifications in a slave society built on dominance and mastery, and a focus on emancipation and age serves as a fitting end to this study which underlines the wider importance of age as a vector of power in the antebellum south. Contests over emancipations underscore how far understandings of aging as a period of declining force led to conflict between white southerners looking to rise at another’s expense. White enslavers looked to their aged peers who sought to free their slaves as reduced in authority and status, and as figures whose claims to mastery must be usurped for the good of both private and public interests associated with slavery.

Chapter 5 deals extensively with tutelle in the late nineteenth century by concentrating on the working lives of minors, mostly as apprentices and domestics. Minors performed a wide variety of tasks, some of them gender-specific. Young girls did mostly household and domestic tasks; boys became apprentices and learned artisanal crafts. Of the artisanal crafts, carpentry was the most popular, but masons, blacksmiths, tailors, seamstresses, and grain pounders took wards as apprentices. In the 1880s and 1890s, the state confided minors to institutions including Catholic missions, though not always to serve as apprentices. Case studies detail the ways in which their labor was exploited and how they responded to coercion and abuse. They reveal considerable delinquency and misery, which sometimes led to incarceration. The relationship between minors and their guardians in work settings was often characterized by discord, even violence. The chapter explores abuses in tutelle including the hiring out of minors without informing French authorities and the refusal of guardians to compensate minors for their labor when warranted. The chapter analyzes complaints lodged by guardians about minors and the ways in which minors exercised agency. It ends with an exploration of sexual exploitation and prostitution.

In early human societies, community norms specified where and how living resources should be used within sacred groves and in exploited places. Many rulers of ancient and medieval societies issued decrees reserving game and other wild resources for royalty and limiting peasant uses. Colonial rulers criminalized Indigenous uses of wild species and privatized and commercialized landscapes. Intensive exploitation led to the depletion and extinction of many species and laid the foundation for formal conservation. Concern about deforestation in colonial India led to early forest reserves. The utilitarian disciplines of wildlife management, forestry, range management, and soil science arose in response to threats to living natural resources due to conquest, including intensive exploitation, habitat alteration, and the introduction of non-native species. These disciplines focus on the exploitation of economically valuable species to protect a long-term supply. Early forest reserves in the USA were set aside to regulate the use of forest resources.