Here we first highlight the central role played by the vote and political participation in the democratic process. We then look at who votes and who participates in politics. The chapter underscores severe racial imbalances across most types of participation—both conventional and less conventional. It then seeks to explain these imbalances through a rigorous examination of factors like socioeconomic status, group identity and consciousness, institutions, and mobilization. We also look at the impact of uneven participation on outcomes in American democracy and introduce potential solutions for existing inequities.

This chapter scrutinizes two genres that seem closer to the world of comic books than to graphic novels, but that have nevertheless proven extremely influential in the development of the latter. It opens with a definition of both science fiction and fantasy, contrasted genres yet with many shared tropes, and it acknowledges the difficulties of summarizing the specific features of each category. The chapter addresses the most important forerunners of both genres, such as Little Nemo in Slumberland, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, or Prince Valiant, whose relevance for the graphic novel is now fully recognized. It aptly analyzes the birth of Action Comics in 1938 as a turning point and the start of the superhero genre with the Superman character, in whom science fiction and fantasy converge (although later forms of both genres also bear the strong influence of crime comics). The chapter also compares the Marvel and DC production and examines the development of franchises, which prove perfectly compatible with the creation of author-oriented graphic novels. Examples of such affinity are The Swamp Thing, The Sandman, Saga, and The Walking Dead.

The rough chronological boundaries of this chapter will be 1800 and 1921. These are defined by the structure of the United Kingdom, which itself defined the key questions in constitutional history that were discussed in this period. In 1800 the island of Ireland, all thirty-two counties, joined Great Britain, which had been formed in 1707 by the Union between Scotland and England. This was the period of the maximum extent of the United Kingdom. In 1921, following the negotiations at the end of the Irish War of Independence, the island of Ireland was partitioned, twenty-six counties forming the Irish Free State and the six remaining counties in the north-east constituting Northern Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland was subject to a scheme of devolution under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. This had provided for both northern and southern parliaments, only the former was established.1 It remained in place until the imposition of direct rule in 1972. The nineteenth century, therefore, was an age of two unions and this had huge significance for constitutional developments.2 Not only were the Unions themselves matters of great controversy but the three kingdoms, four nations, posed immense problems in relation to questions of church and state, local government, the land and the issue of the extension of the franchise. The constitutional development of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland was complex. The Union state incorporated several constitutional traditions and understandings of the constitution, and a range of challenges to its integrity. The British constitution, most often seen in terms of an English constitutional tradition, was thought of by contemporaries implicitly and explicitly in a comparative context.

In the 21st century, it doesnt necessarily take much to start a business – you can set up on your own, with just an idea and a website or social media account. However, as most aspects of business today are highly regulated, either at the state or federal level, advice as to which business structure is most appropriate for a new or existing business venture will be fundamental to its success or failure. This chapter examines potential business structures in relation to a number of key factors and provides examples for you to consider the impact of each business structure in practice. In this chapter, seven business structures will be examined in detail: sole trader, partnership, joint venture, franchise, trust, unincorporated association and incorporated association. The chapter will also briefly introduce the corporation, which is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 14.

‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’1 So begins Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, a book in which he appeals against one of the most consequential pieces of legislation passed by the new Union of South Africa after its establishment in 1910. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted ownership of land by black South Africans to a small fraction of the available agricultural land of the country. It decreed that whites and blacks were not allowed to buy land from each other. And although the Act did not have an immediate impact, as many, including Plaatje, had thought it would, it began a process of legislative segregation that would ultimately culminate in Grand Apartheid – the division of South Africa into white and black territories or ‘homelands’ – half a century later.

The appropriate choice between business and public enterprise is determined by the interaction between a financial time horizon and the product or project’s economic life. The prevailing interest rate defines a precise credit time horizon which is a temporal outer bound for commercial enterprise. Projects which need longer to break even cannot be funded by business alone. Long-term projects face uncertainty and attempts to control it by means of rigid contracts lead to inferior outcomes. A ‘franchise’ overcomes the temporal boundary. Protection from uncertainty is provided by social and government agencies. Investment ‘manias’ set aside time horizons and can leave a legacy of real assets. Public–private partnerships for infrastructure development are a franchise intended to overcome credit time horizons. They were embraced by New Labour, but have given rise to inefficiency and corruption and are currently in decline. The time-horizon model undermines the standard argument for market superiority. It turns Hayek on his head: it is financial markets that require certainty, whereas social and public agencies manage in its absence.

The developing idea of a social identity based in the Odia language became politicized during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1903 an organization called the Utkal Sammillani was created to lobby for the amalgamation of all Odia-speaking areas under a single provincial administration. The Sammillani quickly came to serve as the most prominent pan-Odia site for presenting Odia interests to the colonial authorities. In Chapter 3, I show that debates within and about the Sammillani frequently turned to discussions about the meaning of politics, citizenship, and the status of the Odia constituency in relation to the colonial state. I describe the ways in which the demand for an Odia province reconfigured nineteenth-century Odia cultural activism into a clearly articulated argument for the political representation of the Odia people as a unified constituency. By including a brief discussion of emergence of colonial franchise and the changing attitudes of the Indian National Congress towards linguistic politics during this period, I show that the politicization of the Odia public into a liberal representative category is part of a larger narrative of the politicization of the Indian masses.

As Chapter 5 explores in relation to both UP and Sindh, and in India and Pakistan more widely, the status of women as new citizens was keenly contested, and women’s movements on both sides of the border in the first decade following Independence were caught up in the search for ways of balancing universal notions of citizenship alongside female mobilization. Women’s organizations in the late 1940s and early 1950s in both places engaged with the idea of group rights, in the main, through juggling liberal universal notions of citizenship on the one hand and movements for grassroots feminist mobilization on the other. Likewise, this was also a question of scales of mobilization: the often difficult relationship between local movements and regional, national or international ones, was also part and parcel of the challenges faced by women more generally, not least around problems of political representation.