Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.

There are three broad categories of challenges faced by the Islamic Republic state, namely those emanating from the inside, those exerted on the state from the outside, and those arising from the fraying of the state’s relations with society. In each instance, the state has been able to neutralize any potential threats coming its way through a resourceful combination of foreign policy adjustments, heightened repression, and expansive securitization. Ironically, the comprehensive and punishing sanctions imposed on the state from abroad have only helped further erode the purchasing power of Iranians and have narrowed prospects for international exchanges and globalization. The outcome has been a further strengthening of the state and especially hard-line factions within it, along with a steady disempowering of civil society and increased costs of political opposition. Sanctions have weakened Iranian society and strengthened the state.

This chapter describes the sociopolitical and economic changes that accrued in Nigeria during the critical postwar years and situates these developments within different contexts. Foremost on the minds of colonial officials was the anticipated effects of the demobilization of thousands of men who had been employed as soldiers, and in auxiliary services, such as drivers and hospital orderlies, and who had enjoyed a higher pay, and the concomitant unemployment that would be experienced after demobilization. It reveals that the postwar period was characterized by continuing shortages of food and other essential items and labor strikes in many parts of the country, causing disruptions in shipping and manufacturing. It argues that the significant amounts of cash that entered the economy as a result of the war became the impetus for new social formations as ex-servicemen returned to their villages with a substantial amount of money and trading firms paid higher prices for export produce than in the prewar times. With this influx of money during the war years, cultural practices, including local marriage practices, were affected. The political changes that ultimately led to the independence of Nigeria from colonial rule occurred during this period of significant social and economic change.