After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

Since India had been controlled by the British, it regressed to a lower stage. Poverty had been a lived reality for Indians, including for some of the Indian economists, since the late seventeenth century. International trade networks were disrupted by economic crisis and wars. Meanwhile, the Indian subcontinent was experiencing some of the most severe famines in its history. The Indian economists felt these crises sweeping their cities and villages. In particular, Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt would spend most of their adult lives examining the regress that they saw in India. They would explore how it could be measured, how it varied from region to region, and its causes.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter offers a description of the complex interaction between power and poverty in light of the portrayal of Jesus in the canonical gospels. His message of salvation, example of solidarity with the poor, and presence in the life of the church offer a direct challenge to impersonal systems of societal arrangement that promote injustice. The Gospels provide a striking testimony for and guide to the essential work of solidarity with the poor.

The 1866 banking crisis effectively ended London’s iron shipbuilding industry. Few companies survived, so destitution faced many shipyard workers. Processing industries also changed. Beet sugar replaced cane, soft sugar hard ‘baked’ sugar and production became concentrated in two firms. In contrast, boosted by foreign grain imports, London’s milling industry expanded. South bank maritime communities maintained established industrial patterns. Shipbuilding proved resilient and traditional employment systems persisted in the Rotherhithe docks, but settlements of waterfront wharf labourers, many of Irish origin, were desperately poor. Poverty was also a hallmark of the north bank. Less socially mixed than in the past, mythic undifferentiated images of ‘Outcast London’ obscured the East End’s continuing maritime connections, including the presence of skilled workers and their organisations. Sailors ashore, the subject of State intervention, were an exception.

This chapter discusses Clare’s nature poetry, in the contexts of the politics of land use, then and now. It reads the verse against issues including the introduction of capitalist forms of agriculture and their effects, including the dispossession and pauperization of agricultural labourers and the degradation of ecosystems. It also considers the politics of language and memory in Clare’s poetry, in relation to changes in the agricultural economy.

This chapter focuses on explaining the powerful logic of perilous promises and hidden information, as well as the dangers of low opportunity costs and attractive rents. We start out by explaining how in many circumstances peaceful bargaining succeeds in preventing hostilities – as the “peace dividend” creates a range of win–win bargaining solutions. Sadly, though, asymmetric information, commitment problems and political bias can lead to bargaining failure and the outbreak of war. Further, when the stakes of contest are high and opportunity costs low, the scope for peaceful bargaining shrinks. In particular, we show that being out of work and out of options makes somebody easy prey for rebel headhunters. This is exemplified by the dreadful consequences of bad harvests. Next, we examine the role of ethnic cleavages and how they tend to be exploited by divisive ethnic politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the curse of natural resources. Countries blessed with valuable soils tend to suffer from conflict, often leaving them poorer than countries lacking natural resources.

This chapter shows that violence today sows the seeds of future fighting through a series of vicious cycles. First, it is stressed that persistent poverty creates vicious cycles of deprivation and disputes. Namely, poverty provides the breeding ground for violence, as the lack of income and perspectives makes it relatively more appealing to join armed rebellion. This, in turn, further impoverishes the country. Secondly, wars tear apart the social fabric of society, which in turn hinders postconflict reconstruction. Put differently, hate and distrust in the aftermath of fighting often trigger revenge wars further down the road. The third vicious cycle studied concerns education, with low human capital fueling fighting and subsequent wars destroying schools. Last but not least, this chapter discusses the impact of war trauma on future crime propensity. These various vicious cycles are illustrated with the help of a series of historical examples, spanning Peru, Angola and Uganda to Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Switzerland. This discussion highlights the crucial importance of fostering peace right now, which leads to a powerful peace multiplier.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

The nature of power, both social and psychological, and the implications of power imbalances in modern societies.

This chapter examines Harriet Martineau’s approach to gender politics through her understanding of ‘manliness’ as explored in a selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832−4). It was a concept essential to her configuration of male leadership fit for the testing times of the early 1830s, and highly topical. Published when the pressures experienced by men of all classes were being highlighted in periodicals and novels, the tales address the differences between ‘personality’ and ‘character’ in crises faced by fathers and husbands, magistrates and petty criminals, trades union activists, landowners, and slave-owners, at home and in the colonies, as they debate the injustices of their living and working conditions. This chapter argues that Martineau’s interventions in contemporary debates about masculinity shift the focus to a new kind of conscientious working man whose values are tested in cross-class dialogues in public places. It explores the ways in which the Illustrations show how men collaborate and compete within their communities, and the ambiguous gender messages arising from patterns of reward and punishment that seem to devalue otherwise positive characteristics.