Reformers chastised the colonial administration for its extractive military-fiscalism and its inability to generate new “state-ideas” as a peacetime power. Public works constructed under native rule had widely fallen into despair; in the Company era, the government rarely expended more than 1 percent of its revenue on their maintenance. In Chapter 3, I argue that reformers considered this parsimony to be an anomalous departure from both pre-colonial and metropolitan precedents. Aligning themselves with Sir Arthur Cotton, a doyen of irrigative canal engineering, they developed a biopolitical state-idea that tasked the colonial state with the preservation of human life. At the same time, they rebuked the colonial bureaucracy for its culture of obfuscation and demanded the establishment of a new “state-system” rooted in transparency.

The chapter uses Adam Smiths wealth of nations to complicate simple laissez-faire notions of economic development. Adam Smith argued that public works were crucial for economic development. Since they wouldnt always be provided by private firms there would need to be some government involvement. However, Smith argued that government waste and debt would continue to be risks of infrastructure, so he argued that infrastructure should be governed by cost-internalizing principles. Also, Adam Smith argued for natural monopoly, which would be exempt from market forces, which provided the groundwork for the idea of public utilities.

Andrei D. Stepanov surveys the accumulation of “small deeds” that constitute the core of Chekhov’s altruistic biography, in three stages – Moscow, Melikhovo, and Yalta – from the medical practice and care for relatives and friends that marked Chekhov’s early career, to more ambitious efforts during the second half of his life – the ways in which he extended help to convicts and exiles, peasants, schoolchildren, students, and poverty-stricken consumptives.

reconstructs the organisation of urban sanitation. Clean streets and waterways involved ongoing negotiations between governmental bodies and inhabitants, and the latter’s contribution to the upkeep of communally used (water)ways was regular and substantial. From the part of the urban authorities, sanitary-policing officials were the principal group to put policies into practice. They were a permanent presence throughout the Low Countries and developed a variety of measures to fight issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or otherwise threatening health. The chapter revolves around two brigades, in Ghent and Deventer, and the reconstruction of their activities challenges the dismissive assessment of the enforcement of hygienic laws in earlier historiography. Sanitary officials performed routine inspections and coordinated waste disposal, and by doing so increased governmental presence in urban spaces and supervised the quotidian affairs taking place in them. Health interests therefore helped to legitimate municipal claims to power, in particular over a specific network of spaces deemed essential to keep clean and accessible.

As William H. Williams’ case coursed through Louisiana’s courts, the state profited from the labor of the convict slaves Williams transported to Louisiana. In 1845, ten of the enslaved felons entered the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Baton Rouge. This chapter chronicles conditions inside the penitentiary, the work the slaves performed, and the difficulties the state confronted in prison management. It also explains how Louisiana law disposed of the children born to enslaved female convicts.