This chapter illustrates how we can express theoretical ideas in the form of a causal model by translating three arguments from published social science research into models. We illustrate using Paul Pierson’s (1994) work on welfare-state retrenchment, Elizabeth Saunders’ (2011) research on military intervention strategies, and Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi’s (1997) study of the relationship between national wealth and democracy.

The introduction introduces the basic concerns of the book: how to think about the welfare state in the context of democratic struggles against domination. It examines recent debates about the relationship between democracy and the welfare state as well as work in comparative political science and comparative political economy about the welfare state. It situates the argument of the book in the context of critical theories of domination. Finally, it outlines the plan for the book.

Opening up and drawing attention to what Kobena Mercer has called ‘the referential realities of race’, in postwar Britain many writers turned (perhaps like their eighteenth-century forebears) towards autobiography, testimony, and realist forms to contest racism and impact dominant sites of representation. Whether Braithwaite in Paid Servant (1962), Markandaya in The Nowhere Man (1972), Emecheta in her autobiographical fictions such as In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974), Dhondy in his 1970s East End short stories, Gilroy in her memoir Black Teacher (1976), or Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), these writers document and articulate the harsh conditions of black and Asian existence in postwar Britain. Using hindsight to link what might at first appear to be a disparate series of texts published between 1960 and the mid-1980s, this chapter highlights how thematic, contextual, and stylistic correspondences emerge across a wide range of different writers whose fictions became partially determined by the need to make evident the grim realities of the widespread culture of institutional and interpersonal racism which continued to face black and Asian people and communities in Britain.