The Second World War marked a turning point for what was considered acceptable in genetics and its implications for eugenic and racially motivated social policies. To be sure, the change in attitude was not quick or decisive. Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized involuntarily after the war. Anti-black racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, needless to say, persisted for a long while and have not yet been eliminated; interracial marriage was still illegal in much of the country during my lifetime. But – and despite the foot-dragging, I think this needs to be recognized as an advance – it slowly became less and less acceptable to adopt openly eugenic or racist opinions in public or to justify them based on science. Retrograde attitudes about such things persist to this day, but they have mostly been relegated to the fringes of scientific discourse.

In “The Formation of the Book of Isaiah: Foundations and Current Issues,” Marvin A. Sweeney analyzes the history of scholarship about the editorial processes that gave rise to the Hebrew text as we have it. As scholars have long done, he takes Bernhard Duhm’s nineteenth-century commentary as a starting point, but then shows the myriad ways in which more recent scholars have challenged his presuppositions and greatly improved on his findings. In the process, he identifies many of the themes and features in the book that have led him and other interpreters to perceive a redactional shaping of the book in four major phases—broadly one per century in the eighth through fifth centuries bce. Sweeney’s most significant contributions to the study of Isaiah, reflected here, have been his demonstration of the Davidic covenant in the final form of the book and his refinement of our understanding of the Josianic layer from the late seventh century bce.

Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

India has been rapidly changing since globalisation, albeit not uniformly. In 2022, India has been found to be the most unequal country in the world (Chancel et al., 2022). This makes it critical to understand where the inequality came from: is it new or structural or something else? Several characterisations have been attributed to India's transformation since globalisation; some talk about rapid urbanization, fast growth with incoming global investments, the IT boom, and an expanding middle class, while another set of scholars highlight aspects such as the agrarian crises, farmers’ suicides, food insecurity, and corruption. The point, however, is to comprehend how each version of this story has a saga of unequal distribution within it, whether in cities or villages. India being the most unequal country in a Marxian term means certain classes are accumulating and others are not even able to reproduce themselves. This makes it even more crucial to look at ‘capital’, and how it is accumulating, which spreads across the urban and rural. This book offers an in-depth analysis of diversification and various sources of accumulation accessed by the agrarian proprietary class, and a discussion on the other two proprietary classes, the petty bourgeoisie and the capitalist. By disaggregating the sources along fractions of the agrarian proprietary class, it shows how the class adopted new means within agriculture and outside agriculture, to further accumulation during the 2004–2014 policy regime. The policies under scrutiny are agricultural and those related to rural population in general, such as Panchayati Raj institutions (PRIs), land acquisition and affirmative action in employment. The latter may serve caste groups but in addition contribute to consolidating class structure. What these policies demonstrate is the key role played by the state in the globalisation era, thereby maintaining a stable political settlement with the three proprietary classes. The state and the nature of the state are important questions raised in this book, thus ‘bringing the state back in’, as Skocpol (2010) once argued. This book's third contribution is that it brings an understanding of classes that does not begin from being informed by abstract categories but rather begins with the empirical observations that guide the formulation of the conceptual classes and fractions. Skocpol finds neo-Marxism's conceptualisation of state very abstract, therefore hard to be applied, and hence starting from the empirical to the abstract following a methodology of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) is an attempt to address that limitation.

Big questions sometimes present themselves in small form. The grand themes of Sri Lanka's contemporary history – its quagmire of nationalist politics, the hampered solution of provincial devolution and the incessant friction between constitutional, administrative and political realities – became manifest in the minutiae of a marginal bureaucratic problem when I was in Colombo in October 2019. For just a moment, all the central concerns of this book were folded into a discussion between a civil servant and a constitutional lawyer about a topic that would never have occurred to me as one of my research interests: the appointment of schoolteachers.

I was attending a seminar titled ‘Thirty Years of Devolution’ at the Galadari Hotel in the historical heart of the capital. Constitutional experts were launching a book (Amarasinghe et al. 2019) to an audience of civil servants: chief secretaries and legal officers from various provinces. The debate centred on the unresolved problems of the provincial council system three decades after its creation. Any talk of fixing devolution felt like a rear-guard battle, though. We all knew that the world outside our elegant conference room had moved on. Whatever had been left of the consultative process on constitutional reform, which had started with much excitement under the Sirisena–Wickremesinghe government in 2015, had been thrown off the rails by the constitutional crisis of 2018 (Welikala 2020). The governing coalition had become defunct. The country was now holding its breath for the presidential elections, which would be in two weeks. Until the race between Sajith Premadasa (United National Party, or UNP) and Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, or SLPP1) was adjudicated, all other political matters were on hold. Quite literally so at the provincial level: by now, all councils had been dissolved. Their term had expired, but new elections had been postponed time and again due to a stalemate over electoral system reform. In effect, we had entered a new ‘interim period’ where the provinces were ruled by presidential appointees (the governors) rather than elected politicians (the provincial council and the board of ministers), not just in the north and east this time but in all nine provinces.

Chapter 8 explains why the most powerful chiefs in Hawaii decided to be baptised a few years after dispensing with their old cult. The most important of these factors revolved around immanent power: The ability of the new god to deliver victory in battle in the immediate aftermath of the abolition, and to Christian forces at the battle of Waimea in 1824, made a great impression, while healing was, as always, also a matter of concern. The impotence of the old gods was confirmed by deliberate challenges to the volcano goddess Pele and the female prophets who spoke for her and by the iconoclastic tours of Ka‘ahumanu, who was now taking centre stage. Meanwhile, the high chiefs also felt the need to repair the sacral basis to their authority, if now in a more righteous mode, while the strict form of Protestantism provided a way of ‘restoring the tabus’, disciplining both their subjects and the Euro-American inhabitants of Honolulu.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1940 to 1973, the so-called golden age of American capitalism, with globally dominant industries and broadly shared prosperity.

Increasing pressure to return to work coupled with increasing feelings of inadequacy. Reached rock bottom, and was persuaded to start lithium, and after all this time, started to slowly improve.