Today is a time of retrogression in sustaining rights-protecting democracies, and of high levels of distrust in institutions. Of particular concern are threats to the institutions, including universities and the press, that help provide the information base for successful democracies. Attacks on universities, and university faculties, are rising. In Poland over the last four years, a world-renowned constitutional law theorist, Wojciech Sadurski, has been subject to civil and criminal prosecutions for defamation of the governing party. In Hungary, the Central European University (CEU) was ejected by the government, and had to partly relocate to Vienna, and other attacks on academic freedom followed. Faculty members in a number of countries have needed to relocate to other countries for their own safety. Governments attack what subjects can be taught – in Hungary bans on gender studies; in Poland, a government minister issued a call to ban gender studies and ‘LGBT ideology’. Attacks on academics and universities, through government restrictions and public or private violence, are not limited to Poland and Hungary, but are of concern in Brazil, India, Turkey and a range of other countries. Attacks on journalists are similarly rising. These developments are deeply concerning. The proliferation of ‘fake news’, doctored photos and false claims on social media has been widely documented. Constitutional democracy cannot long be sustained in an ‘age of lies’, where truth and knowledge no longer matter.

The recent research on the perfectionism associated with the preexilic heroes of the Hebrew Bible – Noah, Abraham, Moses, and so on – lays a foundation for considering the different way that the Second Temple period heroes were described – Ezra, Daniel, Susanna, Sarah (in Tobit), Esther, Achior (in Judith), the non-Jewish Ahikar, and Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. The latter were marked by being problematized and often feminized, and a contrast is often drawn between feminized and masculinized figures.

This book has explored the emergence of new forms of gender identity in India, emphasizing how ideas about modernity and economic liberalization come together to shape emerging trans women identities in Bangalore. I have traced how recent social changes connected to economic liberalization in India have enabled some feminine-presenting GNC people to live “independent” of hijras. These changes are understood as empowering for younger GNC people who can access resources previously available only through hijra groups.

When we put these changes in the context of increased global media coverage of transgender issues, the emergence of trans women is not that surprising. What is intriguing is how trans women are being framed in contrast to hijras. Unlike in countries of the Global North, where there is a pervasive idea that gender nonconformity is somehow new,1 gender nonconformity has been recognizable (if not exactly intelligible) for centuries2 (and possibly millennia) in India. This means Indian trans identities have emerged in a context where gender nonconformity is recognized through the historical presence of hijras (and some other GNC categories). These understandings about hijras shape how transgender people, and especially trans women, are understood.

Due to social change that promises greater inclusion, some trans women have gained newfound freedoms. This has meant that many of these trans women can envision themselves as “new” (and respectably middle-class) women. Like their cisgender women counterparts from the past, these trans women distance and differentiate themselves from their “other,” the disreputable hijra. In their quest to be recognized as respectable women, the trans women in this book valorize this newly available pathway to respectability while simultaneously devaluing other pathways available to GNC people, especially those associated with hijras.

It might be tempting to assume that GNC identities inherently challenge the gender binary, given that these identities are explicitly “nonconforming.” It would therefore make sense to think of GNC identities as encouraging less conformity to dominant ideas about gender. However, the actions of the trans women in this book bring such assumptions into question, since these trans women consciously position themselves within the gender binary as they strive for upward mobility.

The conclusion looks at early nineteenth-century invocations of John Gay’s Trivia as a way of marking the past from the present, before looking in more detail at one work that draws on Gay’s poem in this way. Metropolitan Improvements; or London in the Nineteenth Century celebrates the development and improvements that were reshaping the West End, drawing a distinction between the London described by Gay and Hogarth and the city of “our improved days”. As it surveys the new buildings, streets, canals, and parks that were transforming the cityscape, James Elmes confidently asserts that London in the nineteenth century will be the admiration of foreigners and the text seemingly resolves many of the tensions highlighted in previous chapters between an ideal of the city and its commercial character.

Scholars have observed that Schopenhauer did not develop much of a political philosophy but have failed to recognize that this is a deliberate deflationary strategy. Schopenhauer’s aim was to circumscribe the function of politics narrowly and assign it a place in a broader range of human responses to the agony of existence. However, his attempt to differentiate politics from religion and the state from the church led to contradictions. One the one hand, Schopenhauer favored a strong state that could control social strife and noted that political leadership can rely on religious justifications to ensure stability. On the other hand, he observed that state-affiliated religious institutions often eliminate critical perspectives on their doctrines by silencing philosophical reflection, an attitude he could not accept. Schopenhauer thus ended up with an ambivalent conception of statehood as simultaneously protective of life and property and damaging to free inquiry.

This chapter shows that constitutional intolerance is not only about religion or ethnoreligious identities. Much like ethnic and religious identities, LGBT identities have been subject to the regulation of their visibility in public space. This chapter discusses the anti-genderism of the Law and Justice party in relation to the hyphenation of Polish-Catholic identity and the historical role of the Catholic Church in promoting Polish independence, as well as the instrumentalisation thereof towards political polarisation in its domestic and European context. This chapter does not focus on the toolkit of illiberalism per se, but on the pseudo-constitutional anti-LGBT resolutions, declarations, and Family Charters targeting LGBT identities. A collaboration between the Law and Justice party and a think-tank called the Ordo Iuris Institute accounts for the first wave of this backlash, which invoked the constitution and legal language to allude to a semblance of constitutionalism.

In his Journal of a West India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis documented numerous encounters with the people he enslaved. Guided by Wedderburn’s argument that the provision grounds must be guarded “above all” for Black liberation, this chapter argues that tensions over provision grounds permeated Lewis’s encounters. After granting an additional day per week on the provision grounds as “a matter of right,” Lewis documented that enslaved people were growing poisons, unleashing fires, harboring crowds of destructive livestock, and providing sustenance for self-liberated Black people. Despite noticing these dangers, Lewis wrote to William Wilberforce detailing a plan for emancipating the people he enslaved by giving them his plantation, a proposal feared to be “dangerous to the island.” Lewis’s Journal recorded that his plantations were undermined, not by overt rebellion, but rather by the success of the Black ecological project: The botanical and animal ecologies of the provision grounds were anticipatory abolitionist commons that would be drawn upon in the coming emancipation.

This project started with a mistake—a mistake I made while trying to understand the lives of gender nonconforming (GNC) people1 in South India. What initially began as an awkward social blunder evolved into the focal point of my investigation, ultimately shaping the narrative of this book. Let me explain.

One warm, sunny morning, I sat in a small front room of a sexual rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Bangalore, India. In addition to the sunlight peeking in through the front windows, the room was lit by a flickering fluorescent “tube light,” creating a maze of shadows. The workday was just beginning, so the office was abuzz with activity. There were people coming in and out, happily greeting one another. It was one of my first days visiting this office, so I did not know many people working there yet. Indeed, many looked my way quizzically, probably wondering why someone like me was there before hurrying off to begin their work.

Sexual rights NGOs first emerged in India in the early 1990s as a response to the global concern over the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These NGOs attracted increased international funding for advocacy targeting groups considered “high risk” for HIV transmission, like feminine-presenting GNC people. Through their advocacy, sexual rights NGOs also inadvertently shaped how both traditional and emerging groups of GNC people are understood in India—by themselves and others around them. That understanding is the subject of this book.

In the midst of this activity at the NGO office, I sat chatting casually with a fluctuating group of between four and six people. Most were paid employees of the NGO, so they would sit and listen or contribute to the conversation for 10–15 minutes before going to do some work, then return later on. As people added this or that idea to the conversation only to leave a moment later, I felt as if they were slowly painting a portrait for me of the larger picture about GNC identity in India—one that I had only the barest outlines of at the time. Looking back on this experience, I realize that the fragmented nature of our conversation reflected the different fragments I have pulled together in this book to explain the emergence of newer groups of transgender women and how ideas about these trans women impact the traditional GNC groups they are often contrasted with.

In this chapter, I argue for an account of worship as real union. To worship the Divine is to participate in the goodness of God, in an ontological way. But how can we really participate in God? The answer depends on the coherence of an important distinction between the essence and divine energies of God. We cannot participate in the essence of God, otherwise the distinction between creature and creator breaks down. Rather, we participate in the divine energies of God. Although there is a difference between the divine essence and the divine energies, the divine energies are not something distinct from God. God interacts with us and reveals himself to us through the divine energies. The divine energies are the activities of God that can penetrate our inner being and change us from potentially being good to actually being good. Thus, worship, in the proper and strict sense, divinizes us.

The conclusion summarises the answers to the book’s four animating questions: How did modern slavery emerge on the global political agenda? Where do key actors in the global antislavery network draw the boundary between free and unfree labour? How does the multifaceted approach to modern slavery keep the different legal domains to which unfree labour is assigned from clashing? How do attempts to govern transnational forms of unfree labour reconfigure sovereignty? It argues that modern slavery laws attempt to mediate the escalating tensions around borders and markets created by neoliberal capitalism’s reliance on managed migration and free trade as engines of accumulation. Probing the social relations that propelled transnational modern slavery law, it reveals that the border between free and unfree labour is a contested and gendered act of governance operating across different scales. It concludes by considering the vexed question: what makes labour ‘free’?