• ◦ Not all parallel price increases are the result of unlawful coordination and could as well be the product of competition. The case study of the steel industry in Greece reminds us of this important fact and, in doing so, provides a rigorous analysis to distinguish competition from collusion.

• ◦ In the steel market in Greece, there was some striking evidence of price parallelism whereby the three main producers changed their prices more or less simultaneously. In response, the Hellenic Competition Commission pursued an investigation to determine if they were colluding, either explicitly or tacitly.

• ◦ In spite of the suspicious patterns, the evidence put forth in the case study supports competition. It is explained how common price movements are likely the result of common information. Every morning, all three suppliers had available to them international and regional price levels for each product type. This information allowed them to determine the maximum price that a Greek producer would be able to sell in the domestic market given the prices that Greek importers could purchase steel from other countries. This import price acted as a reference price which was common knowledge to all Greek producers and drove changes in the competitive domestic list prices.

• ◦ Complementing this argument with a rich empirical analysis, the case study concludes the observed price patterns are likely explained as an outcome of competitive behavior.

Chapter 5 examines the ongoing rush for Burundi’s rare earths twenty-five years after the Arusha agreement that put an end to the violent conflict that tore the country apart from 1993. It argues that Burundi’s transition into an origination site leans on the legacy of colonial, post-independence and post-1993 rule of law reforms which together have fostered what Mamdani (1996) calls ‘decentralized despotism’. The conflicting position of lawyers as either representatives of authoritarian power or champions of the rule of law is embedded in a structural bifurcation of the Burundian legal field that enables corporate predation, like that of beer giants. According to their political and social resources, lawyers are positioned alternately as gatekeepers of the rent of exported commodities, or vulnerable to another type of extraversion, aid dependency. This bifurcation makes Burundi a Petri dish of the hyper violence generated by the hyperlegality of late capitalism.

In India of the 1940s and 1950s, democracy was itself the revolution. After two centuries of oppressive and unjust colonial rule and thousands of years of monarchical rule before that, the makers and thinkers of the newly minted republic thought democracy to be the appropriate political form with the possibility of peaceful revolutionary change embodied within it. After the tremendous violence of the Second World War, the spectre of the atom bombs in Japan and the brutal massacres accompanying the partition of the Indian colony into India and Pakistan, many felt it necessary to enact a peaceful revolution. Democracy was to be the means and end of that peaceful revolution. In order, however, to make sense of and to justify what seemed at first glance to be an imported political form, Indian thinkers dug deep to find native resources that could help the process of democratization of the polity. A striking solution was located in that ancient faith that was not quite separate from the universe of Hindu thought but which contained an attractive history of subversion and dissent against upper-caste Vedic religion, that heterodox 6th-century BCE sect of Buddhism. In the last century of British rule, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a modern nation reveals a secret history undergirding the rise of the republic itself in 1950. Buddhism played its own role in the making of modern India just as both Buddhism and India were in-the-making.

In the following pages, I present to you an intellectual genealogy of Buddhism in modern India. Like all modern religions on the subcontinent, Buddhism too was reimagined and reconfigured in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of British colonialism. In the historiography of modern South Asia, Hinduism and Islam have got the lion's share of attention. Buddhism's story is unique for the extent of its re-imagination in India, where its followers were insignificant in number and politically marginalized. A host of British and European orientalists, archaeologists and Indologists are credited with discovering ‘Buddhism’ and India's Buddhist heritage in this period.

This chapter traces the development of the concept of “symbolic racism,” now more commonly known as “racial resentment,” using explicit measures, unlike the implicit biases featured in other chapters. It was first introduced in a survey about the 1969 Los Angeles mayoral election, as a new form of white racial prejudice, more common and more politically powerful than the “old-fashioned racism” of the prior century, especially in white suburbs and outside the old South. I begin with the historical context of the time, as influenced by national events, the local political situation, and my personal background and that of my principal collaborators. I closely examine the original research as it appeared over the next decade, which seems to have focused more on rejecting the role of traditional racial prejudice than on fully developing the idea of a new racism. The growing clarification of the conceptualization and measurement of the new racisms over the next two decades is described. The case is made for its great, and increasing, utility for understanding the politics of the white mass public over the last half-century. I describe the main critiques of this research and our rejoinders and comment on the acrimony of these controversies.

THIS YEAR WILL ‘TEST US TO THE UTTERMOST …’

The year 1951 is a somewhat overlooked year, sandwiched between the year of the republic and that of electoral democracy, with its overshadowed clearing of decks via, as this section shows, an interplay between pre-existing structures and their succeeding shapes. The first casualty of this was the Hindu Code Bill, which got kicked into the long grass given, as Nehru listed to Ambedkar, ‘strong opposition, governmental reconstruction [and] Patel's death’. A second were those Muslims of West Bengal, who had left before the Delhi Pact for either East Bengal or elsewhere in India and then returned afterwards. They had been promised and, in many cases, received grants of INR 200 by the state government to repair their houses, in lieu of their taken-away land and looted shops. An accompanying central loan for a sum between INR 500 and INR 750 for artisans/traders, like Hindu migrants from East Bengal, was, however, not forthcoming. A related and sensitive issue was with whom to arrange for this delivery, as B. C. Roy mistrusted old Khilafat leaders from Bengal and preferred ‘the Jamiat’. A third casualty was the government's grow-more-food campaign, which was overtaken by more than 5 million tons of import. Its concomitant tragedy was the unsustainable rural rationing and integrated controls, as the deficit had to be ‘spread over the country’. Indeed, it was not just food grains and essential items like sugar, but even the newsprint situation that now needed ‘control’.

Control was also what the prime minister was seeking on the States Ministry now, especially on its treatment of Hyderabad. Receiving a file from it about services there, he found that one of its objectives was the ‘dispersal’ of Muslim officers to other parts of India and to replace them by people from Madras, Bombay and the Central Provinces. Nehru did not forget that New Delhi had entered Hyderabad by ‘military occupation’, and, two years and two months later, it had a ‘civilian occupation’. Outsiders sent there had no ability in any of the languages but had a conqueror's attitude, and the so-called ministry was ‘very communal in the Hindu sense’. What was communal in a regional sense was ‘the demand for more food’ from Bombay, without regard to others.

Chapter 3 explores narrative struggles over defining UN mediation. It examines the discursive production of UN mediation as an institution, from its beginning as a series of ad hoc diplomatic engagements, to its institutionalisation in the 2000s. The chapter shows how we can observe over time the increasingly dominant construction of conflict as a technical rather than political challenge. The chapter traces these struggles by contrasting two key documents on the UN’s role in peace and security that appeared in 1992: UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s 'Agenda for Peace' and the UN Office of Legal Affairs' 'Handbook on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes between States'. The differences between these documents illustrate the development of competing logics of UN mediation: that of mediation as an art, and that which sees it as a science. The chapter compares and contrasts the narrative features of these institutional logics, and discusses how they rely upon gendered-colonial assumptions about the nature of politics, violence, and agency that shape the incorporation of the WPS Agenda.

Chapter 4 considers another major actor in the learning of musical knowledge, besides the patrons: professional scholars. While it is true that musical treatises were for the most part commissioned for the elites, once a text was out in the market, anyone with an interest in the subject and a small amount of money in their pocket could acquire a copy. Professional scholars pursued music as a part of their training in mathematics. I center my discussion around the studies of one such scholar of music at the madrasa of Mustansiriyya, who was a student of al-Urmawi himself. I analyze a rare manuscript that contains marginal notes written by this scholar who studied the subject matter under the master. This rare manuscript grants us a unique perspective into how scholars actually went about learning their subject matter.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

This chapter provides a further contribution to work on Word Grammar and language change. It explores particular developments in English derivational morphology in order to look in more detail at what kinds of changes occur in the language network over time. This relates to discussions in other cognitive linguistic theories about diachronic variation in the language network, especially in terms of changes to nodes and changes to links between nodes. The main claims that are made are as follows: (i) much change in the network is very local and involves micro-steps, but (ii) some changes can occur which involve more significant restructuring, for instance where language users have reanalysed a part of a word as a word in itself. Since the central goal of Word Grammar is to understand the grammar of words, such changes can be revealing in terms of the theoretical underpinnings of the framework.

• ◦ In this case study of collusion in the market for air cargo services, coordinating exclusively on surcharges is found to be sufficient to result in supracompetitive final prices, even though the surcharge is only one component of price.

• ◦ The striking feature of the case is not that suppliers coordinated fuel surcharges but they did not coordinate the full freight rates. Since what matters to a customer should be the total price (which is the sum of the freight rate, fuel surcharges, and other items on the invoice), colluding only on surcharges would seem futile for raising the total price because the higher surcharges could simply be offset by lowering the freight rates as airlines compete for customers. This preliminary assessment raises the question: How could this collusive practice have a significant impact on the actual price paid for cargo services?

• ◦ This case study offers an explanation for how supracompetitive surcharges can result in a supracompetitive total (= base + surcharge) price. A critical feature is the division of pricing authority between a firm’s head office and its local offices. By delegating the decision on base prices to each local office and tying the latter’s performance measure exclusively to this price component, a firm weakens the local office’s incentive to reduce the base price in response to an increase in the surcharge. This gives the firm’s head office a way to raise the full price via a higher surcharge.

• ◦ In essence, senior executives agreeing to higher surcharges is effective because they do not control other components of price, having delegated it to lower-level personnel, and they do not have the incentive to fully offset the higher surcharges with lower base prices.