Chapter 4 argues that pre-World War II Southeast Asia was little industrialized. High costs were the main reason for the lack of industry. The main industries were the processing of staple commodities.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

The transformations of the modern era have led to today’s vast social divisions between wealth and poverty, but also created a human community that is interconnected on a global scale, processes that are examined in this chapter. Major economic and political changes, such as industrialization and de-industrialization, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the rise and collapse of communism, and the expansion of nationalism, have intersected with social and cultural changes within a framework of rapidly increasing population and human impact on the environment. International movements for social justice have called for greater egalitarianism and understanding, while ethnic, religious, and social divisions have led to brutality, genocides, and war. Technological developments in agriculture, medicine, and weaponry have both extended human life and extinguished it at levels unimagined in earlier eras, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing long-standing social hierarchies and cultural patterns.

This Introduction reviews the structuring significance of the Europe-wide constitution-making upheaval of the 1860s, whose consequences shaped Europe’s histories during the later nineteenth century. Unfolding beneath the impact of combined and uneven development, a new metropolitan modernity defined the possibilities for social, cultural, and political change across a series of major arenas: state-making and nationhood; capitalist industrialization and class formation; liberalism and the rise of socialism; societal change and conditions for democracy; empire, colonies, and global rivalries. Developments between the 1880s and 1914, in particular the gendered and racialized languages of people, personhood, and the mass, set the stage for the violent conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

Pakistan’s seventy-five-year economic history can be divided into three distinct periods. The first decade after 1947 was a period of low growth, but one in which a functioning state was set up from scratch and rapid industrialization occurred. The 1960–1990 period saw high economic growth but high costs, including the secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing (now Bangladesh), the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the ensuing civil war, which spilled over into Pakistan. Between 1990 and 2022, growth halved, primarily due to the continuing conflict in Afghanistan – this time with the US- led invasion after 9/11 – coupled with poor economic management in dealing with recurring balance-of-payments crisis and frequent recourse to the IMF. The key factors responsible for these changes are identified through ten turning points, which capture major events both internal and external and the ensuing structural changes, including in the composition of the ruling elite. Failure to undertake economic reforms was a key factor in Pakistan’s overall disappointing performance after a promising start.

This chapter examines debates around state planning in Morocco and Tunisia, centering on the idea that the post-colonial state could engineer a great leap in the 1960s. Socialist leaders Mehdi Ben Barka and Ahmed Ben Salah pursued ambitious development plans—agrarian reform and industrialization— intended to “catch up” their so-called delay. These policies, however, were deeply entangled with French colonial knowledge and development experts, most notably on how they conceived of tradition as an obstacle for progress. This chapter explores these plans’ entanglements in the imaginations of international experts during development conferences in Paris and Algiers. In both cases, these socialist leaders placed their attentions on the social resistance of peasants and downplayed reactions from educated youth in the cities. By the mid to late 1960s, students protests raged in Casablanca and Tunis, revealing a generational rupture and a challenge to the socialists’ visions of national development. This chapter also illustrates the benefits of excavating printed traces. International conference proceedings reveal post-colonial entanglements with government policy documents such as the Tunisian and Moroccan development brochures of the 1960s. This connection highlights the shortcomings of post-colonial state power after independence.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.

Chapter 6 analyses the connections between trans-imperial labor migration and Ottoman industrial and urban modernization in the nineteenth century. In a context marked by the mechanization of industrial production through technology transfer, the increasing political-economic ties between the Ottoman and British states, and the scarcity of workers with mechanical skills in Istanbul, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work mostly in the arsenal, as well as some other state factories. This chapter narrates the history of these workers and the community they established in Hasköy beginning with the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. It analyses the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences in the workplace and the city. It demonstrates how their contentious relationship and effective struggles pushed the state authorities to deploy skilled military workers, who were the products of the processes described in the previous chapter, to decrease and eliminate its dependence on them.

The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.

Africa and Europe have had an economic partnership for decades, first around the notion of friendship, then, since the 2000s, around the idea of solidarity. Despite this moral rhetoric, Europe is sanctuarizing itself, cultivating an anti-migratory fantasy and working for a resolute control of African migration. This policy is formalized with the “readmission clause,” whereby certain African immigrants are being posed as unassimilable, undesirable and disposable because they are useless for the neoliberal productive order. Therefore, any flight from exploitation on the continent must be blocked. As this perspective has led to extensive violations and aroused criticism and opposition, this chapter proposes, no longer a hybrid ideology but care. By means of a reading of the history of ideas, we insist on the impasse of the perspective that rejects migration in the name of autochthony. We propose a utopia: to work for the access of all peoples to the general cycle of industrial civilizations; this will bring equality between peoples who will negotiate migrations, taking into account concrete forms of solidarity.

Chapter 2 interrogates the development schemes between Ghana and the Soviet Union – notably the Cotton Textile Factory and the Soviet Geological Survey Team. These engagements were supposed to embody Ghana’s new postcolonial socialist modernity and highlight the benefits, opportunities, and possibilities of Soviet partnership. It demonstrates how pro-Soviet and Eastern bloc stories in the Ghanaian press were not simply intended to offer hagiographic praise or to support Nkrumah’s commitment to geopolitical nonalignment. Instead, they were part of a concentrated movement to dismantle and deconstruct the myth of Western scientific and cultural superiority and anti-Soviet bias, which were introduced and reinforced by Western colonial education and rule. In addition, Chapter 2 focuses on the relationships, expertise, livelihoods, and contestations of the technicians, bureaucrats, and local Ghanaian actors who were essential to overseeing the actual success of Ghana-Soviet relations in tangible ways for the Ghanaian people. It demonstrates how everyday Ghanaians employed Ghana–Soviet spaces to demand rights and protections against ethnic-discrimination and favoritism, and to make citizenship claims.

Industrialists and enabling financial institutions accelerated America’s economic motion, operating organizations so colossal that they commanded economic influence and encroached upon the nation’s cultures and politics. These institutions altered the national face of business and wielded increasing quantities of money, laborers, technological innovations, and political power. Narratives increasingly portrayed businessmen as a new type of hero, “self-made” even if operating within potent networks. They and their advocates portrayed their influence and wealth as proof of their superiority and, by implication, everyone else’s shortcomings. The rhetoric of self-making acquired a new grandeur. The frequency of the term “self-made” reached its nineteenth-century peak in the press around 1890, by which time the concept was well embedded in mainstream culture, and a related term, “individualist,” was climbing rapidly, along with terms like “self-reliance” and “survival-of-the-fittest.” Elites defended their male offspring as “self-made” if they didn’t lose family fortunes. At the same time, laborers and other critics asked whether the rich were “Self-Made or Made for Self”?