This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

The Hebrew Bible with its strident championing of the oppressed is frequently associated with the development of human rights. Renowned for its bold account of the emancipation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, its impact on the later beliefs in freedom and human dignity is immense. Yet is it appropriate to associate its laws with the origin of this principle, since the term itself (זכויות אדם in Hebrew) is absent in the Pentateuch – and where it is anachronistic to impose this post-Enlightenment concept on these ancient sources?

The concluding chapter discusses the ideological underpinnings of the Chuquisaca movement. It reappraises a recurring idea throughout the book: that appealing to ancient Hispanic constitutional doctrines did not make the political process more moderate and backward-looking, less intransigent and corrosive than other revolutionary movements in Spanish America at the time. It is a concept defined as the radicalism of tradition. Beyond formal political proclamations, routines of obedience to authority broke down; traditional social classifications were no longer associated with a particular kind of participation in public life; and the barriers between the urban popular sectors and the creole elites grew increasingly porous as the local communities asserted themselves as the primary loci of collective identity and their traditional place in the imperial order came under public scrutiny. The growing weight of the general will in state affairs favored a practical exercise of sovereign rights that, couched in the contractual character of the monarchy, made submission to the metropolis and its overseas agents a matter of opinion, an object of consent. A brief assessment of the reception of the liberal Constitution of Cadiz of 1812 highlights the pervasive effects of these shifts in the inner workings of politics and social representations.

This chapter of the handbook compares the major moral sanctioning behaviors of blame and punishment from two perspectives: their cultural history and their underlying psychology. The author draws a dividing line between two phases of human evolution – before and after human settlement – and proposes that, before that watershed, moral sanctions were informal, nonhierarchical, and often mild, akin to today’s acts of moral blame among intimates. Soon after settlement, hierarchies emerged, in which punishment took hold as a new form of sanctioning, typically exacted by those higher up in the hierarchy, and eventually by institutions of punishment. The author reviews the empirical evidence on the cognitive and social processes underlying each of these sanctioning tools and proposes that their distinct cultural histories are reflected in their psychological properties we can observe today. Whereas blame is, on the whole, flexible, effective, and cognitively sophisticated, punishment is often more damaging, less effective, and can easily be abused – as in past and modern forms of institutional punishment.

Chapter 1 introduces our idea that group-based inequality is in large part the result of anger constraints placed on disadvantaged groups. We use research in social psychology to understand how public expressions of anger are reserved for the powerful. We develop a theory of how group-based social hierarchies in society are maintained by instituting rules of who can express anger and who cannot. We provide several examples of how United States race relations between Black Americans and whites exemplify this “anger rule.”

The “rise of the individual” is often viewed as one of the key themes of early modern European history, but research has also shown the continued importance of family status and connections. The social structure was not rigid, although both middle-class and upper-class people tried to reinforce distinctions between social groups. Literate people often spent time each day writing letters, which, combined with diaries and journals, provide insight into people’s thoughts and emotions, including love and affection for family members. Early modern physicians and anatomists studied the body to examine physical processes and the ways these connected with the mind and soul. In some places public health measures, such as quarantining or the disposal of waste, slowed down the spread of such diseases. Most childbirths were handled by female midwives, who were trained professionally in the larger cities and varied in their techniques to handle births. Certain forms of sexual behavior, including pregnancy out of wedlock, the sale of sex, and same-sex relationships, were increasingly criminalized, although the enforcement of sexual laws was intermittent and dependent on one’s social class and gender.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the world became far more interconnected than it had been before. The Portuguese connected with the existing rich trading network of the Indian Ocean, and, in response, the Spanish monarchs agreed in 1492 to provide financial backing for Columbus. Other mariners supported by other European monarchs also began to explore the coasts of the “New World” and establish colonies. European voyages, trading ventures, and colonization had a wide range of impacts. In Asia, existing trading networks, traditions, and structures of power changed relatively little. In Africa, the slave trade began to expand, which encouraged warfare, siphoned off workers, and destroyed kinship groups. In the Americas, European diseases eventually killed the vast majority of the Indigenous population. The Spanish set up plantations, built churches, and mined precious metals, using enslaved Americans and Africans. Gold and silver mined in the Americas fueled global trading connections. Increased contacts with Africa, Asia, and the Americas led Europeans to develop new ideas about difference and hierarchy that built on earlier notions and involved religion, social standing, ethnicity, and skin color. Overseas conquests gave Europe new territories and sources of wealth, and also new confidence in its technical and spiritual supremacy.

The final chapter summarizes the major findings of the book along two perspectives.

First, the book shows that the study of civil society under authoritarianism needs to take a bottom-up approach that pays attention to local issues and gives a voice to the people engaged for the public good and for the local community. At its heart, the debate about civil society in Saudi Arabia is about the difference between agency and sovereignty. Saudi Arabia is a country in which the population profoundly lacks popular sovereignty. Yet ordinary men and women in Saudi Arabia – young and old; social activists, philanthropists, and social workers; Saudis and non-Saudis – do have agency.

Second, the analysis shows that where the public social welfare system of the state has failed or systematically excluded specific segments of the population, charity organizations have tried to meet some of the needs of marginalized groups. Sometimes this transgresses the policies set down by the state; sometimes they complement or occasionally work together with the state. The meaning of charity has been subject to debate and scrutiny. Charity is a constantly evolving, contested field, in which numerous actors engage – often highly critical of each other and with competing approaches.

Stalinist repressions, epitomized by the Gulag, and grand industrialization projects warrant exploration of their implications for the social fabric of a place. I find social reproduction not only despite of but in some ways because of the communist industrial strategy. Whether inside or outside of the Gulag, Soviet industry appropriated both the hardware – the infrastructures of modernity – and the software – the human resources in pedagogy, medicine, research, public enlightenment, and engineering. In turn, social mechanisms of relationships of status and closure converged with the state’s developmentalist and survivalist imperatives. Unpacking these channels of resilience even when set against the most coercive aspect of Soviet planning provides additional credence to the argument that Russia had not been the purported melting pot that annihilated the society of estates. I first perform cross-regional statistical analysis to demonstrate that Soviet industries built on the tsarist industrial heritage. Next, I provide illustrative vignettes of appropriations in Samara’s consumer services, strategic armaments, and petrochemicals. I also discuss an aspect of development that has invited the naïve observer to assume a de novo approach to the Soviet project, namely the establishment of “brand-new” cities like Tolyatti. I then explore how even large-scale population movements followed the logic of social closure.

This chapter focuses on occupational associations from Rome, Ostia, and other great harbours of the Roman west during the second and the early third century, and explores how these groups, rooted in the middling social categories, used, reacted to, and even created imperial imagery and ideology. Members of these communities met in meeting places where imperial imagery was omnipresent. Imperial imagines were a part of the decorative schemes of places where feasts and rituals celebrated the majesty of the domus Augusta. These objects fostered the politicisation of lower classes, spreading ideological conceptions of the central power and, at the same time, expressed adherence to the imperium. Associations expressed deference towards imperial power with several goals in mind. One part of their motivation was not political or ideological, but social. They aimed to appear to be honourable communities, respected because of their official recognition and their integration into civic life. The wealthiest members encouraged their peers to express loyalty towards imperial power, because political loyalism belonged to a specific habitus expected of candidates for social and civic climbing.

This chapter explores the transformations of Chinese and Balinese sacred objects into heritage, against the background of centralisation efforts and the state-supported reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan (Central Java) across regime changes. It explains the relation between stronger centralisation and the strengthening of local heritage dynamics. Next, it discusses the impact of the Pacific War and decolonisation on local and centralised heritage practices, as well as on long-term foreign engagements with sites located in Indonesia. Gauging the colonial nature of post-colonial heritage politics, it shows how in colonial times professional and state-supported archaeology led to the consolidation of certain structures and methods of heritage formation in such a way that subsequent regimes could easily take over. An important related topic is the way in which research, collecting, conservation, and reconstruction activities were intimately connected to the development of social hierarchies and processes of (racial) marginalisation.