This chapter systematizes the comparison of the Nigerian and Saudi cases to offer four primary insights about the past and future trajectories of economic liberalization in resource-wealthy, autocratic and hybrid regimes. First, at the level of political actors, the Nigerian organized private sector appears dynamic and competitive in its pursuit of procedural rents when compared to the ossified Saudi Chambers of Commerce. Second, at an historical level, the Saudi and Nigerian histories of corporate law reform share a common experience of initial foreign importation, before a process of local tailoring and, eventually, their liberalization becoming rent-conditional. Third, at a theoretical level, the diverse causal processes evidenced within the two cases illustrates the potential for greater causal processes within the flexible rent-conditional reform (RCR) framework. Fourth, considering the potential global transition to a lower-carbon economy, the application of the RCR theory suggests diverging future potentials of liberalization in high- and low-cost oil producers, and potential newfound relevance for non-fuel mineral producers.

This chapter offers a close analysis of the Uniformitarian Principle and its use as a conceptual tool for understanding and narrating language contact and language change, paying special attention to the social life of Anguillian, the English-lexifier Creole language of Anguilla, the most northerly of the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands. The language and aspects of the situation of contact that led to its emergence are described from a novel uniformitarian perspective that integrates insights from general linguistics, Communication Accommodation Theory, and the analysis of early colonial-era archives.

Two centuries after independence, is colonialism still a valid explanation for Spanish America’s inequities and lagging economic performance? This chapter makes the case that the legacies of colonialism run at a deeper and much more local level than commonly acknowledged and publicly discussed. In particular, factoring-in the administrative practices of the Spanish Empire reveals how eighteenth-century office-selling undermined local governance in numerous ways: Shaping the spatial distribution of authoritarian and ethnic enclaves; the recurrence of violent conflict in certain areas; and ultimately, the under-provision of public goods leading to subnational differences in living standards we observe today. The chapter also outlines the limits of current explanations – focused on factor endowments, national institutions, or postcolonial state-building – to explain local-level differences. The chapter concludes with a roadmap describing the rest of the book.

In Perspectives, I lay out the broad historical concerns of the study. Historians viewing the transformation of the East India Company from a trading corporation to an imperial power have tended to focus on the eighteenth century, rightly seeing this as the moment when large swathes of land in the Indian subcontinent were annexed. What I offer as an alternative is an argument that the ideological, legal, political and economic requisites for the acquisition of land were laid in the seventeenth century. The founding charter empowered the Company to annex lands in non-Christian countries, and from the outset the Company embarked on a determined quest to realize that ambition. It met, however, determined resistance from Mughal authorities and rival imperial powers, and only with the passage of time and migration to the Coromandel Coast beyond Mughal control did it first gain the rights to a permanent settlement at Madras, later to be followed under very different circumstances by Bombay and Calcutta.

The first chapter explores the background to the 1600 Charter setting out the conditions for the establishment of the East India Company. Here I am interested in the rights of acquisition inherited from the exploratory age of the Tudor state rather than the more familiar story of its formal constitution. The language of charters granted to trading companies revealed something of the discursive complexity shaped by European powers striving to legitimize claims to overseas territory. England had few jurists of note and so the state drew partially and selectively on Roman and common law to foreground the precept of possession, not least because it conveniently rendered obsolete all challenges to the means of acquisition. The chartered companies of unprecedented size, capital and ambition which rose to power in the second half of the sixteenth century inherited this repertoire of legal pluralism but found in practice that the quest for conquest of overseas territory was compromised by geography and the existence of rival European powers with similar ambitions.

This chapter addresses questions concerning history and international law. First, it focuses on what traditionally has been, until relatively recently, the relationship between international law and history, including the history of international law itself. Second, this chapter reflects on the globalization of international law and its ambiguous nature and results, combining empowerment and disempowerment. In particular, it highlights that the ambiguity of the globalization of international law has been on display not only with the connection between modern international law and Western power in the context of colonization but also with decolonization since, to a large extent, after decolonization, this connection has continued in the form of neocolonization. The chapter refers as well to the ambiguity of the globalization of international law in relation to the rise of the individual as an international rights holder in the framework of international human rights. Ultimately, international law has both alienating and emancipatory effects.

The conclusion highlights the book’s main theoretical contributions and briefly sketches avenues for further research. It develops the monograph’s contribution to existing constructivist scholarship, which consists in demonstrating how international relations’ macro-concepts originate from ordinary and extraordinary interactions. The book’s primary focus is on the visual gaze. Yet representants can target other senses, and more research is necessary to direct attention to other sensory stimuli. Second, the Conclusion stresses the book’s contributions to the booming literature on recognition and misrecognition. The monograph can provide new perspectives for studying processes of colonization and decolonization as moments of misrecognition and recognition. It can also guide the analysis of struggles of recognition over sovereignty claims in the contemporary era. Concerns about recognition are crucial for questions about the future of the liberal international order. The chapter directs attention to representants for interpreting the efforts of major players from the periphery and the semi-periphery to acquire something akin to great power status. Other, hitherto more marginalized international actors, such as indigenous communities, and some terrorist networks are equally seeking changes in representants. The Conclusion also opens questions about how changes in communication technologies might trigger changes in representants that can have broader systemic effects.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

The emergence of a systematic literature around land-surveying in the late first century AD affords an ideal opportunity to study the development of an ars within the scientific culture of specialized knowledge in the early Roman Empire. The variegated methods that belonged to the historical inheritance of surveying practice challenged the construction of a discrete and coherent disciplinary identity. The surveying writings of Frontinus and Hyginus evince several strategies intended to produce a systematic and explanatory conception of the ars. These include rationalizing explanations of key surveying terminology and practice with a view to natural first principles and an accounting of surveying methods in interdisciplinary perspective with astronomy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. While these earliest surveying works pose several unique challenges, they ultimately provide a precious window onto the challenges and opportunities that greeted the emergence of an ars in the fervid scientific culture of the period.

Explores relationship of law to communal agriculture in three contexts; Indigenous communal grazing; Spanish and Mexican land grants; and Colorado state law of property rights.