The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

Chapter 1 explores travel writing about Wales to show how, as Britishness became an increasingly important cultural category, so too did written accounts of “ancient Britain” become more invested in representing Wales not only as beautiful, but also as infinitely productive. Early and mid-century writers like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson cast Wales as sublimely foreboding and suffused with a masculine classical cultural heritage, but later writers reimagined the country as exemplifying a timeless and quintessentially British type of beauty: namely, the aesthetic they named the picturesque. Later, Welsh writers like Richard Llwyd drew attention to the erasures and contradictions inherent to picturesque view-making, articulating an incipient critique of imperialist landscape aesthetics.

Cuba’s current economic struggles are due to a number of factors. These include an economic structure resulting from colonialism and neocolonialism and Cuba’s geopolitical alliance with the Soviet Union, which had mixed results in terms of economic performance. In the twenty-first century, there have been attempts in Cuba at market-oriented structural reforms, without a great deal of success. Thus far, these reforms have not shown major significant macroeconomic effects. However, it cannot plausibly be denied that Cuba’s post-1959 development strategy has been severely impacted by the system of unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the US. The US’s system of unilateral coercive economic sanctions disrupts Cuba’s international economic relations by making it expensive and risky for other countries to do business with the island and causing Cuba’s investment in infrastructure to perform below expectations. Sanctions create obstacles to accessing new technologies and foreign direct investment for key sectors of the Cuban economy, such as biotechnology and tourism, both of which are important elements of Cuba’s development strategy. Consequently, the US system of unilateral coercive measures affects Cuba’s overall economic health, has inflicted considerable damage to the Cuban population, and has interfered in many ways with the realization of Cuba’s development goals, violating the island nation’s right to development.

The final and concluding chapter reflects on diasporic state-building, drawing out the implications for how this transforms our understanding of state-building under military intervention. It critiques the limitations of diasporic state-building when approached through Western military and developmental interventions and their Euro-centric positionality. The chapter discusses how the optic of diasporic state-building allows us to witness transformations in how we conceive the nation-state and transnational civil society, since diasporas are constitutive actors transforming homelands states and societies in significant and contradictory ways, which can simultaneously bolster and undermine the state. Diasporic state-building also sheds light on transformations in our understanding of concepts such as citizenship, belonging, and nationhood in a globalised world when the nation-state is unshackled from state boundaries and occupies a transnational space. Finally, the chapter ends with the significance of diasporic state-building, when we consider the persistence of conflicts and migrations and the emergence of new diasporas. It offers probing questions for future research for exploring diasporic state-building of other global diasporas in other non-Western contexts.

In this chapter, we seek to examine how play supports children’s overall development. We specifically take the child’s perspective in planning for play development.This chapter has been designed to provide a strong theoretical sense of the concepts of play, learning and development in early education; the capacity to analyse and support play development; a look at planning for play and learning outcomes, drawing on the The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (V2.0) or Te Whāriki.

At the beginning of this book, we examined your own play memories and those of other people. We concluded that play really matters to children. But what do we really learn about children’s learning and development when we observe and analyse play? We begin this chapter by looking at a play memory of a 16-year-old boy whose parents used play to support their son in dealing with the arrival of his new baby sister.

In an age where change accelerates at an exponential pace, the world is grappling with a unique and volatile set of challenges. Mohamed El-Erian, the foreword author of our first publication (Reimagining Philanthropy in the Global South: From Analysis to Action in a Post-COVID World), uses the term “permacrisis” to describe the compounding issues of climate change, geopolitical instability, and technological disruption that now dominate the global landscape. These crises have revealed the fragility of systems once deemed resilient, highlighting the urgent need for transformative financing approaches to support sustainable development and achieve lasting systemic change in an ever-evolving world. This book explores the promise of catalytic capital and the emerging dynamics of development finance in this new global landscape.

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

We use recent theories of the politics of economic development and of economic interdependence and war to construct an analytic narrative of the events covered in this volume.  We trace the end of China’s hegemony, and the instability that attended it, to the different policies the region’s states chose toward commerce, development, and reform.  States that pursued modernization gained wealth and power relative to those that did not.  These choices had fateful consequences for the regional balance of power and encouraged modernized upstarts to overthrow the traditional order.  A more dynamic order arose as great powers competed to impose a new hegemony or at least a new stability, forming coalitions with the region’s other states and offering new ideologies to legitimize their rule.  While existing theories shed light on the evolution of East Asian order, our consideration also reveals important gaps in explanation that merit further investigation.

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.

Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

This chapter examines the political economy of the hub-and-spokes alliance system in Asia during the Cold War. Focusing on the strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communists, it argues that state-building and development were major features of the United States’ efforts to maintain the security of its allies and partners. Because US officials exhibited a heightened concern about the risk of subversion, which could not be contained through military alliances alone, US strategy focused on addressing the perceived causes of its allies’ and partners’ vulnerability. In Northeast Asia, the United States played a significant role in the creation of the developmental state. In Southeast Asia, the United States proved to be less capable or willing to support state-led industrialization, choosing not to do so in the Philippines and failing to do so in South Vietnam. Throughout Asia, containment was as much about economics as it was about military strategy.

The fluidity of the continuum between colonization and sovereignty is particularly evident in the case of small islands generally and Pacific Island states specifically. Colonialism arrived late to much of the Pacific and was thus short-lived compared to other regions. Imperial powers also struggled to extend control beyond their administrative capitals. Yet newly independent states remain enmeshed in relations of dependence with metropolitan countries via Official Development Assistance and forms of “non-sovereignty” or “free association” with states such as the United States, UK, France, and New Zealand. These alternative forms of sovereignty reflect a century-long process of experimentation with political forms for island communities and demonstrate historical legacies and the ambiguity of sovereignty itself. To substantiate this claim, this chapter traces the history of the ways island communities in the North Pacific have been governed over more than a century.

This chapter analyzes different methodologies for using the history of international development and economic growth to study US foreign relations. Early efforts to historicize development, driven largely by the scholarship of anthropologists, political theorists, and historical sociologists, focused on the intellectual origins and discursive effects of development and growth discourse. I show how, over the past two decades, historians have expanded upon this work in multiple ways. They have used governmental and nonstate archival collections to analyze the intellectual and political origins of ideas about development and growth in the United States. They have used documents in foreign languages from across the world to analyze how those receiving development assistance alternately resisted, challenged, accepted, adapted, and integrated US foreign aid into their domestic state-building and development initiatives. Historians have likewise integrated analytic frameworks from other subfields and disciplines – such as environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of economic thought – to assess the short- and long-term legacies of development initiatives. The chapter explores these approaches to analyzing development and growth as entry points to study how, why, and to what ends the United States exercised power in myriad ways across the world.

How we create believable characters. Resisting the urge to decide exactly who your character is before you know who your story needs them to be. The interdependence of character and plot and the emotional journey of the character. Moving beyond ‘show; don’t tell’: the interaction between characters allows the reader to get to know characters by observation rather than instruction. Managing minor characters. Conflict, consistency and contradiction all have a part to play in plausible characterisation. Characters come from you but they’re not you: the importance of freeing ourselves as writers from ourselves as people.