The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

Chapter 7 describes the fortunes of Mwaura three years on from the original fieldwork. It draws attention to heightened anxieties about social breakdown illuminated by the author’s host family’s own breaking apart, and two deaths – one of a neighbourhood youth, and another of a neighbourhood elder, the same young man’s father. This ethnographic epilogue crystallises key issues brought out throughout the book: male struggles with alcoholism, anxieties about downward social mobility, the damaging effects of family breakdown, and contestation over landed futures.

This chapter analyzes how social policy in China has contributed to the well-being of the middle class and their trust of the government. The author argues that if we examine not just China’s earlier reform period (1978–2003) and the fast-growing era (2003–2012), but also the sharp Left Turn in recent years (2012–present), it is hard to fit China’s social policy into the theories of productivism or developmental welfare state that are often associated with the East Asian countries. China’s welfare system is an instrumentalist model which is centered on maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party of China. With this in mind, social policies have been actively used in the past few years to support two mutually independent but intersecting intermediate goals: maintaining economic development and social stability. Both are vital to the party’s authority.

What happened when people did not pay their debts? Debts Unpaid argues that conflicts over small-scale unpaid debts were a stress test for the economic order. To ensure the wheels of petty commerce continued to turn in Mexico, everyday debtors and creditors had to believe that their interests would be protected relatively fairly when agreements soured. A resounding faith in economic justice provided the bedrock of stability necessary for the expansion of capitalism over the longue durée. Introducing the two-hundred-year period of massive economic transformation explored throughout the book, this chapter presents the text’s key historical and theoretical interventions from the late eighteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first. As the capitalist credit economy grew, especially through modern financial institutions, ordinary people used new financial tools and navigated increasingly opaque and impersonal credit relations. This Introduction outlines the dynamics of change and the challenges and opportunities they posed for the world of small-scale debtors and creditors.

This chapter examines the development of an ideology of middle-class behaviour based on the ability to save and to maintain enough capital to prevent a cash flow crisis that would result in being arrested or imprisoned. This led to a new type of class-based thinking about society that was closely linked to the security that new forms of capital provided to successful savers. Such individuals were those who were able to accumulate large amounts of capital through entrepreneurship or inheritance, and not dissipate it though overspending. This was a small elite group who gradually came to be termed the middle class, to differentiate themselves from the middling sort of smaller traders. They also increasingly thought of their capital as a form of property created out of righteousness, and that the role of the law was to protect it from those who were less able.

This chapter concentrates on the spatial presence of Palestinian doctors – the communities they served and those they did not. Villages rarely had medical facilities or doctors, and peasants had to travel to the town or city for medical services and would otherwise rely on traditional practitioners. Towns usually had missionary medical facilities, a small community of doctors (some of whom were native to the town), and one or two government medical facilities – a District Health Office, a government clinic, or a small hospital. Palestine’s large cities – Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa – were characterized by a relatively large professional community, substantial Jewish presence, strong missionary presence that provided both educational and medical services, and a strong presence of the Mandate administration. The chapter places doctors on Palestine’s map and examines how medical services transformed urban relationships, as well as those between the city, the town, and the countryside.

Southeast Asia seems locked endlessly in a boom-and-bust cycle of democratizing, then regressing, then democratizing again. This review of the history of democracy and autocracy in Southeast Asia underscores three themes. First, Southeast Asia reminds us that support for democracy is always contingent. The chapter shows how readily factors such as political polarization and the failure of democracy to deliver on its promises can produce receptive audiences, if not full-on partners, for aspiring autocrats. Second, the chapter explore the ways in which institutions can keep autocratic sympathizers in the wings or in the game, and how institutional reforms, particularly those that seek greater political openness and broader empowerment, can, under some circumstances, stoke political divisions and provide fodder for these reactionary forces. Importantly, the chapter suggests, formal liberalization may elevate antidemocratic impulses, in ways that should by now be anticipated (by scholars, democracy promoters, policymakers). Finally, it is noted how seldom pro-democracy forces, even when present and active, command center-stage – though when they do, their influence can be powerful.

Seen from Europe and America, exhibitions reinforce our understanding of World War I as watershed, marking a turn from the confident embrace of industry and empire to a world of economic anxiety, colonial ambivalence, and modernist experiment. Japan shared in these too, but the evidence of exhibitions also points to continuities, of municipal aspiration, ongoing commercialization, and colonial development. This chapter shows how ongoing urbanization and continental empire increased the demand for exhibitions from private companies, local governments, and colonial authorities, both to tie themselves to the nation and to find a distinctive place for themselves on the imperial map. They were also eager to cater to the emerging middle-class demand for the things that would provide them with a cultured but moral urban life. The demand, in turn, provided employment for a new breed of showmen (rankaiya), who were able to provide the attractions and advertising to make sure the visitors would come.

In September 1923, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Tokyo area triggering thousands of aftershocks, raging fires, and the massacre of resident Koreans by Japanese citizens. What came to be known as the Great Kanto earthquake devastated the capital, ravaging the low city with particular ferocity. As Tokyoites rebuilt their city and their daily lives, changes that had been stirring for the past couple of decades accelerated. The many residents who moved out of the low city helped shift the capital’s center of gravity westward into Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Suginami wards and the suburbs beyond. The white-collar, middle-class suburban commuter had an increasingly recognizable pattern of living. An urban culture of consumption and leisure flourished, from the department store to the café. And the “modern girl” appeared in Tokyo as she did in cities around the world, embodying the promises and threats of shifting roles for women, pleasures and perils of consumerism, and allures and dangers of cosmopolitan entertainment. The urban culture of the post-earthquake years persisted into the 1930s as the nation edged closer to fascism and deepened its commitment to war.

From the years of total war through the postwar American occupation of Japan, the inescapable presence of a state and military conditioned the day-to-day lives of Tokyoites. As imperial Japan prosecuted the Asia Pacific War, both the state and community organizations used coercive mechanisms to mobilize society in support of war, from conscripting labor for manufacturing weapons to admonishing wasteful behavior. In the postwar, the occupation commandeered buildings, remade spaces, and constructed housing for its personnel in support of the project to demilitarize and democratize Japan. From the 1940s into the 1950s, the physical capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and then hastily reconstructed to restore the basic functions of the city. And Tokyo went from being the spiritual, military, and political center of gravity in Japan’s wartime empire to an occupied capital of a war-torn nation where struggling Tokyoites could see in the occupiers a model of affluent, middle-class lifestyles.

As Japan rebuilt and regained its footing after the war, Tokyo reemerged as the engine and emblem of national progress – of not just recovery but economic growth. Leading up to the 1964 Olympic Games, the host city upgraded its physical infrastructure, erected tall buildings, and made sure Tokyo was clean and shiny to demonstrate to the world the nation’s rebirth as a remodernized, peaceful, and prosperous Japan. Over the course of the 1960s, as gross national income more than doubled and Japan became the second largest economy in the world, a middle class ideal took root of a nuclear family with a husband who worked a white-collar job, a wife who managed the home, and household income enough to purchase electric appliances and to save toward buying a home. Tokyo was at the vanguard of the embrace and the achievement of middle class aspirations, with urban living in a danchi or apartment complex within the grasp of more and more Tokyoites and the relatively affordable suburbs beckoning more and more people. But by the late 1960s, middle class dreams were also tinged with disappointment about cramped apartments, long commutes, and the environmental costs of high economic growth.

Chapter 3 focuses on the application of the reasonable person in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapter begins by considering why the reasonable person is frequently placed on means of public transport. It argues that the reasonable person’s presence on the omnibus means that others can see it and that the reasonable person itself sees others. The chapter then considers whether the standard of the reasonable person was meant to be an empirical standard or a standard controlled by the courts. It does so by asking whether the idea was that one could actually encounter the reasonable person on the Clapham omnibus. Contrasting the concept of the reasonable person with the concept of the average human person proposed by the Belgian sociologist and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, the chapter establishes that the reasonable person was meant to be a court-controlled standard. Finally, the chapter shows how the standard has historically been construed exclusively in male terms. It addresses the discriminatory potential of the standard and acknowledges that the reasonable person concept has often been applied in a manner that excludes anyone who does not share the characteristics of the male, white, middle-aged judge who applies the standard.

Although Spanish-speaking lands are often imagined as lands of sexual intolerance, Buenos Aires is better characterized by ineffectual repression and by its recent celebration of sexual diversity. In this chapter we analyze sexuality in Buenos Aires against the backdrop of economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and political transformations that often undermined the regulations of authorities. The decades between 1880, when Buenos Aires became the capital, and the overthrow of President Juan Perón in 1955 were crucial for the formation of modern Argentina and constitute its focus. We begin with some preceding historical trends in the colonial and early independent era, and end with a succinct analysis of a few salient trends after 1955, especially those leading to Buenos Aires becoming a leader of LGBTQ+ rights in the twenty-first century. We discuss immigration, class differences in sexual behaviours, commercialized sex, sexual diversity with marica and homosexual identities, the rise of family sociability, and the push for sexual ‘normalcy’.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Donald Trump was not the first president to favor smaller government, but they understood and respected the need for government even as they favored an adjustment in the mix. Instead of a conversation about the mix, Trump made politics about the distrust and animosity of Americans toward other Americans. His efforts to retain the presidency even though he lost the election based on the “big lie” poisoned trust in elections that continues, and his plan to stop the election of Joe Biden discarded democracy altogether. These tactics made it more difficult to have a national conversation about a change in the mix of government and markets that could renew economic opportunity for those left behind by economic developments and previous decisions of government by both political parties. The government helped to unbuild the middle class when it borrowed money to fight the Vietnam War, ignored how globalization harmed many Americans even as it benefited others, and cut taxes in ways that mostly benefited the wealthy and robbed the government of needed resources.

This chapter assesses the interplay among social class and the growing centralization of African American literature in the marketplace. Since the 1980s the production of black literature has been increasingly shaped by the economic and aesthetic priorities of commercial bookselling. Contemporary African American writers have expressed their awareness of the ways that the commodification of black literary expression has both imposed limits and created new possibilities for literary art. These authors have been particularly attentive to new patterns of consumption and reception that emphasize class distinctions among consumers and genres of writing. These changes have prompted writers to rethink traditional assumptions about the social and aesthetic obligations of black middle-class writers in forging alliances with the working class. The chapter considers these shifting social relations with reference to literary works by Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead.

The high economic growth created jobs to reduce inequality as well as poverty. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the effect was more than offset by other factors, like the widening wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. There was also a large amount of transfer to the rich through the real estate market, while fiscal policy transferred little to the poor. Industrial relations were repressive. In the 1980s, inequality slowed to widen as the offsetting factors weakened and the transfer through the real estate market decreased, but industrial relations became more repressive. South Korea sustained high economic growth through the democratization process because, while staving off a possible disaster, democratization was limited in scope. Democratization failed to narrow inequality as it interacted with other forces, but it led to reforms to enhance the transparency of the economy. Independent unions emerged with democratization, but it aggravated the non-performing loans problem.