Chapter 8 expounds on how the Anti-Extradition Movement was organized and sustained in the absence of a centralized leadership. We illustrate how protesters, networked in both online and offline realms, collaborated on a spontaneous, horizontal, and many-to-many basis to generate a continuous stream of actions – a process we term “peer collaboration.”

What drove the transformation of Britain’s population, economy and environment so that by 1819 it was arguably the most rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society in the world?

What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

This chapter explores how value creation is shifting. Amidst the saturated media environment where consumer attention is a prized commodity, brands face the challenge of standing out and maintaining relevance. Traditional metrics of competition such as price and quality are no longer sufficient differentiators; instead, brands are increasingly evaluated by their contributions to society and the authenticity of their engagement in cultural and social issues. In articulating the complexity of value in the context of brand and society, this chapter suggests that value is not merely about economic transactions but also involves co-creation with consumers and societal impact. It explores how brands are moving beyond traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards more polarising and purpose-driven stances: that is, engaging in brand activism. This new dynamic places brands as facilitators of change, influencing culture and engaging with consumers on deeper ethical and moral grounds. Brand activism has implications on consumer perception and loyalty, where the importance of authenticity in brand activism is picked up on by consumers and can drive meaningful consumer/brand connections.

The problems that afflict Pareto efficiency can be overcome if the criterion is rebuilt on preference-free foundations. A policy change passes the ‘availability test’ if it allows agents to afford whatever they purchased originally: Agents might not then be better off but no one can legitimately object to the change. One way to pass the availability test is to give agents the right to repeat their original transactions; a reform of rent control serves as an example. A second strategy stabilizes prices for consumers while letting the prices that firms face promote efficiency in production. A deregulation of a public utility, for example, can preserve consumer prices while giving firms an incentive to innovate. These policy alternatives show how to resolve the Schumpeterian dilemma of creative destruction: They harness the progressive feature of capitalism, that it fosters technological change, while protecting the individuals who can be harmed by the same forces. Conventional laissez-faire policies are in contrast difficult to justify even from within the orbit of traditional economic theory and can generate bitter social conflict. An application to opening an economy to free trade shows how to combine the advantages of technological change while satisfying the availability test.

The chapter surveys critiques of glory. We begin with the argument that cultures of honor are deadly. This argument gives rise to theories which explain the early rise of capitalism as an attempt to swap the pursuit of fame with the (safer) pursuit of money. We also review the argument that it is grotesque to speak of glorious fighting or glorious death in the age of industrial warfare. Other critiques of glory touch on the nature of asymmetrical warfare, the actual attitudes soldiers display towards each other in battle, and the rise of drone warfare. How is it that in spite of all of these powerful critiques, the idea of glory still permeates public discourse? We suggest that the key to thinking about this puzzle might be a tendency to run together the Achillean (personal) and Periclean (political) varieties of glory.

The Yorkshire novelist Storm Jameson wrote that her work tended to ‘sag beneath my great ideas’, as she fought to reconcile her own frustrations with a world of isms and inconsistencies. This chapter explores In the Second Year (1936) Storm Jameson’s dystopian vision of fascist Britain and what this might look like. Like many of her other novels is waterlogged with dialogues and monologues which seek to unpack and explore the great ideas of the age - modernity; capitalism; materialism; individualism - and the ways in which they inform and underpin the attractions of a particularly British fascism, one fashioned in a crucible of class prejudices, the public school system and growing inequality.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

A capitalist market has been part of modern Russian literature since at least the early nineteenth century. Even during the Soviet era, the market was never entirely abolished. But when socialism fell in 1991, capitalism rushed in. This chapter focuses on the economic, social, and aesthetic consequences of the market in post-Soviet Russian literature. The book market boomed just as thick journals and legacy critics lost cultural authority, and as readers, publishers, and writers were pulled towards bestselling imports, largely western pulp. Drawn by success and fascinated by new forms, many authors innovated genre conventions, authorial performance, and audience interaction, using misdirection, mystification, and online and social media, among other strategies. Others mobilised the terms of capitalism to mount a critique of the illusory values of the new market society.

The epilogue critically assesses how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, laborers, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It also invites global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.

We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

Guitar shop showrooms are museums of design. As visitors walk by rows of instruments, they encounter a tactile history of popular music. However, shoppers may notice that the majority of electric guitars available in the modern marketplace are strikingly similar. While there are certainly instances of radically new styles, they are outnumbered by instruments that resemble mid-twentieth century designs, such as the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul. This chapter explores moments in electric guitar design history that speak to marketplace tensions between historical consciousness and innovation. There is a widespread belief that the electric guitar was perfected half a century ago. Therefore, new design choices must be in conversation with the past. Success stories—such as Fender’s Custom Shop series—rely upon such historical nods. Design flops—such as Gibson’s “G-Force” automatic tuner—fail because they innovate beyond what buyers are willing to accept. So, is the electric guitar dead, as some commentators have proclaimed? I argue that the instrument is in a persistent state of rebirth as new models move forwards by looking backwards.