By looking at the impact of migration within Britain and concentrating on the industrial workplace in Luton, this chapter shows how different forms of mobility within ‘working-class culture’ were consonant with the enduring salience of stories about historical hardships drawn from early life. It explores how, even as the Labour Party shied away from discussing the inter-war Depression, many manual and non-manual workers still spoke about politics in these older terms. However, remarkably similar stories about unemployment and the Depression before the war could also feed into Conservative support. The chapter closes with a discussion of attitudes towards immigration and the welfare state.

No account of the ‘rise of the modern British state’ would be complete without an appreciation of the ways in which local institutions, constitutional principles and precedents, laws – and ultimately governance – evolved. Prior to the twentieth century, locality defined the overwhelming majority of British subjects’ lived constitutional experience: the shire rule of Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, medieval corporations and county corporates, fourteenth-century Quarter Sessions, the empowered Elizabethan parish, and then the explosion of ‘ratepayer democracy’ in the nineteenth century featuring municipal corporations and county councils, Poor Law unions, and ad hoc statutory bodies (including school boards, public health authorities, and improvement committees) of all kinds.

This chapter outlines the framework and argumentative structure of the book. It introduces the assertion of jurisdictional authority over concession agreements, which is the key site of the analysis. While concession agreements in the 1920s were considered exclusively a matter of domestic law, in the 1950s a powerful community of scholars and practitioners argued that they should fall under an international legal order and be called ‘economic development agreements’. This internationalisation was a claim for the universality of ideas propagating private property and the sanctity of contract, as well as a rejection of the authority of socialist and anti-colonial policies to redistributive ends. Western industry, former imperial governments and liberal thinkers of law and of economics successfully claimed the international sphere for building a new legal order. The authority for such an international legal regime was based on a temporalisation of difference that relied on concepts like ‘civilisation’ and development to downgrade challenges to the rules of property protection by locating such challenges in the past. This was a process of self-authorisation through legal practice and academic writing, laying the groundwork for the later emergence of the regime of international investment law.

This chapter explores the debates about the future of the Tanzanian state after independence, which culminated in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. It sets out the contours of elite-level conversations about development in the 1960s, as Tanzania groped for a path forwards that would translate independence into meaningful socio-economic progress. After showing how Julius Nyerere’s decision to embark on a radical programme of socialist reform was motivated by local unrest and the fate of postcolonial regimes elsewhere in Africa, it then revisits the little-understood politics of the Arusha Declaration and its fallout. Offering an alternative dimension to readings of Arusha as a stimulant for national unity, the chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s socialist revolution created fissures among the political elite. In particular, it pushed Oscar Kambona, a prominent politician, into exile in Britain. The Arusha Declaration represented a critical turning point in Tanzania’s postcolonial history that narrowed space for dissent, while also sowing the seeds for future challenges to the TANU party-state.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

This chapter explores the debates about the future of the Tanzanian state after independence, which culminated in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. It sets out the contours of elite-level conversations about development in the 1960s, as Tanzania groped for a path forwards that would translate independence into meaningful socio-economic progress. After showing how Julius Nyerere’s decision to embark on a radical programme of socialist reform was motivated by local unrest and the fate of postcolonial regimes elsewhere in Africa, it then revisits the little-understood politics of the Arusha Declaration and its fallout. Offering an alternative dimension to readings of Arusha as a stimulant for national unity, the chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s socialist revolution created fissures among the political elite. In particular, it pushed Oscar Kambona, a prominent politician, into exile in Britain. The Arusha Declaration represented a critical turning point in Tanzania’s postcolonial history that narrowed space for dissent, while also sowing the seeds for future challenges to the TANU party-state.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

The law of expropriation stands at the crossroad of three fundamental rights: the right of States to expropriate, their right to regulate and the right of foreign investors to property. Underlying these rights and their interplay, one finds the protection of public and private interests and the conflict between them. In establishing a balance between these, international investment agreements (IIAs) have traditionally subjected the legality of expropriation to certain conditions and failed to address explicitly the issue of the right of States to regulate. A great number of IIAs concluded in the 2010s tackle this issue, typically by distinguishing expropriatory measures from regulatory measures. Likewise, those agreements also contain articles or annexes that specify the scope and modalities of application of the expropriation provision with regards to specific matters pertaining in particular to intellectual property rights, land, subsidies and grants. Those specifications are analysed in Chapter 7. Analysing in detail treaty practice and arbitration practice as well as their evolution, Chapter 6 examines the two main issues raised by the protection of foreign investors against illegal expropriation: (1) the types of expropriation covered; and (2) the conditions of legality of expropriation. As a preliminary matter, it first focuses on the types of property protected, in particular contractual rights.

This chapter focuses upon the making of the Suez Crisis in international law. It is argued that paying attention to how a crisis was made out of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company helps us to understand the making of Cold War international law in two ways. First, it invites us to move away from the standardised narratives of the significance of the Suez Crisis for international law as, for example, the realisation of the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the use of force or the moment at which peacekeeping emerged as an innovative (executive) solution to international crises. Secondly, an attention to the production of crisis pulls back from narratives of the Cold War that emphasise its ‘non-juridical’ character. In contrast to this, I argue that the crises that apparently plagued the Cold War world were so significant precisely because they marked a radical challenge to the existing international legal order. The Suez Crisis can be seen, then, as a jurisdictional contest over the authorship of international law, or as a struggle over the authority to authorise.