At one time the National Labor Relations Act was a bulwark for the rights of workers to organize and protest working conditions. Its preamble, unaltered after more than eight decades, charges the Board to promote both freedom of association and the collective bargaining process. But today, the labor movement in the United States and throughout substantial portions of the industrialized world is in retreat due to offshoring, contracting out, automation, globalization, and the law. Right-to-work legislation, which prohibits collective agreements requiring the payment of a service fee as a condition of employment, is now the law in twenty-seven states, and the Supreme Court has endorsed the same framework in the public sector. Further, the agency’s mission ensnarls it in the problem to which Professor Bodah alluded. The NLRA admittedly allows for a measure of politicization through broad ambiguous language that could be interpreted differently by different administrative (and, on appeal, judicial) tribunals, as well as staggered terms of tenure for National Labor Relations Board Members.

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the concept of ‘citizen rights’ that were encapsulated within India and Pakistan’s post-Independence constitutions chimed with what many ordinary Indians and Pakistanis at the time believed were their rights as ‘citizens’ to be. When deciding upon citizenship rights, both governments faced the common challenge of having to negotiate dissonance between the agenda that they set from above and the way in which this agenda was interpreted and implemented from below. Rather than assuming that the two countries in constitutional terms moved – inexorably – in separate directions, it draws attention to similarities as well as differences between the processes at work in the decade following Independence, and thus to the degree of interconnectedness that operated despite the upheavals of 1947 in places such as UP and Sindh. In this context, it points to a range of quotidian readings of constitutional rights that emerged alongside more formal expressions of citizenship entitlement in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The Introduction argues that just as there was no certainty or inevitability about the creation of two sovereign states even as late as May 1947, so were pre-Independence ideas of ‘citizenship’ rights formed around a very different notion of the nation-state. This had implications for both Indian and Pakistani citizens after 1947, and the relationship between their experiences of citizenship and its attendant rights. Alongside legalistic notions of what it meant to be a citizen, with rights predicated upon law and the constitution, there are also more ‘active’ expressions of citizenship, which engage with ideas about rights as crucial for political and civic participation. It therefore, emphasizes that rights are dynamic phenomena, affected in the case of post-1947 South Asia by the physical movement of people between different jurisdictions. Rather than focus on former British provinces that were physically divided by Partition, the Introduction highlights the significance of developments elsewhere, in UP and Sindh, which found themselves in a reconfigured relationship after Independence.

Chapter 6 explores issues connected with citizenship and belonging during the late 1940s and 1950s, and in particular focuses on the differentiated realities involved for particular marginalized groups – religious minorities, and economically disadvantaged peoples such as Dalits, tribal communities and haris (share-cropper peasants) – who were excluded, in a range of ways, from the ‘mainstream’ benefits of what being a citizen came to mean in both UP and Sindh during the early post-Independence years. Not only were certain communities excluded from typical frameworks of citizenship rights in postcolonial India and Pakistan but also the latter were sometimes established to marginalize them deliberately, requiring them to seek out alternative methods for lobbying government

The Earth is a powerful organic chemist, transforming vast quantities of carbon through complex processes, leading to diverse suites of products that include the fossil fuels upon which modern societies depend. When exploring how the Earth operates as an organic chemist, it is tempting to turn to how organic reactions are traditionally studied in chemistry labs. While highly informative, especially in terms of insights gained into reaction mechanisms, this approach can also be a source of frustration, as many of the reactants and conditions employed in chemistry labs have few or no parallels to geologic processes. The primary goal of this chapter is to provide examples of predicting thermodynamic influences and using the predictions to design experiments that reveal the mechanisms of how reactions occur at the elevated temperatures and pressures encountered in the Earth. This work is ongoing, and we hope this chapter will inspire numerous and diverse experimental and theoretical advances in hydrothermal organic geochemistry.

Chapter 2 explores how in 1940s and 1950s South Asia thinking about Indian or Pakistani identity as a mirror of the ‘other’ country affected broader understandings of citizenship and belonging. It highlights the extent to which everyday public opinion could be conditioned by localized reactions to people arriving from other places or others leaving their families and goods behind, particularly in relation to UP and Sindh. The creation of two independent countries meant that the movement, displacement and rehabilitation of migrants became an integral part of the wider process of formal citizenship definition, as did the status of minority communities who did not leave. The chapter therefore also considers how far the physical movement bound up in the creating of two separate states at Independence shaped quotidian meanings of ‘citizenship’ as people competed for space and resources.

As Chapter 5 explores in relation to both UP and Sindh, and in India and Pakistan more widely, the status of women as new citizens was keenly contested, and women’s movements on both sides of the border in the first decade following Independence were caught up in the search for ways of balancing universal notions of citizenship alongside female mobilization. Women’s organizations in the late 1940s and early 1950s in both places engaged with the idea of group rights, in the main, through juggling liberal universal notions of citizenship on the one hand and movements for grassroots feminist mobilization on the other. Likewise, this was also a question of scales of mobilization: the often difficult relationship between local movements and regional, national or international ones, was also part and parcel of the challenges faced by women more generally, not least around problems of political representation.

Chapter 1 explores how ideas, promises and agendas originating in the nationalist movements of the first half of the twentieth century shaped not only the policies of independent governments in South Asia, but also the kinds of demands that their new citizens made of them. It looks at the complex and contingent relationship between state ceremony, power and everyday understandings of citizenship and rights after 1947. On both sides of the new border, citizenship ideas in practice were made more ‘vernacular’, and shaped, if not necessarily reconfigured, by popular engagement with the idea of ‘citizenship’, whether this was propelled from below or directed from above. It also considers how far – for India and Pakistan during their early years – the process of ‘making citizens’ was also about consolidating the unitary state in ways that could often allow each country to emulate the other, despite contrasting contexts.

The Epilogue/Conclusion explores some of the contemporary outcomes flowing from the mid-twentieth century developments investigated in Boundaries of Belonging, before providing a summary of the main arguments presented in this study.

Focussing in particular on urban centres in present-day Sindh and UP, Chapter 3 explores key dynamics involved in the development of citizenship that connected with this control of ‘public goods’, including food and civil supply, in relation to both the politics of prices and price controls and debates about food and civil supply administration. It highlights the extent to which supply and control of goods became an important means through which ideas about citizens’ relationship to the state were articulated and played out. Its second section then considers popular discourses surrounding government corruption which emerged from the mechanisms involved in the supply of goods. This examination of popular views of corruption extends into a discussion of how particular scandals developed in the press, and their broader meaning for ideas about citizenship rights, concluding with consideration of cross-border smuggling as an ‘anti-national’ problem in the early 1950s.