This chapter examines the cultural–educational aspect of party activism and relates this to the functions of the PPO examined earlier. It will be shown that the broad range of activities that fell within the scope of the party’s mission of cultural enlightenment gave the latter significant material implications. Because of this, the intensity with which communists engaged in cultural activism was to a significant extent independent of the attitudes prevalent amongst the central leadership, whether with respect to the relative weight attached to the Party’s cultural mission or the actual content of the latter. This observation has significant implications that extend beyond the immediate scope of this book onto the broader historiographical debate of Soviet cultural policy in the interwar period.

This book brings together African histories of consumption with their actors, performances, and spaces to explore how the dressed body serves as the point of contact between personal, very local experiences, and the broader global context. It draws on the author’s long-term anthropological research in Zambia and the Africanist and dress scholarship that frames it. Past and present across most of Africa, people have been and remain passionate about how they appear in public, and Zambia is no exception. Clothing helps people make history and socio-cultural change just as much as history helps drive their new dress practice and fashion cultures. Exploring the dress and fashion scene in relation to changes in the political and social setting reveals a surprising range of issues that have endured across history in Zambia. They converge on the dressed body and make the significance of a well-dressed appearance the heart of that story.

Research on goals and motivation started almost a century ago and continues to thrive today. In this chapter, we distill the rich literature on consumer goals and motivation by presenting recent works against the backdrop of foundational theories. We start with a discussion of how consumers initiate goal pursuit. Next, we examine the factors that help consumers stay motivated in the face of internal and external obstacles, and what happens once consumers attain their goals. We then explore research on how consumers’ goal pursuit interacts with the surrounding social world. Finally, we suggest some broad areas for future inquiries on consumer goals and motivation.

The supply chain model has become the dominant mode of production in the globalised economy. While much attention has been placed on the downwards economic pressures of the model, little attention has been placed on the consequences for democratic participation. This chapter casts light on this area by examining how the supply chain model undermines democracy at work. It also raises the fundamental question of whether and how existing governance structures can be democratised, or whether and how new democratic institutions can be created that extend democratic underpinnings to globally expanding supply chains? Drawing on this we highlight that two distinct approaches to supply chain labour governance have emerged: one based on focussing on production relations and collective bargaining, and the other based on consumption relations and a CSR approach by brands. These approaches raise important questions that are central themes of the book such as what is the relationship between the representation of worker interests and consumer interests; who has the “right” to raise concerns about labour conditions in global supply chains; and can these contrasting approaches prove complementary?

The British world was not just an assortment of widely dispersed peoples but also an empire of trade goods. Over time, the goods themselves became freighted with the ‘moral economy’ of imperial partnership. As the empire unravelled and the verities of global Britishness were called into queston, therefore, humble trade commodities were not immune to the contingencies, unable to rely on older consumer loyalties in the face of tectonic shifts in the terms of trade and the attractions of new markets outside of the British orbit. Britain’s decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community in the early 1960s represented not just a major rupture in the traditional patterns of trade, but also an audit of the emotional balance sheet. Everyday consumer items with little in the way of obvious emotional ballast — wheat, butter, lamb, tinned fruits, and especially sugar — would play a crucial role in denaturalising Britain’s place in Commonwealth markets and vice versa. Viewed from the perspective of disparate communities heavily reliant on goods for export to the UK market, Britain’s European aspirations ignited passions and resentments that could not simply be explained in terms of lost export opportunities. That such appeals to a wider moral economy ultimately failed to prevent the UK from taking the plunge — albeit delayed by a decade of false starts and endemic ill-feeling — suggests that the diminishing returns of greater British goods was a reliable index of an imploding British world.

Chapter 2 implicates how the definition of the Black middle class has evolved over time and how the earlier research underlying such definitions has principally focused on Black married-couple families with children, and largely overlooked those who live SALA lifestyles. Chapter 2 addresses this gap in the literature by interrogating how those within the Love Jones Cohort conceptualize themselves as members of the Black middle class and how they define the Black middle class more generally. Chapter 2 also questions whether the emergence and presence of the Cohort complicates established definitions of the Black middle class. Chapter 2 demonstrates that, in general, those within the Cohort conceptualized middle-classness according to broader definitions of the Black middle class, in terms that align with the scholarship outlining objective, subjective, and a combination of both measures. Chapter 2 documents how education and income are central to the way Cohort members judge their (and others’) middle-class status, and associated subjective measures, such as education-related networks and the lifestyle commodities, as well as activities that a middle-class income provides.

To meet climate targets, a shift to low-emission diets that also support health and sustainability is necessary. A high-impact target is to reduce red meat consumption by 50 percent by 2030 in high- and middle-income countries based on the 2019 EAT-Lancet diet. Actions to lessen animal-based meat consumption could cut dietary emissions by 3–8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year (Table 9.1). Scaling up plant-based meat will require viable products, low costs, effective public policy to catalyse change, and strong markets. The priority actions are to facilitate consumer behavioural change for large segments of populations, promote policy targets and actions for reduced-meat diets in high- and middle-income countries, use public-private finance to improve alternative meat product nutrition and sustainability, and enhance affordable technology and business options.

The national income and product accounts yield key economic aggregates and detail their component parts. Gross domestic product (GDP), the principal measure of economic activity, is arrived at through three different approaches that sum elements along different dimensions as follows: the product approach based on sector of production, the broad divisions being agriculture, industry, and services; the expenditure approach defined over consumption, investment, government, and exports net of imports; and the income approach encompassing wages, interest, rents, and profits. The expenditures approach gives rise to a basic identity equating the gap between saving and domestic investment (S-I) to the trade balance (X-M). Comparison of the economies of Emerging East Asia by GDP component brings out the region’s diversity. Historic data for Taiwan reveal systematic changes that occur in conjunction with economic development.

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.

Thomas Browne’s curious A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) is an ars moriendi tract organized on early modern medical ideas about consumption, a disease understood as virtually pyral, a metabolic combustion of the body. Browne’s framing of mortality is more elaborately developed in his celebrated Urne-Buriall (1658), a virtuoso’s survey of worldwide mortuary custom throughout history, and a commentary on the impersonal state of human remains in cremation, inhumation, and other styles of corporeal disposal. Composed in the mid-1650s, these two works on the dust and ashes of mortal relics attend to humans' origin in dust in cognate varieties of burning: the reduction of flesh to dust by pyral and febrile flame, and the apocalyptic fires that will consume the world in ashes on the last day. Ash and dust represent the resistless anonymity of people's particulate fate, and produce anomalies of memory: in Urne-Buriall Browne is absorbed by the vagaries of identifiable remains, their random survival or effacement; in the Letter, however, although the disease itself leaves only wasted bodily fragments, the patient’s exemplary life is recorded and memorialized by Browne as a textual monument.

Chapter 7 focuses on the process that transformed West Central Africans from forced laborers into consumers of products manufactured elsewhere. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals the items West Central Africans collected during their lifetimes and the emotional and financial value associated with material culture. Their consumption patterns make it possible to explore the movement of goods, the role of commercial centers, and the changes in taste and fashion. Africans imported items that favored European industries at the expense of their local production, a clear demonstration of how colonial power, dispossession, and dependency have a long history and predate the twentieth century. Rulers and commoners desired material things beyond their basic needs and aspired to buy and collect a variety of goods. They consumed items that connected them to societies around the world and encouraged African political elites and warlords to engage in warfare and other strategies to enslave enemies, exacerbating violence, dispossession, and displacement. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals that African women not only acquired imported goods and transmitted them to loved ones but also made constant efforts to protect the assets they had accumulated during their lives.