Indian Economics’ short-term development plan aimed to harness progress in the two main sectors of the economy – industry and agriculture. The peasants, factory workers and merchants needed specific policies to aid them in growing their crops, manufacturing their products and selling their goods, respectively. India needed agricultural production of raw materials, industrial production using raw materials, and distribution of the finished manufactured products. Indian Economics prescribed a balanced growth strategy, seen later in India’s post-independence five-year plans, the first of which was implemented by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) from 1951 to 1956.

Upon the discovery of oil in 1908, the oil industry in Iran underwent a swift and extensive expansion, precipitating rapid industrialisation and significant demographic transformations that fundamentally redefined social relations, societal structures, and governance both locally and nationally. Central to these transformative processes was the development of oil towns, which emerged as crucibles of change, profoundly reconfiguring traditional lifestyles, and labour practices. This chapter delves into the complexities of managing oil production in areas not wholly subsumed under the aegis of the Iranian central government. It highlights the significant challenges encountered in cultivating a stable workforce and inculcating a culture imbued with principles of labour discipline, orderliness, and punctuality. These shifts presented formidable obstacles, especially for tribesmen traditionally engaged in nomadic pursuits, who found themselves compelled to transition to regimented forms of employment. Further, this discussion extends to the strategic recruitment and deployment of Indian workers, initially engaged for security purposes, whose roles evolved to encompass skilled, semi-skilled, and clerical positions, ultimately cementing their place as a permanent fixture within the industry. This narrative underscores the profound and multifarious impacts of the oil industry on the social and economic terrains of Iran.

Exploring the pivotal role of oil in the social and economic development of Iran between two World Wars, the era was marked by the establishment of a modern state aimed at ensuring territorial integrity and creating a homogeneous society within defined geographical borders. Such transformative efforts led to the collapse of the Qajar dynasty and the ascent of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s centralised and authoritative government. During this period, extensive social and economic development policies radically transformed the fabric of Iranian society, notably through the state’s substantial role in industrial investment, which significantly increased the number of industrial workers. Despite these broad changes, operations in the oil industry continued as initially established, resulting in dissatisfaction among both Iranian and Indian workers. This discontent gave rise to a series of labour strikes in the 1920s, underscoring the workers’ capacity to influence the shaping of civil society. Concurrently, the imperative for oil revenue coupled with the Iranian government’s insistence on employing local labour precipitated the cancellation of the D’Arcy Agreement and the signing of a new contract in 1933. A crucial term of this contract was the ‘Iranianisation’ of the workforce, which gradually increased the presence of skilled Iranian workers within the industry. This strategic shift not only redefined employment and living conditions but also facilitated the expansion of oil towns, where policies of ethnic and employment segregation were widely implemented, reflecting the broader national goals of integration and societal standardisation.

Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

Shanghai is often seen as the exemplar of Chinese cosmopolitan modernity, including gender and sexual progressiveness under Western influence. This chapter argues that Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism is also rooted in migration, activism, and state policies. The early reforms of patrilineage coincided with influxes of migrants and refugees, who constituted the majority of Shanghai’s urban population. As the hotspot for China’s industrialization, women’s economic empowerment and social activism occurred almost simultaneously. The semi-colonial status of Shanghai before 1949 that protected groups such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in extra-territorialities also made possible the survival of sexual minorities. These historical and social conditions created an urban environment that has made negotiations of the most intimate aspects of human life both possible and difficult. Shanghai as the pioneer of gender equality and sexual modernity in China must be viewed through those intimate negotiations, in which people transform the definitions of freedom, belonging, and modernity.

Technological development typically has outcomes that can be perceived as both positive and negative for humanity. In a capitalist society, the benefits of new technology are often evaluated in economic terms, whereas the negative impacts are often evaluated in social, health-related or environmental terms – the externalities of conventional economics. The benefits of a new technology are often immediately obvious, while the negative consequences appear rather later. In this chapter, we examine four areas of major development or change: industrial technology, agricultural technology, medical technology, and digital and communication technology. Each has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on individuals, families, communities and societies, as well as on the understanding and practice of social work. These are discussed using the questions identified above: Who owns? Who uses? Who or what benefits? Who or what loses? This allows us to consider their implications for social work and for the re-imagining of social work in the twenty-first century.

How informative are the institutional diagnostics conducted on the IDP case study countries? South Korea seemed to offer an interesting basis of comparison. Would an institutional diagnostic made there at the time its level of development was close to that of the IDP countries today, that is in the 1960s and early 1970s, have anticipated the stellar development that would follow? This chapter describes an attempt at establishing an institutional diagnostic of South Korea in the early days of its take-off. Of course, this diagnostic had to rely on second-hand material in the literature rather than direct observation. Going through the early days of South Korean development under General Park, it turns out that the nature of the diagnostic would have much depended on the time it would have been made. Such instability would have essentially been the result of the uncertainty about the quality of the political leadership. In several instances, particularly after seizing power, Park’s strategy and institutional reforms indeed seemed extremely risky, not to say suboptimal. They worked because of his talent as a leader, especially his capacity tom onitor the business sector.

The same kind of backward institutional diagnostic as for South Korea was applied to Taiwan in its take-off days. An early diagnostic conducted just after the KMT settled on the island would have been rather negative in view of the very unfavourable initial conditions of Taiwan’s development, but it would have been strongly positive a few years later. This chapter explains why, while presenting an account of the development strategy deployeda nd the institutional setting developed by the newcomers. This second diagnostic would have been different from the one drawn for South Korea, even though in both cases development was strongly directed by a military authority headed by an authoritarian leader and ended up focusing on labour-intensive manufacturing exports. But the initial strategies and institutional structure of the two economies were quite different. On the one hand, Taiwan’s development was initially anchored in the modernisation of smallholder agriculture and the development of rural industries. On the other hand, an important role was paradoxically given to central planning, but combined strict market incentives for most economic agents.

This is the first chapter of the synthesis of the various institutional diagnostics undertaken in IDP, including those of South Korea and Taiwan. It compares the main economic development challenges, or advantages faced by the various countries, and the major institutional causes behind them. Development is seen as the structural transformation of the economy through the absorption of traditional low-productivity activities by the modern high-productivity sectors of the economy, rather than merely GDP growth rates. The comparative analysis is conducted with systematic reference to the well-known framework proposed by Arthur Lewis to represent this progressive diminution of ‘dualism’. If South Korea and Taiwan fit this framework rather well, the structural transformation is shown not to rely on growth engines sufficiently strong and labour-intensive to proceed satisfactorily in the IDP countries, except maybe in Bangladesh where the domestic engine is supplemented by massive outmigration of workers. It turns out that the cause for such a situation most often lies in the political economy context of the design, decision, and implementation of the appropriate development strategies.

The following pages will show that the activity of the PPO in industrial enterprises tended to institutionalise the ideological dimension of party policy, transcribing its most radical elements onto the pattern of factory politics. The upshot was that subsequent recalibrations of industrial policy favouring technocratic management were undermined by the very fact of the Party’s presence on the factory floor. This grassroots political dynamic became a key element of the industrial relations forged during the FYP, forming the basis of a pugnacious political culture that would define rank-and-file activism for the duration of the period examined in this study.

This chapter offers three main historical perspectives on corporate sustainability. First, it addresses the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions of corporate sustainability. It investigates the ‘what’ question through the issues to which corporate sustainability has been addressed; the ‘how’ question through the modes which have been deployed to deliver corporate sustainability; and the ‘why’ question through the rationales that have been offered for corporate sustainability. Second, it investigates the ‘who’ question by unpacking the historical roles and relationships of society, business, government and the natural environment actors. Third, it examines the ‘when’ question through three key phases of corporate sustainability. It presents corporate sustainability in the contexts of: industrialisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the rise of the modern corporation and ‘managerial capitalism’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and rapid internationalisation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries bringing wider impacts of corporate power and the greater awareness of the Anthropocene and human interdependency. This analysis of three historical phases is illustrated through the experiences of two long-standing companies: Boots, the UK pharmacist, and Tata, the Indian conglomerate.

This chapter re-visits Raymond Williams’s imagined journey in ‘Three around Farnham’, from The Country and the City (1973), to explore the meanings of georgic in a period of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. It suggests that William Cobbett might be read as a writer engaged with the georgic mode and shows how his writings on rural England contain recognisably pastoral and georgic themes, tropes and rhetorical strategies. It examines Cobbett’s attempts to inhabit the rural ideal through his various farming ventures before reading Rural Rides (1830) as a work in the georgic mode, realised through Cobbett’s detailed mapping of the English countryside. This parallels Cottage Economy (1821–1822), an attempt to take georgic away from elite literary culture and down to the level of the cottage. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Cobbett’s later tours of industrial Britain imagine a union between agricultural and industrial workers as the only possibility for political reform.

One of the most influential individuals of modern history is Mao Zedong – or Chairman Mao. He lived an extraordinary life. Influenced by the Marxist-Leninist ideology of communism while a student at Peking University, Mao was a founding member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1927. He immediately led an insurrection – the Autumn Harvest Uprising – that initiated a civil war with the Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party that then ruled China. It was a war that would last until 1949 (although interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945). When Mao’s CPC finally defeated the nationalists, the KMT and its followers retreated to Taiwan. This is the reason that China still does not recognise Taiwan as an independent country today.

On 9 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a port city of Japan. Sumiteru Taniguchi was sixteen at the time, delivering post about a mile from ground zero. The force of the explosion threw him from his bicycle, melting his cotton shirt and searing the skin off his back and one arm. But Taniguchi survived, one of the fortunate few who did. Many thousands in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the first city to be bombed, were not as fortunate. Japan surrendered six days later, thereby ending the Second World War.

Just like Taniguchi, who would become a lifelong advocate for the prohibition of nuclear weapons, Japan was left badly scarred after the war. But to understand the extent of the devastation, it helps to briefly discuss what came before the Second World War.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

Just before the start of the First World War, Robert Millikan, professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a specialist in electron theory, travelled to Germany to present an academic paper. A few years earlier, in 1905, the scientist Albert Einstein had proposed a linear relationship between the wavelength of light and the maximum velocity of electrons emitted from irradiated metal. Einstein was developing quantum theory – and Millikan was adamant that he was wrong.

While visiting Dresden Millikan was introduced to a young researcher who had just completed his PhD. The young man was South African and could thus speak English – which is probably why he was asked to show Millikan around campus. They also shared a research interest, as the young researcher was also working on Einstein’s theory.