Vadim Shneyder provides a financial biography of Chekhov as an upwardly mobile freelance literary laborer against the backdrop of Russia’s economic expansion and transition to a money-driven economy. Shneyder traces the rapid development of industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, driven largely by the expansion of the rail network, and examines how this new environment both appears in Chekhov’s works and shaped the conditions of their production.

Few concepts have become as closely associated with war literature as trauma. War literature revolves around the isolated voices of soldiers and their deeply unsettled afterlives – it takes as its subject matter the individual experience and consequences of war. This chapter argues, however, that the mass may be more than incidental in our understanding of how war literature embodies trauma. An overwhelming experience, trauma is deeply entangled with mass warfare, industrialisation, and the homogenous, empty time of global capitalism. The question of mass or scale is central to how we have come to conceptualise trauma more generally, whether in relation to genocide, pandemics, ecological limits to growth, or the political consequences of global finance or even mass trauma itself. Understood as a structural condition of anxiety, trauma is now even encroaching upon the future as a pre-traumatic foreboding of militarism and the threat of global catastrophe. Examining these links between war and the mass, this chapter suggests a reconceptualization of trauma that associates its characteristic temporal dislocations with questions of scale, uniformity, and incomprehension.

In Chapter 7 I move onto the case study of Botswana, which in contrast to Somalia and Uganda has experienced structural transformation due in large part to its diamond industry. Industrialization in Botswana has led to a sectoral shift out of agriculture as workers have left rural areas to move to cities and join the modern workforce, thereby leading to a decline in the relative value of rural land. I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that ethnic fractionalization has declined in Botswana since the mid-twentieth-century and examine parliamentary debates around ethnic identity. Moreover, I show that this shift has happened not because of but largely despite efforts of the Botswanan state, which has both discouraged rural-urban migration and failed to alleviate institutional ethnic inequalities that persist to the present day. Finally, I consider alternative explanations for ethnic homogenization in Botswana and find them all wanting.

I begin the book by providing an overview of recent political economy literature on ethnicity, which largely assumes that ethnicity is fixed and unchanging despite decades of evidence to the contrary. I then introduce my argument as an attempt to explain ethnic change. I first argue that people hold multiple ethnic identities simultaneously, and that individuals emphasize the one that brings them the most benefits. I then build upon earlier theories from Marx and Gellner to claim that industrialization is the most powerful factor that leads people to re-identify with larger ethnic groups, and that this process of assimilation is induced by the decline in the relative value of land. Inasmuch as the process of industrialization is inherently uneven, however, I suggest that assimliation should proceed unevenly as well. Finally I claim that the major role played by states in my theory is in their ability to promote or inhibit industrialization, not through assimilationist policies. I then go on to establish the scope conditions of my argument, namely the way I focus on ethnic change in non-violent contexts while also limiting myself to non-immigrant communities.

Finally, in Chapter 10 I close the book by discussing some broader conclusions about the study of ethnicity and ethnic change, while also speculating about future prospects for the relationship between industrialization and assimilation. In the former case I focus on such topics as future quantitative work using data on ethnicity, our understanding of individuals who change their ethnic identities, the role of the state in enforcing or promoting ethnic identification and policy implications as regards promoting industrialization. In the latter case I return to my original dataset of country censuses from Chapter 4 to see if the relationship between industrialization and ethnic diversity changes over time. Upon introducing an interaction effect, I find evidence for a declining effect over time, although it appears that the interaction effect is driven by observations from the Americas, a result for which I find evidence in the secondary literature as well.

In this chapter I examine the statistical effect of industrialization on ethnic change. I first take Soviet-era cross-national data measuring ethnic diversity by country in 1961 and 1985 and regress the change in ethnic diversity across these twenty-four years on change in carbon emissions per capita over the same time period. The results demonstrate a strong relationship between decreasing ethnic diversity and increasing levels of industrialization, a result which is robust to the inclusion of several control variables and the use of various sub-samples, as well as alternative measures of industrialization such as cement production and urbanization. I also show that carbon emissions are robustly correlated with change in the percentage identifying with the largest ethnic group per state. I then use an alternative original dataset consisting of individual country censuses between 1960 and 2019, and show that the same effect holds, both as regards the effect of carbon emissions on ethnic fractionalization as well as robustness checks and multiple alternative measures such as electricity consumption and the share of labour in both agriculture and industry.

This chapter contains historical support for my argument from the pre-modern and modern worlds. Even though industrialization was very limited in the pre-modern world, I provide evidence that urban, industrial areas allowed for the creation of broader ethno-national identities in the two cases of ancient Greece and Rome. I then discuss theories of the rise of nationalism in the modern world, with close examination of several cases from both Western and Eastern Europe. In particular I examine in more detail how industrialization encouraged assimilation in Germany and the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, before moving on to a discussion of the case of South Africa. In many of these cases I not only show how industrialization led to the growth of broader ethnic identities but how these processes were actively discouraged by the state, most obviously in the case of apartheid South Africa, while in other cases state-promoted assimilation failed.

Here I examine in more detail my first case study, namely mid-twentieth-century Turkey. The presence of high-quality census data from Turkey between 1935 and 1965 allows me to replicate my statistical analysis from the previous chapter at the provincial level to show that urbanization is correlated with increasing levels of people identifying as Turkish; moreover, this relationship is robust to the inclusion of a number of different controls and the use of sub-samples. Qualitative examination of evidence from Turkey suggests that this process was a consequence of economic structural change and incentives provided by the state, such that incentivized assimilation took place in urban Turkey but not in the countryside. Indeed, I show that a lack of industrialization in Kurdistan was responsible for the lack of Turkish identification in the region, despite both violent and non-violent attempts by the Turkish state at assimilating its Kurdish population.

Here I provide an overview of the concepts of ethnicity and industrialization. I first define ethnic groups as descent-based groups and show how vertical ethnic change can take place, both through the consolidation of smaller ethnic groups into larger ones as well as assimilation into a national identity. The chapter also discusses why the book focusses on what I call vertical ethnic change instead of horizontal ethnic change, namely because the former is far more prevalent than the latter. I then provide a similar overview of the concept of industrialization, by focussing on how industrialization has historically involved a shift in the focus of the economy from rural agriculture to urban employment and from land to labour as the predominant factor of production. I justify my use of carbon emissions as my predominant cross-national quantitative measure of industrialization and my use of urbanization as my main proxy for industrialization for regions or communities within countries.

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.

The collapse of traditional hierarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced political thinkers to wrestle with the practical implications of social and political equality, and gave birth to the liberal tradition of political thought. The liberal response to this development came in two overlapping stages. First, the democratization of public and private life made it clear that the power that we exercise over each other in modern societies is reciprocal, insidious, and pervasive, and gave new urgency to the problem of carving out a domain of nonresponsible conduct. Second, the rise of industrial capitalism exposed the tension between the dependence that we experience in our private lives and the independence that we are expected to display as citizens, and gave new urgency to the task of creating the conditions under which people become fit to be held responsible for what they do. Because these two projects are often at odds with one another, the characteristic note of liberal political thought is one of balance and compromise as we seek to strike an appropriate balance between republican and market freedom.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

This chapter will depart from these interpretations of the Turkish Revolution through the theoretical and historical pointers discussed in previous chapters. It will argue that the original Kemalist experiment with modernity (1923–45) cannot be understood as a form of (state) capitalism, but rather as a historically specific Jacobinism.

Chapter 6 discusses the origin and protracted development of capitalism in Turkey in the post-World War II period. I show how capitalist social relations began to penetrate the social fabric, and how the initial Kemalist project has been reinvented by different actors to contest and produce capitalism. In addition, the period after the 1950s witnessed the rise of a new capitalist class in provincial Anatolian towns. Pace the conventional interpretation, commercial groups of Anatolian towns organized in and through the Islamic National View Movement (NVM), neither supported an "artisan" or "statist" capitalism, nor was it simply an Islamic critique of the developing market society. Instead, the movement envisioned a novel political space as the foundation of a new capitalist industrialization strategy unencumbered by the spirit of earlier Republican policies. Although the NVM was unable to take control of the state from the 1970s to the 1990s, its conservative capitalist heritage was appropriated by the Justice and Development Party, which has led to an unprecedented consolidation and deepening of capitalist social relations in Turkey since the beginning of the new millennium.

Chapter 4 addresses how Latin America has sought to generate socioeconomic welfare since 1880 by making choices about the model of economic development – the region’s strategy to promote economic growth and the material well-being of the populations as a whole. It identifies three periods during which the region adopted distinct models of economic development and assesses the performance of each model. The first model, the market-oriented agro-export model, led to moderate but unequal progress – a mixture of moderate economic growth, a slight improvement in absolute levels of welfare, and an increase in economic inequality. The second model, the statist import-substitution industrialization model, produced strong progress – good economic growth, a big improvement in absolute levels of welfare, and a decrease in economic inequality. Finally, the third model, the market-oriented neoliberal model, still used in the region, has yielded slow progress – languid economic growth, a slight improvement in absolute levels of welfare, and a small reduction in economic inequality. The chapter shows that the question of what is the best development model for Latin America remains open.

The chapter outlines the colorful history of power and resistance in pre-British Hong Kong. Many communities involved in this part of Hong Kong’s history continued to play a part in the colonial and post-colonial struggles. The chapter also discusses how the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and financial center fomented different social groups that were mobilized in the struggle for Hong Kong’s future by competing political forces at the height of the Cold War. Most significant is the rise of a new middle class in tandem with the transformation of Hong Kong’s economy into a finance and service-centered one in the 1970s and the 1980s. This new middle class, combined with the plurality of grassroots social movements, charted a course for the locally rooted democratic movement that continued to grow after the sovereignty handover, constituting the backbone of the resistance in its quest of greater autonomy of Hong Kong under Beijing’s rule.

Chapter 3 offers a historical account of the emergence of the welfare state. In the absence of private or public insurance and faced with new, poorly understood, and existential risks, workers set up mutual aid societies (MASs) to cope with industrialization and urbanization. At their peak, MASs covered up to half of the (male) population but only protected against a small fraction of the risks of unemployment, disability, disease, old age, and death. While MASs tried to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard through monitoring, they faced a double bind: they attracted bad risks while losing good risks to commercial insurance. Nor could they cope with correlated risks or support PAYG arrangements (the time-inconsistency problem). Ultimately, they were replaced by compulsory public social policy programs that mandated all citizens to join a common risk pool. The state had the power of compulsion, the ability to overcome the time-inconsistency problem, and majority support for social insurance in the absence of effective private alternatives. The result was a massively redistributive welfare state.