Taking a pause from direct focus on the Jhaveris, Chapter 4 is an interlude that outlines major shifts across the Mughal Empire between the 1680 and 1720s. I suggest that military campaigns in the Deccan region impinged the Mughal treasury and undermined administration to an extent never seen before. Officials in Gujarat started to engage in behavior that undermined Mughal sovereignty. Yet, they also had little choice as monetary resources were becoming scarce. Financial limitations impacted the quality of state machinery including the upkeep of buildings, delay in salary payments, and even the ability of officials to legitimately demand taxes. Despite this, local Gujarati poems suggest that residents preferred Mughal rule to ruthless attacks from the Maratha marauders, whose periodic raids were increasing in frequency and intensity. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, successive Mughal emperors were poorly equipped to revive the grandeur of their ancestors. Their short stints as emperors, sometimes as brief as a few months, led to the further breakdown of Mughal authority. This manifest most clearly in the form of rivalries between Mughal governors sent to control and profit from Gujarat. Insecure in their positions and strapped for cash, these governors turned to assaulting key members of the business fraternity in the city of Ahmedabad.

Building on the introduction, Chapter 2 goes back to the more general notion of extractive institutions and proposes a theoretical framework that helps explain a conundrum in the literature according to which extractive institutions are sometimes beneficial and sometimes detrimental for economic development. I contend that the persistent effect of extractive colonial institutions depended on the extent of imperial infrastructural investment, the treatment of property rights, and the use of violence. The worst scenarios for long-run development demonstrate little public investment, the removal or weakening of individual property rights, and high levels of coercion through violence. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the role of elites in the creation and perpetuation of such institutions. I argue that colonial subjects who had been deprived of public goods (because of underinvestment from the center), had not enjoyed individual property rights for centuries, and had been exposed to imperial violence, were likely to become alienated from the state. Such alienation persists over generations, outliving the formal institutions that created it.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners adapted to, resisted, and failed to overcome changes associated with age, both real and imagined, and the extent to which these struggles intersected with wider concerns over control, exploitation, resistance, and survival in a slave society. In doing so, it asks future scholars to rethink static hierarchies among Black and white southerners, to incorporate age into their work as a category of analysis and as a relation of power, and to address the contingent and contested networks of solidarity and support among enslavers and enslaved in the American South. Age shaped slavery, both as a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, in crucial ways. Albeit never on equal terms, both Black and white southerners had to grapple with the realization that “old age [was] creeping up on me so fast,” and their efforts to do so were entwined in the wider struggles within and against slavery. The ravages of time came for all, and the conclusion reiterates how recognition of this fact shaped the dynamics of American slavery, and the lives of enslaved people and enslavers alike.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

Leisure time and social affairs were of paramount importance for enslaved people; in these spaces they developed positive personal identities and meaningful relationships with others. The significance of competition in leisure activities, however, with its attendant emphasis on contest, and even conflict, meant the identities forged in these spaces were neither static nor fixed in time. Competition involves putting your reputation on the line and, regardless of any sense of shared honor through participation, to lose is to be publicly revealed as having been mastered by another. Enslaved people who had valued their physical prowess or mental aptitude as allowing them to demonstrate themselves as the best in the community might struggle in the face of challenges from younger rivals or simply from time itself. Younger members of the community might see in their elders a rival to supplant, and, in doing so, a hierarchy they might stand atop. Such conflicts demonstrate the necessity of intersectional analysis when exploring enslaved social dynamics and identities, wherein age must be incorporated as much as the well-studied categories of gender, class, and race.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

Loyalists, those who opposed the rebellion that created the United States, remain poorly understood in large part because of the teleological implications of framing the American Revolution as the inaugurating event of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. This essay shows loyalists as reasonable people who carefully assessed the specific colonial circumstances where each lived. The trajectory of three individuals, in particular, highlights the diversity of loyalism and that it drew support from all corners of colonial society. These three are the Mohawk diplomat Mary Brant, the slave-owning Georgia soldier William Martin Johnson, and the formerly enslaved Thomas Peters, who served with the British Army for the duration of the war. All three left the United States due to their ardent loyalism, dying, respectively, in Upper Canada, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone. Prioritizing loyalists highlights the violence of the rebel movement and showcases the War of American Independence as a civil war. In place of a familiar patriot and US-nationalist interpretation, recovering loyalism as a good idea emphasizes loyalists in their colonial context, assesses the transformative impact of war, and follows their diaspora throughout the British Atlantic and, especially, to British North America.

Describes the phenomenon of “Sister Republics” and shows that it was limited until the first Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. To better understand the interactions between the “mother” Republic and her “daughters,” this chapter studies their constitutions and bills of rights, which reveal that some of them were shaped by native patriots, while others were forced upon them by the French government. In a way, the “Sister” Republics became a “constitutional laboratory” for France. All these changes did not happen without chaos and violence. In the “sister” republics too, force and coercion were necessary to implement the new regimes and to silent the factional struggles and the counter-revolution. Thanks to the French army, however, revolutionary terror did not win the day at least until 1799. In spite of all these problems, the young republics experimented new institutions and improvements for the time being and for the future. But, by a strange irony of fate, the only true “sister” republic was the republic of the United States, that is the only one which was not really influenced by the French Revolution, and which was to become a model in the following revolutionary waves.

Violence helps to define revolution as a mode of historical change; however, violence is a factor, not an actor, in history. Widespread violence in a variety of forms persisted in France despite three constitutions (1791, 1795, 1799) and their accompanying claims to end the Revolution. The popular violence that began in 1789 helped to eliminate the vestiges of feudalism and abolish inherited privilege. In 1792, rural revolts, urban riots, and foreign war served to bring down the monarchy and promote social leveling. Dismantling the old order provoked widespread resistance, which inspired state-authorized terror, exceptional justice, and mass executions on an unprecedented scale in 1793-94. Royalism, Jacobinism, religious resistance, continuing war, and politicized vigilantism all fueled continuing cycles of violence after 1794. Economic chaos, parlous policing, and partisan judges also prolonged an endemic violence that ranged from solipsistic banditry to armed counter-revolution. These multivalent forces of instability could only be tamed by enhancing and depoliticizing the repressive powers of the state. Efforts both to ensconce the republic and contain violence, notably by militarizing justice, enhancing repression, and limiting democracy, spawned a growing liberal authoritarianism after 1797. Reducing factionalism, banditry, and regional resistance fostered a security state and personal dictatorship in 1802.

In the Lushai Hills, colonialism provided the infrastructure for the circulation of violence and disease that helped drive upland populations towards its own institutions. An overlooked age of warfare underwrote the destitution, poverty, dislocation, and sickness that invading colonial agents misrecognized as primitivism but that was, in fact, the results of their own cataclysmic disturbances. A focus on profound violence and disruption - rather than the celebration of continuity, cross-cultural interaction, and cultural resilience that often characterizes Indigenous-centred studies of colonial encounter - demonstrates that highlanders had to adapt and reinvent themselves within a particular colonial situation and its imposed constraints: brutality, heartache, disease, forced labour, sexual violence, hunger, and loss. At the same time, Mizos developed creative responses to, and confidently articulated critiques of, their invaders - forces that often found themselves dependent on upland know-how, hospitality, and labour. Far from passive victims, Mizos resisted colonialism and sought out ways to moderate its most profound effects. They adopted new trade goods not only to make their lives easier but also (as with the adoption of colourful synthetic materials for headdresses and jewellery) to make everyday life more beautiful amid the bleakness of fear, dispossession, and conflict.

Chapter 5 examines Corippus’ accounts of military activity, his battle narratives and his use of violent imagery. The first part of this chapter discusses the likely sequence of John’s campaigns in 546, 547 and 548. Certain conclusions are drawn regarding the size of John’s army, its constitution and the strategic goals he followed, as well as Moorish fighting practices in the same period.The second part of the chapter considers the long battle accounts within the Iohannis, and the political function they may have had. Stylized combat sequences were a very common feature of Greek and Latin epic, and Corippus added new and visceral imagery to the poetic repertoire. Violent imagery of battle was a display of poetic virtuosity, but also a means to address the ambiguities of ‘Moorish’ identity and political fealty. Battle clarified loyalties – and hence identities – in a manner that was not otherwise possible. Violent imagery accentuated this process, essentially transforming the ‘good’ Moors into heroes, (and so comparable to their Roman allies), and the ‘bad’ into abject and dismembered body parts. If the Iohannis was intended to reconstitute the body politic in North Africa, it frequently did so in an unusually literal manner.