Chapter 3 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the crucial role of cities in enabling small elite groups to amass large pools of wealth while guaranteeing poverty for the large majority of people whose labor made that wealth possible. This is the first of two chapters on the subject. It shows how state actors and wealthy elites controlled rural land and exploited wealth created by agricultural laborers and the energy of the Sun and Earth. It argues that building pre-modern cities and deriving wealth from them always involved the enslavement of millions of laborers for a wide diversity of tasks. Finally, it traces the origins and proliferation of urban artisans, shops, and marketplaces as well as the built hinterlands they required to create smaller pools of wealth in cities. This wealth served as cities’ economic lifeblood despite obstacles artisans and shopkeepers faced within their complex political relationship to urban states and wealthier elites.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, both the public and scholarly understanding of capitalism was governed by a logic of individual visibility. This angle, however, can easily obscure the fact that invisibility helped shape German society as a capitalist society too. The chapter thus argues that a focus on the interplay of visibility and invisibility can improve our understanding of capitalism in Germany and beyond. By way of example, it analyzes the investment practices of the ultra-wealthy industrialist Thyssen family. It elucidates their opportunities of keeping capital invisible by concentrating public attention to specific family members within the bounds of a nation or Europa, thereby enabling hidden networks of less prominent family members and asset managers to act globally. Although these practices emerged within the specific historical context of the interwar period, they remain relevant today. The chapter thus highlights the long-standing history of exploiting invisibility in capitalist societies.

The legitimacy of ISDS appears to depend in part on an expectation that it benefits smaller businesses, not just large multinationals and the super-wealthy. This chapter collects data on size and wealth of the foreign investors that have brought claims and received monetary awards due to ISDS. Categories for the size and wealth of foreign investors are compared to the size of damage awards, which helps determine that the primary beneficiaries in ISDS cases have been companies with annual revenue exceeding US$1 billion and individuals with net wealth in excess of US$100 million. The main finding is that the beneficiaries of ISDS-ordered financial transfers, in the aggregate, have overwhelmingly been wealthy individual investors and large companies – and especially extra-large companies. The authors also note that the awards gained by small companies are not so different from their legal costs.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the varied conversion of diaspora activists' resources—their home-country network ties, social capital, and fungible resources—mitigated their interventions in the Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni revolutions from the United States and Great Britain.

Hobson’s mature welfare economics was less a product of Oxford liberalism than of a radical tradition going back to Paine. However, Hobson also strove to express that radicalism in qualitative terms, and here was more strongly influenced by the illiberal Ruskin, whose inspiration was pre-capitalist, than by liberal predecessors. By 1900, Ruskin was frequently interpreted in a socialist manner: the task Hobson set himself was to show that Ruskin’s insights were compatible with his version of New Liberalism. The outcome, with its stress on quality rather than quantity, was distinctly different from the liberal orthodoxy that established itself in his lifetime.

Chapter 5 advances the argument comedies of Aristophanes to consciously draw on the poetics of both literary and administrative catalogues. The plays contain lists that parody the archaic poetic catalogue tradition; meanwhile, in various scenarios, Aristophanic characters display a preoccupation with the listing-behaviors we have already begun to outline: counting, valuation, quantifying, and establishing authority. The comedies thus represent a deep integration of the literary and administrative spheres through their use of the inventory.

This chapter examines connections between climatic determinist accounts of civilization and the tendency toward climate reductionism in recent writings on climate change and future societal collapse. It examines the writings of a sequence of key historical figures, notably, Hippocrates, Ibn Khaldūn, Montesquieu, and Buckle. Thereafter the work of a range of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American writers including the chemist-historian John William Draper, geographers Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple, and medical practitioners William Petersen and Clarence Mills are reviewed. Scrutiny of their pronouncements reveals the intimate connections such figures perceived between climate and health, wealth, war, eugenics, temperament, and civilization more generally. The essay foregrounds continuities between these proposals and the writings of some contemporary commentators on climate and economics, and on the implications of climate change for the future of human society.

All governments have budgets. Budgeting is a core state function. Effective budgeting empowers the state to prioritize policies, allocate resources, and discipline the bureaucracy. Proficient budgeting contributes to efficient fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This book offers a comparative framework that identifies eight categores called cultural clusters that help identify the budgetary institutions and policies adopted by different governments.

In contrast to the synoptic gospels and the Pauline letters, the author of the Epistula is concerned to present a coherent and comprehensive account of the essentials of Christian faith as he understands it. That is especially the case in the area of eschatology, which becomes increasingly focused on judgement as the text proceeds. Judgement is preceded by resurrection, and it is the resurrection and judgement of Christians that is most strongly emphasized. The judgement will bring about a final division within the Christian community between the elect (those who obey Jesus’ commandments) and the rejected (those who disobey), and the failure to challenge the inappropriate conduct especially of wealthy members of the community is attributed to ‘partiality’ and is itself regarded as disobedience exposing one to eternal punishment. Thus the impartiality that Jesus will display at the eschatological judgement must be anticipated here and now. A hardline insistence on strict retributive justice is maintained in spite of the disciples’ appeal to the divine mercy.

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a free black woman entrepreneur in California and a pioneer of black philanthropy. During her ninety years of life, she worked on the Underground Railroad and helped to usher in California’s Gold Rush. She is perhaps most famous for using her enormous financial resources to assist John Brown in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Her continued efforts of racial equality in the West led her to be known as “The Mother of Human Rights in California.” When Pleasant and two African American women were kicked off a street car in San Francisco, she filed suits. Her case, Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company, went to the California Supreme Court. After two years of litigation, the city outlawed segregation in San Francisco’s public transportation. This paper places her efforts squarely in the center of America’s greatest turning points. Time and time again we see how black women, and in particular, Mary Ellen Pleasant, cannot be separated from the endorsement of American entrepreneurship, abolitionism, and human rights.

Are local politics usually characterized by disagreement or consensus? While scholars of politics in major cities such as New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles have long emphasized the centrality of racial and class cleavages in elections and governing, the conventional wisdom is that local politics outside such urban behemoths – that is, in the thousands of smaller cities and towns where nearly 3 in 4 Americans live – are relatively staid. According to this view, local politics are distinctive from national or state politics because they typically revolve around relatively low-stakes issues and rely on elected officials who are characterized more by managerial acumen than ideological fervor. These characteristics, the argument goes, make local politics relatively placid in comparison with the pitched battles that frequently roil national politics.

In the previous chapter, we examined patterns in descriptive representation, ideological congruence representation, and policy responsiveness across economic groups in communities throughout the United States, revealing the substantial underrepresentation of citizens with low wealth at the municipal level. Importantly, however, Chapter 7 focused largely, though not exclusively, on general patterns of (inequality in) representation. This emphasis, while vital, has the effect of minimizing the nontrivial number of instances in which less affluent residents receive considerable representation at the local level.

Houston, Texas is a city of roughly 2.3 million people, located in the southeastern portion of the state, near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It has a dynamic economy, with two dozen Fortune 500 companies, the nation’s second-most-active port, and significant energy, technology, aerospace, medical, and manufacturing sectors. Although the city has a white-plurality population (37.3 percent of residents identify as white), it is very racially diverse, with 36.5 percent of residents identifying as Hispanic/Latino; 16.6 percent identifying as African American; 7.5 percent identifying as Asian; and 2 percent identifying as “Other.” Compared with many cities of similar size, Houston boasts an attractive combination of abundant jobs, affordable housing, and exciting cultural amenities.

Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is a village of 26,000 residents in Racine County, Wisconsin, a suburban area approximately 30 miles south of Milwaukee. Although historically devoted to agriculture, the village economy is now dominated by the retail, industrial, and health care sectors. Mount Pleasant boasts numerous local, national, and international companies, “including Putzmeister, Case New Holland, SC Johnson, Diversey, Horizon Retail Construction, Racine Federated, and many others.” The village is fairly prosperous: The median family income ($59,584) is slightly above the state median of $59,305, and more than 40 percent of residents possess at least an associate’s degree. Nearly 72 percent of residents own homes, with a median home value of $172,292.