This essay introduces the Special Theme on regulation and domestic service in colonial societies. It provides a brief overview of the key themes of domestic service and regulation in the history of colonial states, and reflects upon the ways in which the colonial past is deployed in contemporary calls for the regulation of domestic work by the state, to secure the rights and protections of present-day workers as modern, free subjects. We note that, while much more work needs to done on this subject, current scholarship suggests that the status of the domestic worker and the extent of regulation in colonial contexts was historically unclear and often ambivalent. The three articles that constitute the Special Theme are then discussed in turn, to highlight the important insights, both empirical and theoretical, they offer to our deeper understanding of this complex history.

Massive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.

The upheavals of World War II prepared a new labour regime in twentieth-century India, in employers’ chambers, government offices, and in the newly established Labour Department, but as crucially, at the workplace and on the shop floor. This article studies the case of Calcutta port, an important military port in Southeast Asia after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, where the complex historical processes resulting from the war generated an unprecedented impetus for the transformation of the labour regime. It examines the powerful impact and dynamics of the war at two levels: at the level of long-run changes in the work organization, and, through a microhistory approach, at the level of workers’ everyday wartime experiences. Under wartime exigencies, the employers introduced ad hoc, piecemeal, but significant reforms – food rations, bonuses, higher wages, housing provisions, and regularization of employment – that were more extensive than originally conceived of and proved to be irreversible, and, ultimately, cracked open a labour regime based on casual labour. The focus on workers’ experiences shows us how the measures designed for stabilization and efficiency proved to be profoundly unsettling in the context of dramatic events that pervaded the workplace. In the shadows of the war, workers and employers experienced a balance of forces in flux. Labour relations were marked by anticipations, hostility, tensions, and, increasingly, sharpness of conflict. The article argues that, by the end of the 1940s, the employers and the state had overcome an industrial relations crisis through nothing less than a restructuring of port labour relations, creating a highly regulated “formal sector” with significant welfare provisions.

The aim of this article is to broaden our knowledge of the metrological system of the Morisco period in the kingdom of Granada and, more specifically, in the rural area of the Alpujarra. The sources used in the analysis are two inventories of ecclesiastical goods from Islamic origin, drawn up in 1527 and 1530, four decades after the culmination of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus. The article explores the agrarian units of measurement used by the Morisco community of the Alpujarra in their daily lives (measures of surface area and length, weight or mass, volume or capacity, and of water used for irrigation). As far as possible, equivalences are presented for the units discussed. Attempts are made to establish whether these measures were inherited from the Andalusi period or whether, on the contrary, they were the result of the implementation of Castilian legislation on the matter. The data gathered have revealed the existence of a hybrid measurement system, which shows that the ordinances to modify the system of weights and measures of the Muslims and to seek a correspondence with the Castilian system had little effect in the Alpujarra, where, in many cases, the Islamic system of measurement continued in use. This circumstance indicates that the changes and transformations in the daily life of this rural community after the Christian conquest were not as imminent as might have been expected.

This article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider society, a subject becomes an exemplar by objectifying and conveying to others the chosen specific form of virtue. Taking the case of Ataman Semenov, a White general in the Russian Civil War, the article then examines the pitfalls of having to take a culturally particular exemplary position. Some of these relate to the problems that occur in general when moral exemplarity is demonstrated, the subject being unable to control misreading of the exemplary act, the hesitations of followers, or the leeway with which they attempt to emulate or imitate the act. Other problems concern the historical positioning of the exemplary subject, particularly in a time of war. By making overt certain specific virtues, and by the same token backgrounding or suppressing others, he or she has to “stand out” amid general confusion and uncertainty and therefore is certain to arouse animosity, as much as loyalty.

This article aims to dissect the nature of exemplarity in Italian Fascism. The social and political structures that emerged in Fascist Italy were highly reliant on a sense of morality, largely because of the degree of violence inherent in those structures. Under Fascism, morality was founded on concrete examples rather than on abstract principles. Exemplars were idealized sources of moral strength, and figures with the capacity to inspire or persuade. In particular, the fallen soldier and those who died for the nation constituted a major category of Fascist exemplars. Thus, soldiers who fell in the First World War were awarded exemplary status in order to encourage behaviors favorable to the regime. With the goal to demonstrate the importance awarded to exemplars, this paper focuses on a group of ossuaries, or bone depositaries, that were built under Mussolini’s dictatorship, and within which the regime reburied the remains of soldiers who fell in the First World War. The main purpose of the ossuaries was to present the dead as role models that might boost support for a program of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Thus, while their creation drew on factors such as Romantic literature and Italy’s religious and political traditions, the ossuaries represent an ideal case study of how Fascist morality was aided by and expressed through the use of exemplars.

Mussolini is considered in this article as a figure around whom narratives have been developed for a century or more. Several biographies were published shortly after he came to power and many others have appeared in the decades since his death in 1945. This article explores the place of anecdotes in the construction of a legendary Mussolini in the 1920s and in the demystification that marked the period after World War Two. It is shown that early biographies were marked not only by hero worship but also by a commercially driven need to humanize and to amuse. After the war, humanization persisted as former Fascists and associates of Mussolini spread stories and anecdotes that made the dictator appear not as an evil tyrant but as a flawed and fallible human being. The agenda here was to make support for Fascism and its leader forgivable. A comparison of the anecdotes shows that both adulatory and demystificatory ones reserved a place for minor stories or petite histoire. The resulting image, which placed some emphasis on his sex life, proved influential. It presented a challenge to historians and found its way into the biographical films that were made for cinema and television between the 1970 and the 2000s. It is suggested that, via anecdotes, Mussolini occupied an ambiguous and continuous place in the moral universe of Italians, functioning variously as a political and a gender exemplar.

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se.

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.