Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

This chapter examines the law of nullity of marriage to consider how deception has affected the existence or validity of consent. It articulates important differences between void and voidable marriages, arguing that these speak to the public and private sides of marriage, respectively. It also showcases the range of deceptions that have been considered legally significant, situating these within the cultural framework outlined in Chapter 1. On top of this, the chapter argues that the range of qualifying deceptions has often been justified with reference to public policy or convention on the basis that the relevant information would typically be important to an intimate partner or that its disclosure would serve a collective interest or value. The chapter concludes by suggesting that changes in the law of nullity, and a small number of related areas of law, demonstrate that there is still a desire for legal recognition of the wrongs and harms associated with inducing intimate relationships, even as these have shifted over time.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

China’s age of abundance has led to the creation of wealth and a surplus. Using a lifecycle approach this chapter examines the sources of this surplus creation, and estimates the impact of population aging and welfare expansion on future lifecycle surplus. It also estimates future fiscal pressure on the state with the changes in lifecycle surplus.

Three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where should a history of post-socialist social justice start from? This chapter explores how questions of social justice in Eastern Europe after 1989 emerged against the background of policies of privatization – the transfer of state assets to private hands – in public rhetoric and expert commentary. Taking a longer historical perspective, the chapter shows how the notion of a ‘popular’ or ‘people’s capitalism’ came to be instrumental in framing debates about wealth redistribution and mass entrepreneurship after decades of dictatorship in virtually all countries of the former Communist Bloc. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the wider implications of this regional experience for a history of social justice in the European twentieth century and beyond.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.

Smiths analysis of the relationship between division of labour and the wealth of nations interpreted as per capita income is illustrated, through their connection with productivity. The division of labour also explains the existence and characteristics of social stratification and alienation. The classical tripartition in social classes – capitalists, landlords and workers – is discussed, considering both its explanatory value and its limits. Division of labour evolves through time: Babbages laws, Taylorism, the production chain, mechanization. The international division of labour and international value chains are considered. Marxs communist utopia with the disappearance of compulsory labour is recalled and confronted with less unrealistic utopias concerning the command structure within the firm or Ernesto Rossis labour army.

Known chiefly from sources related to democratic Athens, the Sophists emerge from the competitive ethos of aristocratic Greek society. The impetus for the Sophistic movement was the transformation of social and political relations within the Greek world following the defeat of Xerxes. These changes were most dramatically felt and best recorded at Athens. The phenomenal wealth of fifth-century Athens increased the number of Athenians aspiring to an aristocratic lifestyle and intensified the competition for social recognition and for preeminence in politics. Verbal dexterity was a key attribute in the pursuit of such standing. Sophists attracted students by promising to impart such skills in the young men of wealthy families. The turmoil of war in the late fifth century encouraged some of those influenced by Sophists to turn toward oligarchic revolution at Athens, tainting the reputation of Sophistic learning, leading to the condemnation of Socrates for his engagement with these self-proclaimed teachers of political virtue and wisdom.

Transaction costs are the costs of strengthening a given distribution of economic property rights. When these costs are positive, economic property rights are never perfect and the Coase Theorem does not hold. Furthermore, different distributions of these property rights lead to different levels of joint wealth.

Plutarch’s various comments about wealth are usually recognizable as springing from the same personality, but the emphasis is different in different contexts. This chapter explores this variety within the Lives, and in particular the characteristic connection with moral decadence and decay. Two pairs are explored as test-cases, Agis–Cleomenes–Gracchi and Agesilaus–Pompey. Rome, with signs of luxury and decadence everywhere, might be expected to be particularly in focus, but talk of decadence is most frequent in the Spartan Lives. Is this an indirect way of passing comment on Rome without causing offense That may also explain his frequent reluctance to talk as openly about Roman corruption and bribery as one might expect, especially in connection with a Life’s central figure. He may also be sidestepping too great an emphasis on Roman luxury as this had traditionally been associated with the Greek East.

The chapter discusses the period from the loss of communication with Greenland until the mid-seventeenth century. During this time Greenland existed primarily as a cultural memory negotiated in European texts. The focus is on the most central texts that established what we may call Greenland’s discursive terrain. It is examined how a dualistic perception of Greenland came to dominate European representations. These were the themes of wealth and violence. Central to the account of early colonial Greenland is the mid-fourteenth-century report by the church official Ívar Bárdarson, to which the chapter pays particular attention. There is also a discussion of how Inuit legends negotiated a memory of the European colonists. These legends may appear to provide an Indigenous account of the violent clashes between peoples in Greenland. Yet the Inuit legends were not only solicited and written down by missionaries, they were also disseminated by Europeans in print – in effect co-opting Indigenous tales as part of the West’s repertoire.