Apple Computer, Inc. released its “Think Different” campaign in 1997 to mark the return of Steve Jobs and to resurrect the struggling computer company. The Think Different campaign “got an audience that once thought of Apple as semi-cool, but semi-stupid to suddenly think about the brand in a whole new way.”1 Interestingly, be different is what Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) embraced and practiced from its beginning in 1983. The Bank distinguished itself from the crowded banking sector by serving entrepreneurs in the region since the early 1980s. At the time SVB was formed and officially named, “Silicon Valley” was considered unattractive for banking to capture the public attention and adopted the available moniker.

This chapter surveys the histories behind differentiation in colonial governance, rooted in the politics of colonial conquest from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It begins with an explanation of the East India Company as a mercantile enterprise with few commitments in the governance of India. Challenges to the Company’s trading prerogatives led to the conquest of eastern and northern India, yet the illegibility of indigenous society and fears of peasant rebellion fashioned governance arrangements which empowered proprietary elites, who served as key intermediares between the colonial state and society. In much of southern, central and western India, however, threats to the colonial enterprise from indigenous state-building projects, like Mysore and the Maratha confederacy, led to significant conflict and a variety of different arrangements: significant state intervention into rural society and relations with cultivators, as well as the affirmation of different types of princely states. The chapter concludes with the extremes of state presence and absence: in metropolizes and in political agencies on the frontier of state authority.

“Cynics and Stoics” is an investigation into ecological aspects of both schools’ injunction that individuals should practice “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) and live “according to Nature.” The relationship of autarky to the sustainability of systems on a global scale is considered in light of Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism and virtue ethics. The relationship of subsistence to sustainability is illuminated by Cynic practice and grounded in the modern concept of “appropriate technology.” The Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis (“proprioception”) is presented as an early instance of an “environmental ethics” that still speaks to the manifold relationships that human beings have to one another and that our species has to the rest of the natural world.

Chapter 1 provides the background for a discussion of Chinese economic thought in the Qing period, introducing its most important ideas, terminology, and tropes. In this context, it stresses the unique centrality of economic issues in Qing politics. It also illustrates how dismissing imperial tropes related to the notion of “nurturing” and “pacifying the people” (yangmin and anmin) as mere empty rhetoric prevents historians from fully understanding important political and economic objectives of the Chinese imperial government. This chapter also examines two important debates on the role of the state in the economy of the empire, the Debate on Salt and Iron (81 BCE) and the controversy surrounding Wang Anshi’s New Policies (1069–76). It further analyses the pro-market trends that accompanied the commercial growth of the Song dynasty – the beginning of a process of commercialization that was to come to maturation in the late Ming and early Qing periods.

Chapter 2 focuses on the expansion of pro-market trends and how it came to influence Qing policies. It also discusses the economic developments that inspired the rise of pro-luxury consumption ideas from the late Ming period to the early nineteenth century. In this context it examines the writings of a variety of scholars and intellectuals including Lu Ji (1515–52) and Tang Zhen (1630–1704), the two most prominent pro-luxury advocates.This chapters also illustrate the elasticity of the Confucian discourse on the economy and its ability to adapt to actual changes in the economy of the empire, challenging the notion that Confucian ideology led to intellectual immobility.

Chapter 4 illustrates the developments of the trends originated in the late Qing in support for state intervention on the economic and how they came to influence the political thought of the 1920s and 1930s. These trends led to economic solutions that tended to marginalize the market, including Jiang Jieshi’s New Life Movement (1935) – a fascist vision of frugal modernity – and various projects of economic cooperation (the Cooperative Society Movement). This period witnessed an intensification of the tension between treaty-port consumerist trends and economic decline in the rural hinterland, as well as that between the nation-building perspective of the state – which focused on developing the country as a whole – and the treaty port-based view of consumerist modernity. In addition, an escalating sense of crisis and need of decisive action to save the nation from the mounting threat from Japanese expansionist imperialism brought to a special admiration of fascist models of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) such as Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Chapter 3 examines the early nineteenth-century return of the idea of limited resources and the decline of the notion that market-based luxury consumption could have a positive effect on the economy. It is at this time that population growth, together with the rural–coastal gap, appeared to require curbing of luxury consumption of resources and a return to state intervention. By this time trade and manufacturing had been widely accepted as an important component of the economy. Chinese intellectuals and reformers, however, believed that the stimulating power of consumption should be channeled away from luxury goods and deployed in support of the production of daily-need goods as a means of solving the poverty crisis. This chapter also discusses the early impact of Western ideas of economic liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these ideas were received by Chinese intellectuals and reformers. Western imperialism led to a shift in the main conceptual parameters of the economic discourse from dynastic stability to defensive nation-building. Pro-frugality policies acquired a new popularity in the context of confrontation with Western models of evolutionary modernity, the rise of defensive economic nationalism, and the return of the idea of economic scarcity (poverty).