This chapter illustrates the rise of automated decision-making and surveillance technologies in government, alongside the growing political inequality within Western liberal democracies. It examines the historical development of the use of technology in government, from paper-based systems to increasingly networked electronic systems, culminating in the extensive use of automation and AI in government. It demonstrates the effect of new technologies on vulnerable populations, honing in on social security as a case study. It shows that since the 1970s, the rapid advancements of technologies, combined with the “new public management” ideology, have effected fundamental changes in the processes, structures, staffing levels, and operations of government to an unprecedented extent. To illustrate the significant issues relating to the use of automated government decision-making, the chapter focuses on the government’s use of automation in social security as a case study.

In early 1978, Towards the Great Civilization, the last pre-revolutionary book written by Mohammad Reza Shah, was published amid great fanfare. To be sure, from the early 1970s, he increasingly spoke of this ‘great civilization’ and its elements, a significant number of which are found in his first work, Mission for My Country (1961), in his trial balloon aimed at the ideologization of the monarchy, Pahlavism (1966–1967) penned by Manuchehr Honarmand, and in the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party of Shah and People founded in 1975. Expressing great optimism about Iran’s future, the shah portrayed this Great Civilization as an Iranian modernity superior to that offered by the liberal and capitalist West and the communist East.

This chapter looks at the history of climate change, the failure to act, systemic thinking and truth.

Any type of asset can be tokenised, i.e., registered on a blockchain or other type of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Hence, the resulting cryptoassets take many forms, including currency/payment tokens, security/financial/investment tokens, and utility tokens. The technology offers new opportunities for issuers, investors, and the financial system at large but also challenges, including some new risks in addition to those already known by conventional financial systems. The EU regulatory framework for cryptoassets seeks to address these challenges while facilitating innovation and competition across the European Single Market. These rules have evolved since the EBA’s 2014 recommendations on AML/CTF provisions through the 2018 FinTech Action Plan and the 2020 Digital Finance Package. This has now resulted in an updated AML/CTF framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) as a bespoke piece of financial regulation to fill gaps in existing EU financial law, the Pilot Regulation as the EU’s “regulatory sandbox” for DLT market infrastructures, and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) that promotes cybersecurity in the financial sector.

The Introduction lays out connections between Parables unique to Luke and stories about Israel’s founding families. Like Jesus who looked to stories of Israel’s origins when explaining matters relating to himself, Luke reworked well-known Genesis texts to convey ideas.

This chapter reviews the literature on the teaching of history, and defines the purpose of this book: to offer a clearer definition of the aims and benefits of the study of History at the college and university level. Two principles are at the heart of that conception. One is that long-standing methodological and epistemological divisions within the discipline are a source of its unique pedagogical value. The other is that History assumes a particular ethical posture relative to its subjects – the people it studies – and that this too is a source of its unique pedagogical value.

This chapter offers an introduction to Making India Work. It presents a snapshot of India’s welfare regime today and outlines its distinctive features in comparative perspective. The chapter establishes that the development of social policies has been a significant component of the building of India’s national economy and polity. Historical decisions have had longer-term implications for the shape and size of the country’s social provision, yet social policy has been curiously marginalised within classic scholarship on India’s political economy. The introductory chapter defines the term ‘welfare regime’ as distinct from a ‘welfare state’ and introduces the analytical tools necessary to identify the components of a welfare regime in a context of high economic informality. It provides an overview of methods and historical sources and summarises the book’s main arguments before providing an outline of the book structure.

In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

This chapter provides an overview of the origins, expansion and reform of India’s welfare regime since the early twentieth century. It outlines the contributions of the book to wider literatures on the histories and politics of social policy in developing countries. The chapter demonstrates interventions in three bodies of literature: firstly, to histories of labour and of the mid twentieth-century democratic and developmental Indian state at the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial eras; secondly, to the literature on the political economy of democracy and development in postcolonial India; thirdly, to the comparative politics literature on welfare regimes beyond Europe and North America. The chapter highlights three factors for their role in shaping the nature of India’s welfare regime over the past century: firstly, the changing shape of India’s model of capitalism; secondly, the gradual deepening of democratic participation; and thirdly, the multi-level territorial articulation of both capitalism and electoral politics.

This chapter presents themes that appear in earlier chapters and makes the case for legal reform to create an agricultural framework that represents the “real” west, rather than John Dutton’s west.

In this chapter, I argue that geographical location and spatial orientation influence how residents of Tehran think about who they are and how they define and negotiate boundaries. In Tehran, the spatial locations of self and others in the hierarchical structure of the city remain signifiers of social status, yet the use of public spaces in different parts of the city and easier access to these spaces have complicated established social relations. I discuss how social, symbolic, and spatial boundaries are negotiated in a changing urban environment and how such processes create a sense of belonging or alienation – of being included or excluded – in different spaces. Furthermore, I show that while dividing lines among social groups in Tehran are conceptually powerful, they are not entirely class-based; rather, they are defined by a complex set of values and relations that are constantly questioned and renegotiated in public spaces.