Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

In this chapter, I argue that the formation of intellectual property was enabled by a cultural transformation, involving the embrace of natural legality, a transformation that parallels, in significant respects, the Christianization of imperial Rome. In this cultural transformation, traditions of Roman law were rediscovered as a naturalistic foundation for sociability and national economic life. The commodification of human creativity and inventive discovery, through intellectual property rights, made sense, within the culture of natural legality, as a justified response to natural, but extraordinary, powers of human creativity, and became part of a broader strategy for national empowerment. The combination of Roman law with interpretations of Christian obligation that emphasized natural sociability and legality gave new form to a natural rights tradition, one that providing legitimating foundations for the recognition of intellectual property under principles of English common law. The chapter concludes with a focus on the U.S. constitutional convention of 1787, and the embrace of intellectual property as part of the constitutional framework for a powerful, national state.

Starting with India’s role c.1750 as the ‘workshop of the world’ because of its dominance over global textile production, I chart India’s subsequent transformation into a raw materials producer for Britain and other industrial countries. I take a critical view of the standard Indian nationalist narrative of decline, emphasising the complexity of the process, particularly how important India’s indirect contribution was to the industrial revolution in Britain. I then look at the ‘imperial globalisation’ of the High Imperial Era when India contributed decisively to Britain’s global balance of payments, under the ‘gold standard’. The ‘deglobalisation’ that occurred during the inter-war period opened the way to the post-independence attempt at building a ‘national economy’, which benefited for a while from the Cold War helping to attract investment from East and West to finance costly infrastructures but faced a crisis that led from 1991 to an opening of the economy in the new context of the post-Cold War world. I look at India’s environmental history, too, emphasising its recent entry into the anthropocene era through growing fossil fuel use, and the nature of Indian capitalism.

This chapter explains why environmental health issues carry profound implications for China’s future and how they threaten to severely weaken the nation’s economic growth, undermine its sociopolitical stability, and complicate China’s foreign relations.Environmental health issues not only exact a significant economic toll but also have profound sociopolitical implications. With the growing public attention on air quality, pollution has increasingly become a political issue that tests the Chinese government’s ruling capacity. The environmental health problems, in conjunction with other mounting domestic challenges, will constrain Chinese leaders’ ability to mobilize the resources and internal support necessary for China to play a global leadership role.