This chapter revisits the three critical historical conditions that made China’s age of abundance possible: the Chinese population, the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the leader Deng Xiaoping. It sets China’s economic prosperity within a historical perspective and argues that such a chapter is not repeatable and cannot be sustained. The chapter lists four headwinds as China moves out of its age of abundance: unfinished urbanization, rising incomes and wealth inequality, population aging, and the return of the state’s omnipresent control.

A short conclusion ties major findings of Bankrolling Empire to wider understandings of early modern political economy in India, and to the comparative history of such transitions world-wide in that crucial period. Scholars such as Braudel, Wallerstein, Mann, and Goldstone have done major work on this period, and the story of the Mughal Empire, the Jhaveri family, and new political upstarts offered in this book helps to fill important gaps on the world scene. By focusing on how four generations of a single business family interacted with sources of political authority in South Asia, we learn how a major imperial formation atrophied, and the mechanisms by which various smaller successor states relied on finance to emerge in its wake. This work suggests that business leaders like the Jhaveris were not complacent, but maintained a keen eye towards political developments of the day. When opportunities arose, they relied on their expertise and wealth to shape political power. In the twenty-first century, as relationships between private capital and political authority continue to be intertwined, this work reminds us that while politics certainly impacts business, commercial actors often possess greater resources that can reorient the very contours of state power and its capacity to govern.

The epilogue retraces the explanations, inchoate in the book, for the exacerbation of state power resting on enhanced technological capacities and de-/reconstructed legal frameworks. It suggests that the studied socio-techno-legal phenomena of extensive warfare and state power have developed because of the infinite enmity that characterizes the relationship between states and transnational jihadist groups and networks. This radical and unequal enmity reveals the dependence of norms, although they necessarily present gray areas and uncertainties, on concrete situations. When this concrete situation is replaced by other parameters, legal grey zones that never appeared to be problematic under the first scenario emerge as factors of infinite warfare. The epilogue formulates concluding thoughts on how the described phenomenon might evolve when technological capacities of drones are even further enhanced and they become autonomous, and how state power might accordingly evolve in the quest to annihilate members of jihadist groups, or infinite enemies.

The book’s evidence has implications for scholars of state-building and rural politics, as well as for policymakers concerned with improving state effectiveness in the developing world. I conclude by highlighting three of these implications.

Ghana has been among the most peaceful countries in sub-Saharan Africa since independence. Yet its northern hinterland is the one sub-national region in which this peaceful reputation is not especially accurate. Over the last four decades, Northern politics has been characterized by repeated flare-ups of non-state violence. This chapter concludes Part III by arguing that non-state communal violence can be another political outcome of a scarce, resource-advantaged state’s isolated interventions in hinterland regions. Because the state’s actions have such outsize effects on society, the state’s few steps into society generate waves of societal upheaval that create conflict.

The introduction lays out the book’s main arguments and themes, and compares the Royal Navy to the two different contexts which it straddled: the maritime world, and the armed forces. Naval service was more strictly regulated and anchored in the structures of the state than work in the merchant marine, and it was invested with explicit national and patriotic meaning. However, it also differed from service in the Army, as it required a good proportion of recruits to have specialised skills, and usually integrated them all into mixed crews, rather than establishing separate ‘foreign’ units. The Navy’s peculiar status, suspended between the military and national on the one hand, and the maritime and transnational on the other, is what makes it an important case study. If ‘foreign Jack Tars’ were in some senses mercenary fighters, they were also primarily – like ‘British’ Jack Tars themselves – a transnational, mobile, and often highly professionalised seafaring workforce. Studying them in the crucial historical juncture of the French Wars allows us to present a transnational history of a national institution, expose the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states, and probe and deconstruct the very meaning of the term ‘foreigner’.

After the war with Iraq (1980–1988), Iran had to reconstruct the economy and the government’s public management systems to address mounting challenges of urban poverty, low economic growth, and poor local management, which had led to significant urban unrest in several cities. The technocratic response of the Rafsanjani administration (1989–1997) included tentative steps to decentralize some central government functions to municipalities and a mandate for them to become financially self-sufficient. The technocrats supported decentralization for instrumental or pragmatic reasons of increasing the efficiency of local administration, not for empowering local democracy. I interpret the tensions between the competing imperatives of the Iranian decision to decentralize by distinguishing two ways a state can be strong, or between what I call good and bad centralization. In so doing, I draw on the distinction of two types of power introduced by Michael Mann, “infrastructural” power – the power of states to achieve collective purposes – and “despotic” power – the capacity of government to exert power over society and individuals. While both authoritarian and democratic states seek to augment the former, authoritarian states depend on strengthening the latter. By their indifference to the goal of checking despotic power, the technocratic endorsement of decentralization worked against democratization and dovetailed with the velayi goal of augmenting both forms of power together toward the goal of Islamizing society and state. At the same time, the failure to promote local economic development through decentralization must be considered a failure of the technocratic agenda.

Chapter 7 further elaborates and defends the idea that it is Confucian culture’s emphasis on hard work, savings, and education that has enabled China (and other East Asian economies influenced by Confucian culture) to rapidly accumulate both physical and human capital and to absorb existing Western technologies and develop indigenous innovation capacity better than other developing countries, leading to its rapid economic rise. It addresses some of the common objections to the cultural theory as well as some misunderstandings of the theory. This chapter also shows that there has been a cultural awakening in economics in the past two decades and that an increasing number of leading economists have explored both theoretically and empirically the role of culture in economic growth and development. The last section of the chapter considers the role of some other Confucian values such as benevolence and trustworthiness in helping to promote economic growth in a society with a weak rule of law.

This chapter introduces the book's main theoretical argument: that armed groups are dependent on popular support and accordingly strive to obtain and maintain it, efforts which shape insurgents’ repertoire of contention. It outlines the concept of the 'constituency' (Malthaner 2011) which serves as a relational framework to understand the dynamic relations between insurgent groups and their supporters. It further develops the concept by more explicitly developing its spatial dimensions. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of insurgent movements use of space and how it shapes interactions with their supporters. It embeds this theoretical approach in the broader literatures concerned with insurgent groups’ relations with civilians, ranging from counterinsurgency and social movements to rebel governance. It argues that the paradigm of territorial control (Kalyvas, 2006) is too reductive and cannot account for patterns of support for insurgents in areas they do not control. It also addresses the critical role of the state in shaping insurgent behaviour and how state–insurgent interactions are reciprocally formative. It proceeds to look at issues of insurgent governance, recruitment and civilian agency.

This chapter examines the impact of Roman imperial expansion on the Atlantic rim of the Roman empire, an “ecological frontier,” so the chapter argues, that traced a natural arc encompassing southern Ireland, southwest Britain, the whole Atlantic coast of Gaul from the Cherbourg Peninsula to the Pyrénées, most of the Iberian Peninsula, and the far northwestern corner of the African continent. A set of case studies illustrates how the territories, resources, and peoples of this ecological frontier zone were integrated into a Roman imperial system centered on the Mediterranean basin. The chapter argues that this Atlantic rim was integrated in a highly differentiated way that not only shattered a preexisting Atlantic world that had been bounded and unified, but also reordered its constituent parts in the service of empire. The chapter’s central thesis, seemingly paradoxical, is that imperial integration and regional fragmentation went together.

Chapter 14 returns to Britain in 1814–15, with Jenner hoping that peace would bring new opportunities to advance the vaccination cause. The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the reopening of lines of communication, bringing further reports of vaccination around the world, provides a useful vantage-point to identify key developments in the global story. Although the early history of vaccination is one of the diffusion of know-how and biomatter along the lines of Europe trade and empire, the networks rapidly become more complex and multilateral, with the new prophylaxis constructed on a global stage, not least the management of the practice, its integration in systems of public health and in legislative and other forms of coercion. Above all, it is possible to see vaccination as a quiet revolution, an emancipatory force, the pointy end of increasing state power and a foundation for further breakthroughs in the struggle against disease.

Aiming to develop its nascent industrial economy, in 1896 Imperial Russia adopted a new patent system that borrowed substantially from the German precedent. Yet this system was never embraced with enthusiasm by Russians since in legal, economic, and social terms Russian inventors faced many difficulties casting inventive activity in terms of Patent Office regulations. A series of Imperial and then Soviet patent laws were thus not effective in economic development. Eventually the Soviets would hold up “worker inventiveness” as the vital quality that would thrive under new production relations so thoroughly just and rational as to render patents superfluous. While the 1924 patent law would be a pragmatic concession to European industrial politics, the 1931 statute would reassert the primacy of state enterprises over patent holders, but even this truly Soviet law continued to pay lip service to the durable concern for inventors’ creative authorship.