On 4 November 1944, the home department of the Government of India ordered a notice to be placed in the Gazette of India announcing the enforcement of the Indian Reciprocity Act against South Africa. Because persons of Indian origin in the Union of South Africa faced restrictions in entering, residing in, and trading, the central government directed that similar restrictions be imposed on South Africans of non-Indian origin in British India. In addition, the home department distributed an office memorandum explaining that the Government of India had decided to enforce the Indian Reciprocity Act and take retaliatory measures against the union government. The memorandum declared that the decision to finally implement the Indian Reciprocity Act against the Union of South Africa was a reaction to proposed legislation, such as proposed legislation that was colloquially known as the Pegging Bill. The proposed bill, which would later be passed as the Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction Act in 1943, was referred to as the ‘Pegging Act’ because it ‘pegged’ a racial pattern of land ownership in the Durban municipal area. Sir Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, the agent of the Government of India in South Africa at the time, had also recommended that the Government of India consider more drastic retaliatory measures towards the union government, advising that the bill be made immediately applicable. The floor of the legislature, Indian public opinion and the press were all insistent in demands for retaliatory measures against South Africa.

The Government of India decided to give effect to all measures of the Reciprocity Act. One of these measures was to refrain from employing any more South African nationals of non-Indian origin in the various services in India, as Indians in South Africa were not employed in any but the ‘most subordinate and menial posts’. Only approximately 200 white South Africans were employed in India. Specifically, the Home Department requested that South Africans of non-Indian origin not, in future, be appointed to posts in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police and other services at the provincial or federal levels. Despite putting these measures in place, the memorandum admitted that they were ‘not likely to be of any considerable magnitude’ because so far, no South African had been employed in the Secretary of States or Provincial Services and the number of those who held technical posts was negligible.

Race is only significant to human life insofar as it correlates with class, or more broadly, with the quality of life. That is to say, whatever you may consider race to be, it is only a problem if your racial assignment has an effect on your life course. Or, put another way, race exists for racism – more generally, for the reinforcement of political-economic boundaries in society and the maintenance of inequality.

That is a major reason why race can be so confusing. It is social difference masquerading as biological difference. The relationships between colonized and colonizers are frequently reducible to non-Europeans and Europeans. Despite its etymological origin (in the subjugation of the Slavic peoples of central Europe) the relationships between slaves and slavers became easily reducible to Africans and Europeans.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused millions to die and even more to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously declare a state of emergency than ever before enabling us to compare their decisions more directly. States of emergency usually imply the extension of executive powers that diminishes the powers of other branches of government, as well as the civil liberties of individuals. Here, we analyze the use of emergency provisions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and find that it can be largely explained by drawing on political economy. It does, hence, not constitute an exception. We show that many governments have (mis-)used the pandemic as a pretext to curtail media freedom. We further show that executive decrees are considered a substitute for states of emergency by many governments.

This chapter illuminates the diverse, emergent views of reading, writing, and the literary that unfolded in Cuban journalism, a key player in nineteenth-century print culture. Drawing on both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, the chapter unpacks questions of normative practices, cultural tastes, linguistic correction, and the tensions among the informational, didactic, and entertainment functions of the printed word and with the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s outreach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. An analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions, in a chapter that also contextualizes journalism’s rise within pressing social issues and questions about access to literary culture by focusing further on journalism’s role as a forum for writing by free men and women of color, by a few enslaved individuals, and by white women.

Discusses statistical methods, covering random variables and variates, sample and population, frequency distributions, moments and moment measures, probability and stochastic processes, discrete and continuous probability distributions, return periods and quantiles, probability density functions, parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, covariance, regression and correlation analysis, time-series analysis.

Public responses to the global health emergency caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 lay bare the realities highlighted and the findings underscored in this work. Security is not primarily about the protection of territory. Security is first about attention to basic health and educational needs. Basic social welfare is the primary security need for many hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Welfare without the state is not possible; the state must be involved centrally in the provision of public welfare, especially in countries with human security as poor as Pakistan where even the most basic attention can be lifesaving. But even in high-income countries, good governance is imperative for public security. At the same time, this core duty of government, to provide everyday security, cannot be achieved by government alone, even with well-designed state institutions. Welfare without the private charitable sector is impossible. Without strong relationships between government and nongovernmental organizations, including religious charities, and especially the charitable associations that are at the front lines in the provision of everyday human security, public action in the absence of government policy can only be anemic.

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

The contribution of the Indian indentured of South Africa to the colonial economy was massive. Despite undertaking back-breaking work, from labouring on sugar plantations to building railways, most of the just over 150,000 migrants chose to stay in South Africa rather than return to India. Their impact was incredible, yet their histories were largely invisible in the public domain and continue to be marginalized. The promise of a memorial for the indentured made by the government in 2010, as Indians commemorated the 150th year of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, failed to materialize even a decade later as the 160th anniversary was being marked. There is one indentured migrant, however, Sultan Pillai Kannu, whose name was emblazoned on a technical training college, and in postapartheid South Africa, a street bears his name.