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This chapter provides a theoretical basis for understanding the role of the state in Hong Kong's development. Using three new developments in economic theories of growth – the endogenous growth approach, institutional approaches, and the capability approach, it highlights the role of bureaucratic capacity and the presence of dense ties between the state and the entrepreneurial elites in shaping development. In a post-industrial era of 'bit-driven growth' centring on intangible production and the delivery of direct interpersonal services, private-sector elites become less reliable allies of government than in the previous era.

The conclusion argues that elites in Russia were far from obsolete by 1917 and that a move from a class‐based identity to one focused on professional concerns provided a basis for them to exist in the absence of Tsarism. The Russian Revolution facilitated this move, with elites responding to the mass movement by establishing new organizations. Elites engaged with the revolution and were far from an inert, counter‐revolutionary force. This demonstrates that revolutionary democracy enabled groups to participate, irrespective of popular support. Changing identities, however, fuelled the divisions that led to the failure of Kornilov's revolt and undermined the White armies in the civil war. The conclusion examines the weaknesses of White ideology. Finally, it argues that elites influenced the revolutionary process, fostering popular fears of counter‐revolution and encouraging Russians to see Bolshevism as preferable to the Provisional Government, offering real change and defending the revolution.

With the withdrawal of the urban elites from cities in the late sixth and early seventh century, all links to the late antique social hierarchy were severed. The aristocracy of early medieval Greece was essentially of military origin, and often not of local extraction. Public power in early medieval Greece remained, however, in the hands of the local elites, with little, if any interference from government officials. Early medieval elites resided in cities and engaged in activities, such as feasting or games (tzykanion) to mark the social boundaries separating them from the rest of society. By the mid-eleventh century, some were also involved in public displays of piety through religious confraternities. The status of aristocratic men was also vicariously represented, especially in funerary ceremonies, through their womenfolk. By contrast, very little is known about the daily life of peasants, although it is clear that the number of freeholders began to drop dramatically by the mid-eleventh century. The distinction between free and non-free in early medieval Greece was associated with the use of violence. Moreover, the existence of slaves in early medieval Greece is amply documented in the sources, leaving the impression that it was quite normal to purchase, sell or own slaves.

This chapter examines how violence is utilised in political transitions away from democratic consolidation towards hybrid forms. Using the case of post-communist Russia, three types of violence are identified. The first, ablation, occurred after the Russian Federation emerged as a proto-democracy. The second, scapegoating, came alongside Russia’s political reformulation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven by the authoritarian vision articulated by Vladimir Putin. The third is nullification. This accompanied the consolidation of the hybrid semi-authoritarian Russian state, and refers to an attempt to create external conditions favourable for regional hegemony. Each type differed in severity, linked directly to internal and existential threats, as well as the extent to which elites perceived their hold on power to be under challenge.

Explores the sociopolitical world of the Yadava century that served as the context for Marathi literary vernacularization. The Yadavas, also called the Sevunas, were a non-Brahmin dynasty that stabilized their political territory by creating a clientelist Brahminical ecumene. As a system this Brahminical ecumene served the political aims of the non-Brahmin Yadava state. This chapter outlines the social order in which vernacularization would emerge.

The rise of the managerial class has effected a fundamental reversal of priorities in the university sector, such that faculty now exist primarily in order to serve the demands of management as such. With managerial jargon in the ascendancy, political argument about the nature of the sector falls into cliché; and cliché precludes the yielding of any knowledge that is based in thinking, because it reduces thought to prejudicial clichéd banalities. Inn this state of affairs, there can be little legitimacy for a critical position that might challenge the supposed primacy of economic rationalisation of all aspects of university life and of knowledge. The result is that the privatisation of knowledge and the attendant commercialisation of information assumes a normative force. The university is complicit with a general political trajectory that leads to the corruption of politics and of intellectual work through the improper insertion of financial rationales for all decision-making. The chapter explores the pre-history of this in Thatcherism and Reaganomics; and it demonstrates that the logic of university privatization is essentially a state-sponsored subsidy for the wealthy, and for the ongoing protection of existing privileges.

In his chapter, Chen Yangbin suggests that given their different responses to the growing complexity of the “Xinjiang problem,” Uyghur graduates from specialized dislocated schools are likely to form a new educational elite group. These Uyghur youth, who attend boarding schools in inland cities (Xinjiangban) and undertook the university entrance exam in Putonghua, have gained access to universities across inland China, including some of China’s most prestigious. Based on an initial survey of these graduates, Chen delineates the uniqueness of their experiences both at university and in their daily lives in eastern China. He demonstrates their feeling of superiority in terms of educational achievement, which they attempt to balance with an equally strong sense of representing Uyghur culture. The chapter also analyzes the implications of this new group of elites when viewed against the background of identity, multiculturalism and ethnic integration in China

Chapter 3 examines the legacy of the May Fourth Movement in the context of postwar Hong Kong’s golden age of cinema. It argues that the May Fourth project was an unfinished one and was carried forward by progressive Cantonese filmmakers who were the torchbearers of its ideology. This chapter focuses on the careers of left-leaning filmmakers such as Ng Cho-fan, one of the founders of the Union Film Enterprise Ltd., and their emergence as postwar Hong Kong’s new cultural elites. Through a close reading of Union’s film adaptations of the Ba Jin trilogy, Family (Jia, dir. Ng Wu, 1953), Spring (Chun, dir. Lee Sun-fung, 1953), and Autumn (Qiu, dir. Chun Kim, 1954), this chapter demonstrates the transformative nature of the moral message of postwar Hong Kong’s cultural elites. Not only did left-leaning film talent repurpose core tenets of May Fourth, they also sought to reinterpret the spirit of vernacular modernism for the colony’s audiences through their film productions. Although May Fourth precepts were brought to Hong Kong by China’s nanlai cultural elites and leftwing film talents, the May Fourth spirit underwent a creative translingual appropriation during the 1950s as local Hong Kong leftwing companies such as the Union and Xinlian emerged.

This chapter introduces Nathaniel Bowditch first as contemporaries celebrated him, and then as we should understand him: a man whose mathematical sensibilities transformed the world of practical affairs, pioneering the impersonal procedures and institutions associated with modern capitalism and modern life. Insistent on order and exactitude, Bowditch instituted new systems to organize information and execute business, including filing and cataloging systems, printed blank forms, and inflexible due dates. Inspired by the regularity and predictability of the solar system, he forwarded a vision of the corporation as a clockwork mechanism. The chapter sketches out the main features of Bowditch’s life and character; considers the provincial and cosmopolitan impulses, and the vertical ties of patronage and horizontal ties of elite privilege, that operated over the course of his lifetime; and briefly considers the place of the impersonal institution in the historiographies of the state and of capitalism.

This chapter presents Nathaniel Bowditch’s childhood and youth in Salem, Massachusetts, as they were shaped by the town’s maritime orientation, Revolutionary-era events, and the network of family and social relationships into which Bowditch was born. Additionally, it explores three distinct worlds of contemporary mathematics, embodied in the applied skills of mathematical practitioners, the Harvard curriculum, and European scholarship. Kin connections were the key to Bowditch’s apprenticeship in a maritime business, where he received training in bookkeeping, navigation, and surveying. Impressed with Bowditch’s mathematical abilities and interests, Salem’s learned gentlemen provided him with an entrée into the world of European mathematical and scientific scholarship, housed in Salem’s Philosophical Library. Here Bowditch educated himself and was first exposed to the mathematical vision of predictability and certitude that was a driving force in his life and work.

This chapter examines Nathaniel Bowditch’s assumption of a leading role in Salem’s economic and social elite, and the business conduct, social activities, and religious and partisan loyalties elite membership entailed. Following a final Pacific trading voyage, in 1804 Bowditch assumed the helm of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company (EFM). Though one of a new breed of financial institutions and business corporations in the early republic, under Bowditch, the EFM followed longstanding informal and personal modes of business conduct. In his work with the East India Marine Society logbooks and museum collections, however, Bowditch introduced standardized, impersonal information systems that heralded his later approach to institutions. Salem’s elite social circles embraced Bowditch, but not without noting his lack of a collegiate education and the social polish it ostensibly imparted. Bowditch’s church affiliation and Federalist party activities, on the other hand, anchored him securely in elite circles.

This chapter follows Bowditch’s professional activities and personal life between 1815 and 1823, an era in which Salem entered a period of decline. Along with townsman Joseph Story, Bowditch emerged as a leading figure in establishing the legal foundations and working practices of trusts, an institution that served the individual and class interests of American social elites. He managed the fall-out of a local bank scandal, an inside-job theft that exposed the lax business practices of elite corporations and called into question the trustworthiness of the “gentlemen” who ran them. He encountered another gentleman scoundrel in the new publisher of his Navigator, even as he coped with family difficulties and tragedy. Meanwhile, Bowditch’s involvement in Boston’s elite intellectual, political, social, and business circles intensified, until in 1823 he moved to Boston to run a financial corporation.

This chapter examines the nature, impact, and significance of Bowditch’s work as head of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company (MHL). In offering trust accounts and pooling investment capital, the MHL served elite Bostonians, as individuals and as a class, in innovative ways. Bowditch systematized office paperwork and pioneered business procedures to realize his Laplacean vision of the clockwork corporation running with rule-bound regularity. His approach alienated many farmer-borrowers, and caught elite Bostonians off guard, but ultimately the city’s upper crust appreciated its political, ideological, and psychological advantages. Drawing on the association of quantification with impartiality, the mathematician-as-executive created a new kind of capitalist institution, one that folded an impersonal bureaucracy into an enterprise serving the interests of an interconnected community. Now central to that community’s economic success, the Bowditch family frequented elite social circles and Bowditch cultivated new friendships with Boston’s men of letters.

This chapter examines Bowditch’s drive to transform three institutions fundamental to the Boston elite--the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Boston Athenaeum, and Harvard University—into clockwork mechanisms functioning with rule-bound regularity. Bowditch’s Laplacean vision did not distinguish between for-profit and not-for-profit corporations, and he applied his characteristic systematizing impulses to the chaos he found in the cultural institutions’ library collections, financial accounts, institutional records, and administrative conduct. When he forced the resignation of Harvard’s president, critiquing him as an incompetent who followed personal inclinations over corporation rules, elite Bostonians censured Bowditch as a parvenu lacking the “delicacy” that comes with a collegiate education. The controversy exposed internal divisions in the city’s elite and raised questions of just what it took to be a true patrician in a republic.