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This chapter combines a full analysis of the Parliamentary Papers archive, giving an overview of all chamber parliamentary lobby activity, with detailed assessments of the main campaigns. It shows growth of lobbying in the mid-nineteenth century and through the twentieth century. It shows the frame-changing effect of the Corn Law abolition as a relaunch of the chamber brand. The extended tensions over free trade and tariffs are given new insights. A crucial new analysis is given of chamber cooperation with government in disseminating consular information after 1917—arguably the first example of corporatism in the UK. Resistance to municipal enterprise and high local taxes (the Rates) form major themes of the twentieth century. Modern lobbies have focused on partnering government, but attacking over-regulation.

Examines the internationalization of trusteeship as it arose in the context of British colonial administration in Africa, the Berlin and Brussels Conferences, and the experience of the Congo Free State. It is out of these experiences and events that the idea of trusteeship emerges as a recognized and accepted practice of international society. The chapter has five sections: the first discusses British attitudes towards Africa; the second looks at Lord Lugard's ‘dual mandate’ principle of colonial administration—the proposal that the exploitation of Africa's natural wealth should reciprocally benefit the industrial classes of Europe and the native population of Africa; the third discusses the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the Brussels Conference of 1890; the fourth describes trusteeship in relation to the Congo Free State. The fifth section of the chapter points out the progression from the idea of trusteeship in the East India Company's dominion in India—in which the improvement of native peoples would come about rapidly and result in institutional forms and practices that closely resembled those in Europe—to a new incrementalist approach in which societies and people were thought of as occupying different rungs on a progressive ‘ladder of civilization’, and, depending on their stage of development on this ladder, were suited to different forms of constitution.

Victor Turner (1920–1983) and his wife Edith Turner (1921– ) did fieldwork together among the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia. Victor was awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester and became a leading figure in the Manchester School, with its emphasis on extended cases studies and process. Agnostics and Communists as young adults, the Turners found faith and were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1958. Soon after, they moved to the United States, with the University of Virginia becoming their final institutional home. They emphasized communitas as a more general category that helped them identify what was admirable in religion. They also went on Catholic pilgrimages as a way of combining their own practise of their faith with anthropological research. After Victor’s death, Edith emerged as an influential anthropologist in her own right. She has been a champion of the reality of spirits.

This introductory chapter details the author's experiences after arriving at the University of Chicago in 1972. Prior to this he obtained a master's in social anthropology at the University of Zambia. He was not prepared for the boring conventionality of Chicago sociology and the quiescent conservatism of its politics. He became a missionary for the “extended case method”—the Manchester School of ethnography, which was developed in the towns and villages of central and southern Africa and situated field sites in the wider society and its history. Social anthropologists trained in Manchester were dispatched to the colonies to do their fieldwork. The author, meanwhile, was taking the method in the other direction, from Africa to Chicago. He later landed his dream job at Berkeley, arriving there in 1976, fresh out of graduate school.

Chapter 1 examines the significance of India’s constitution as both a democracy and a republic and the force of B. R. Ambedkar’s ideas on the necessity for “democracy in social life” alongside the institutions of formal democracy. It is the first study that draws attention to India’s credentials as a republic as a way of understanding its democracy. The chapter introduces the site of this study and the linkages between agrarian and democratic values. Methodologically, it shows the importance of using the approaches of the Manchester School in India (hitherto unexplored) and the value this adds to our definition of what constitutes “the political.” Here, “the political” contains both agonistic and competitive tendencies on the one hand, but also reparative and cooperative impulsions. The methodology of this book, of studying electoral and non-electoral social life alongside each other, and the four key “events” of the book are also explained.