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Chapter Four examines the hidden sinews of political power in the local state by examining the role of patronage networks in county and prefecture government. The chapter explains the origin of patronage networks in Poshan, tracing the configuration of present-day networks to the early post-Mao years of decentralization and economic reform. While analysts have long been aware of the importance of personalistic ties and informal networks at the elite national level of Chinese politics, this is one of the first studies to systematically examine the origins, structure, and function of patronage networks within the local state. Despite often being seen as a parasite on the formal institutions of state, in a political system characterized by fragmented authority and personal power relations rules, patronage networks play a vital role in bureaucratic coordination and in maintaining order through the informal regulation of political competition.

When Charles Bell moved to London in 1804, he knew no one in the city. In London, Bell worked to set up a private anatomy school on the model of his brother’s, he established himself in social and professional circles, and he courted patrons. This chapter follows these efforts to establish himself within scientific and medical circles and to build for himself a network of supporters. Bell began to establish ideas about systematizing medical education in these early years in London. He also attempted to create a space for himself in various communities that were connected to his classrooms, publishing on art (in his Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting), surgery (in A System of Operative Surgery), and on the anatomy of the nerves. His research on the brain and nerves soon became Bell’s primary focus. His contribution to that field, as he began to develop it in those early years, would be to bring elegance and order to the brain and nerves, finding within their anatomy a rational system that would reflect the beauty of nature and appeal to natural philosophers and medical men alike.

Chapter Six examines the politics of spoils in the rapidly growing local economy. The chapter explains how patronage networks influence local decision-making and resource allocation, and how such networks have been able to adapt to an increasingly sophisticated regulatory environment. By looking at public and private ventures in Poshan Prefecture's growing tourism industry, the chapter highlights the ambiguous relationship between corruption and development. A study of political conflicts over the control of revenues from a booming tourism industry provides further illustration of the complex interaction between local patronage networks and formal state institutions.

As celebrities, writers received invitations to salons in aristocratic town houses or to country-house weekend parties. This excited mixed emotions, ranging from elation at being part of a socially exclusive circle to disgust at the sycophancy being practised. Writers whose attitudes and experiences are detailed in this chapter include J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, W. S. Blunt, Robert Browning, John Buchan, Thomas Carlyle, Marie Corelli, W. H. Davies, Elinor Glyn, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Francis Thompson, Hugh Walpole, Mrs Humphry Ward, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. During the Great War, readings by soldier poets and others were staged by aristocratic hostesses in aid of various charities; but writers had not been without their own salons or patronage networks. Attention is given to the weekly literary lunches at the Mont Blanc restaurant in Soho presided over by Edward Garnett, and to the Sunday parties given by Alice and Wilfrid Meynell at their Bayswater home.

This chapter discusses political patronage and how essential it was to black rights and mobility in Republican Washington. The job security of African American civil servants depended upon a Republican patronage network of black and white politicians born during Reconstruction. Patronage was more than a party scheme for black Americans; it represented the right to a decent livelihood and social mobility. Black men and women worked hard to succeed in federal offices, and they managed their political affiliations carefully and skillfully to ensure that their efforts would be rewarded. Connections to important people and politicians created a web that could keep vulnerable citizens from falling victim to the hardening bigotry in turn-of-the-century America. This chapter explores the nineteenth-century origins of those connections and their functioning into the early years of the new century. It makes apparent the political system that created black Washington's opportunities and would become the target of white progressive reformers.

The Old Bolshevik notables controlled their provinces with personal patrimonial authority, backed by their revolutionary prestige and well-organized patronage networks. The authority of the regional elite, combined with the locally impervious strength of their machines and their distance from Moscow, gave them considerable independence from the center and from Stalin personally. In the end, the regional clans could only be crushed, in Stalin's unimaginative and primitive view, by the wild onslaught of terror. To carry out collectivization and industrialization, Stalin had previously been forced to cede a lot of power to local provisional barons. But later in the mid-1930s he worked to centralize and reclaim authority. Stalin would show that he was capable of killing a lot of people in his quest for centralized power.

This chapter shows how the fragmentation of political authority precipitated a crisis of legitimacy of the old order. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, it first shows how Indira Gandhi attempted to restore central control through intervention in India’s states. Failing to reestablish control over India’s fragmented patronage network, she then made a populist turn, mobilizing the masses across India through the media and mass rallies in her conflict with her opponents. This chapter argues that this strategy was a consequence of the breakdown of the Congress system, rather than its cause. Mrs Gandhi’s attempt to recentralize power met with substantial resistance in the states. Her government eroded the rule of law and the undermined the formal institutions of intermediation between state and society. The authoritarian emergency that followed from 1975 to 1977 was not an aberration of this populist program, but its logical fulfillment.

Chapter 7 charts how community-based activism led to a pragmatic move into mainstream politics. Initially this meant the Labour Party, which was then dominant locally, was most immigrant friendly, and had also been supportive in the independence struggle. Bengalis subsequently joined all main parties, despite the Liberals’ notoriously racist campaigns in the 1990s, and became a major part of the council establishment. The chapter looks at how resistance to Bengali membership of the Spitalfields Labour Party was overcome by intervention of left-wingers, and how, when the party wouldn’t choose a Bengali to stand as a councillor, one got elected as an independent. It looks at patronage networks, prejudice encountered by political women, continued distrust of the ‘white left’, potential conflicts between representing the Bengali community and representing all constituents, and the demand for a Bengali MP. It ends by looking at the use of multiculturalism as a progressive veneer, and the impact of partnership governance in strengthening ethnic and faith organisations and tying them to council norms.

In searching for the sources of new authority in the eighteenth-century Levant, the chapter outlines the political and socioeconomic changes that became most apparently manifest in the rise of new provincial notable (a`yān) households. These changes together constituted a new order, which signified the collapse of the accustomed patronage networks and the forging of new ones, thus opening and closing the doors of opportunity for many. In the provincial capital, Damascus, this changing social topography was mirrored in a changed urban landscape and sociability. Meanwhile, the city streets witnessed fresh violence as the different contenders struggled over resources. Like the new mansions of eighteenth-century Damascus that represented a site of display and negotiation by the nouveau riche, the new chronicles represented a disorder in the literary space, a site of negotiation and display by the nouveau literates.

This chapter analyzes adaptive tribal identity in Qatar. It begins by examining the transformation of tribal identity as wealth and growing state power weakened the authority of tribal shaykhs, which historically flowed from the shaykh’s control of territory and his ability to provide for the welfare of tribe members. As these responsibilities were taken over by an increasingly powerful and wealthy state, the significance of tribes weakened. At the same time, the growing expatriate population produced a resurgent, defensive reconstruction of indigenous identity that was both national and tribal. The chapter looks at this evolution in tribal identity. It then links this transformation to similar processes in neighboring states. It concludes by comparing the political evolution of tribal identity in Qatar to that of tribes in other Gulf countries and examining the endurance and occasional political implications of these cross-border linkages.