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In Tea , James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea advertisements and tea sales, Fichter argues. The protests were noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind. By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price, redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet as Fichter demonstrates in Tea , by then the commodity was not a symbol of the British state, but of American consumerism.

Does political alignment at different levels of government influence centralized bureaucratic processes? Environmental clearances are important regulatory tools that allow governments to target the distribution of public goods/bads by both controlling negative externalities and allocating rents from project developers. While commentators advocate for central authorities to control environmental licensing of major projects, in emerging markets with weak formal institutions, it is still possible for local politicians to influence this process. We use data on environmental clearances in India for thermal (primarily coal-fired) power plants between the years 2004 and 2014 to test whether local legislators influence an otherwise bureaucratic process in which they play no formal role. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that partisan alignment with the state chief minister results in a sharp increase in local clearance applications. This is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of political influence “greases the wheels” of bureaucracy by facilitating more environmental approvals, rather than creating regulatory bottlenecks. Our results contribute to a growing literature that suggests that lower-level politicians can still exert influence on the policy process despite having few institutionalized powers.

\"The Saffron Wave is an analytically incisive and insightful exploration of one of the most important social movements to have swept postcolonial India. The book is remarkable not only for the historical depth it lends to our understanding of Hindu nationalism but also for the insights it affords contemporary politics in India.\"--Akhil Gupta, Stanford University

Unleashing India's Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth provides nationaland local policy makers, private sector enterprises, academic and research institutions, internationalorganizations, and civil society with a better understanding of the power of innovation to fueleconomic growth and poverty reduction.

Techniques of cost-benefit analysis or the talk of the greater common good might seem like a cruel joke when those who are asked to pay the price of progress are unlikely beneficiaries of projects that displace them.7 The construction of highways in densely inhabited parts of rural China and India have not only disrupted traditional economic and social networks but have led to an unknown number of fatalities as locals, misjudging the speed of passing vehicles, attempt to cross the highways on foot. Author-activist Arundhati Roy describes the controversy on India's Narmada Dam as follows: \"From being a fight over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system.\" In their legal battles, Narmada activists raised challenging questions about the principle of eminent domain, and the legal fictions underlying it that justify the legal displacement of thousands of poor people from their customary habitats to make room for development projects.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

The central features of the ancient South Asian Harappa civilization are investigated to ascertain the circumstances that facilitated the civilization's existence without the establishment of a central state. Archaeological evidence demonstrating the absence of a central state within Harappan civilization is presented, eg, the lack of memorials dedicated to military campaigns & enormous political & religious structures. Problems with Jonathan M. Kenoyer's (1998) contention that religious & elite trade figures essentially functioned as local governments throughout the Harappa civilization are highlighted; rather, it is demonstrated that large trading companies with branches throughout the South Asian region were responsible for the organization & supply of public goods. Various conditions responsible for the rise of the stateless Harappan civilization are subsequently identified, eg, the presence of various ecological zones, relatively easy access to requisite material resources, & the formation of inter-regional trade. Two reasons for rejecting the popular conception of the Harappan civilization's formation as the product of a natural-historical accident are also given. References. J. W. Parker

Considers whether the current biopolitical crisis, as defined by three biopolitical regions emerging in the 21st century, signals the failure of globalization by virtue of there being too much individual freedom over reproductive choices. These regions are identified as axes of inequality, decline, and replacement. Global demographic trends are seen to portend a dysfunctional world order, and translate into at least two threats to US interests: a politically fractious Europe and an illiberal India. Extreme laissez-faire and state-controlled approaches to biopolitical problems are seen as ill-advised, while a political response that enhanced personal freedom is contended to be a means of making globalization fairer and more humane. Toward this end, an international and intergenerational bargain model of globalization linking financial arrangements to regional biopolitical outcomes is advocated. Adapted from the source document.

Data, the techno-optimists are fond of saying, is the new oil. It is the fuel of the modern economy, a valuable commodity that can be bought and sold, and a strategic resource for nations. Indeed, digital assets now matter far more than physical ones. As the writer Tom Goodwin has pointed out, \"Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.\" As with oil in another era, the market today has generously rewarded those who have best captured data. In 2006, three of the world's six most valuable public firms were oil companies, and just one was a technology company. By 2016, only one oil company remained in the top six. The rest were tech giants.But the oil metaphor has turned out to be inaccurate-not because it overhyped the role of data but because it failed to warn us just how pervasive and problematic our relationship with data would become. The Internet, it has become clear, is not so free, after all; users are paying in the form of personal information, which is collected by \"data brokers\" and sold to third parties. Earlier this year, news broke that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from tens of millions of Facebook users and sold it to political campaigns. The scandal showed how malicious actors could wield data to threaten the democratic process, and it led to a congressional hearing featuring an apologetic Mark Zuckerberg, the ceo of Facebook, and prompted broader soul-searching about the power of massive technology companies. At its peak, Standard Oil could influence what people paid for fuel, but today's big technology companies can influence what people think.The world is beginning to suspect that the basic incentive structure of the Internet itself may be flawed. Many online businesses face a deep underlying conflict between their own interests and those of their users. Just as concerns about unaccountable oil monopolies at the beginning of the twentieth century led to new antitrust measures, concerns today about the growing power of the companies that collect and sell personal data have led to calls for governments to fundamentally rethink their approach to regulating the Internet. As they do so, they cannot afford to ignore the one country leading the way in developing a new model of how citizens relate to the Internet, a place that treats digital infrastructure as a public good and data as something that citizens deserve access to: India.