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Why does the American federal government seem to prioritize elite capitalist interests over those of other groups? Class Politics and the Creation of the American State draws on a wide range of sources—personal letters, official government documents, private notes, and newspaper articles—to reveal that the federal government was built to give the emerging capitalist elite a way to consolidate and institutionalize their power. Challenging both liberal and conservative interpretations about what the US Constitution means, this book tells a new story about how the American state took shape.

The framers of the Constitution constructed an image of the state, enshrined in the Constitution, that presented their power as universal: a system meant to serve all Americans equally. This image helped legitimize the new order, even if the rising capitalist class stood to benefit most of all. Since the United States of the late 1780s was not yet a fully capitalist society, the state that was built opened space for less capitalistically incorporated social classes, including some artisans and yeoman farmers, to have limited representation. Class Politics and the Creation of the American State shows how the structure of the early American state worked primarily to advance capitalist interests, while incorporating other groups enough to maintain a sense of broad representation and inclusion.

Finalist: Memory Studies Association 2025 First Book Award Shortlist | April 7, 2025 

In Continuous Pasts, author Sakiru Adebayo claims that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa depicts the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, and continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration. Adebayo argues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa invites critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity—that is to say, the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book also argues that post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa shows the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. It contends that, in most cases in Africa, the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors—and that it is precisely this despairing disposition toward the future that some writers of post-conflict fiction attempt to confront in their works. On the whole, Continuous Pasts shows how post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa recalibrate discourses of futurity, solidarity, responsibility, justice, survival, and reconciliation. It also contends that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory. Each text analyzed in the book provides, in very interesting ways, an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can ‘remember together’ using what the author describes as an African transnational memory framework.

Development agencies and researchers are preoccupied with policy; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world.

But what if development practice is not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?

By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development.

David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.