Why are we so invested in imagining children as innocent? All of us, former children, surely remember moments of cruelty, greed and nastiness from ourselves and our peers. As cultural and educational theorist Henry Giroux has argued, the myth of the pure and innocent child serves to distract us from all the ways that our society shapes childhood and how, in turn, cultures of childhood and of play reflect the overarching power structures of our broader society.

Consider for a moment that even the idea of childhood (a period of life where one is competent to do manual labour but not expected to do so, where one is expected only to learn and play) is a fairly recent Western invention. In the Middle Ages, young working-class Europeans would have been expected to work from a very young age. And which bodies are allowed to even be a ‘child’ is a matter of power: in the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, enslaved Africans were considered and treated as adults before puberty (including as targets of sexual exploitation). At the same time, the white children of plantation owners were held to be precious flowers of youth until well into their twenties. Since the mid-twentieth century the age range designating ‘youth’ has drastically expanded as labour markets have changed; ‘youth’ often now includes people well into their thirties (longer than the life expectancy of a nineteenth-century factory worker in London). So, even though, biologically speaking, humans naturally take a remarkably long time to reach sexual maturity and some degree of physical independence, the idea and importance of childhood, youth and human development is deeply shaped by culture, society and economic pressures.

Just as childhood is shaped by these forces, so too is play. As the anthropologist the late David Graeber (2014) argues, play may be the fundamental activity of not only humans and not only animals but also all forms of life: purposeless, usually social, generally enjoyable activity. The ground-breaking work of Jean Piaget confirmed what most of us observe: children play imaginative and social games as a way to learn about the world and their place in it. Today, ‘serious games’ (including simulations, role-plays and gamified learning platforms) are an important part of corporate, military and other forms of adult training around the world. Play is always political: consider ancient Rome, where enslaved gladiators were made to ‘play’ for the entertainment of the patricians … to the death. Or consider what the popular game ‘Monopoly’ teaches children about capitalism and the economy: it's a ruthless fight to the finish (this, in spite of the fact that ‘Monopoly’ was originally designed as a critique of free-market capitalism's impacts on housing markets).

Today, although we imagine childhood as a period of life free from financial concerns, it is anything but. Beyond the ways that the stress of familial financial precarity might impact youngsters, the broader sociological and cultural force of financialization encourages parents and teachers to begin ‘investing’ in education, skills development and competitive competencies at an early age. ‘Financial literacy’ education is increasingly part of the curriculum in many schools. Many children's toys and games encourage the development of financial dispositions. On one level it is quite natural for children to learn and play in the shadow of, and in ways that reflect the dominant social institutions of, their era. But when this play is taken as neutral or natural (rather than shaped by a set of social institutions), what are the consequences?

The two chapters in Part VI both explore how youth and play are entangled with financialization, neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. They both seek to uncover the key hidden assumptions at work.

Oded Nir (Chapter 16) investigates a conventional indoor children's play area in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, close to the border with the Gaza Strip. It has been built underground in a bunker to protect its users from Palestinian rocket attacks, launched in reprisal for Israel's many devastating and deadly military incursions. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is often (unhelpfully) presented as an ancient and eternal struggle dating back to biblical times, conveniently (for some) inviting us to forget the political, economic and sociological dimensions. Nir details how, since the 1980s, the state of Israel has aggressively pursued neoliberal policies and financialization that are uniquely tailored to both sustain and benefit from its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and its access to cheapened Palestinian labour. Yet these policies have also had a dramatic negative effect on most Israelis, whose indebtedness and financial precarity encourage them to move into illegal Israeli settlements and otherwise participate in a conflict with which they might not otherwise agree. For Nir, the underground playground, which often evokes notions of the timeless joys of childhood, instead speaks to something else: the way that systems of financial oppression, inequality and exploitation become normalized. Financialization, because of the way it seeks to transform future potentials into present-day commodities, alters our sense of time and of the future. The playground can be seen as a monument to the way that a financialized Israel is culturally invested in narratives of an endless present over real and meaningful change.

Ben Stork (Chapter 17) focuses on an advertisement from the US's United Negro College Fund, which targets Black donors to contribute to the cause of offering financial assistance to Black youth seeking university education. Stork relates the long history of educational segregation and inequality in the US, from the days of slavery where reading and writing could mean a death sentence, to the post-Second World War era, when Black people were structurally denied access to universities. But in the last decades of the twentieth century these barriers have transformed and been accompanied by new forms of ‘predatory inclusion’, where Black people are targeted for highly exploitative loans for programmes that fail to help graduates close the staggering racial wealth and earnings gaps that plague that country. Stork notes that the advertisement in question has its seventeen-year-old Black female protagonist address the potential donors framing her success as ‘your dividend’: to donate is not merely to do good and give back to one's community, it is to ‘invest’ in the future of Black people. As laudable as that may seem, Stork notes that it signals the profound shift that has occurred under neoliberalism and financialization, where even the human development that education provides or the cause of equality for Black people in America must be reframed in financial terms.

Both chapters, then, mobilize themes of childhood, play and education to sensitize us to the profound economic as well as cultural power of financialization. In both cases, this power is freighted with the legacy of colonial and racial power regimes: in the case of Nir, the Zionist project that has sought to colonize Palestine for Jewish settlement; in the case of Stork, what Saidiya Hartman (2007) calls the ‘afterlives of slavery’ in a country built on that institution and the anti-Black structural racism it inaugurated.

A brief note that each chapter uses the term ‘securitization’ in a distinct but related way. For Nir, securitization refers to the military practice of building up security infrastructure to protect ‘assets’ and ‘investments’, a notion of securitization that binds together the military and financial spheres. Here, in contrast to security (an achievable goal), securitization justifies endless manoeuvring and an infinite horizon of risks to be managed. Stork (Chapter 17), uses securitization in a more technical sense: in the world of finance it refers to the way that many financial assets (say, a bunch of mortgages) can be bundled together and sold in different ways. This is done to counterbalance risks and to offer financial customers bespoke forms of exposure to very specific types of risk. In both cases, securitization is an ongoing, never-ending process.