It is sometimes believed that in ‘the past’ few people lived to old age, so the care needs of older people are a modern issue. Or that in ‘the past’ or in other distant countries at present, older people were/are cared for by their families, whereas in contemporary Britain they are neglected and placed in care homes or live alone. In reality in all known past societies substantial numbers of people were defined as ‘old’, but often they did not have; have always preferred independent living when possible. When they needed care, richer older people were cared for by servants, and poorer people in charitable institutions or workhouses. From 1948, in the Welfare State, they had free health care under the National Health Service and local authorities provided residential homes and community services for means-tested fees. These improved until the 1970s, but were never perfect. More older people had, mainly female, relatives providing care, rather than public services, but more lived longer, needing specialised care, which families could not provide. In the 1980s public services deteriorated under a neoliberal government hostile to state welfare, which cut and privatised them. After some respite under a Labour government, 1997–2010, decline continued to the present, worsened by the Covid pandemic to which older people – their numbers still growing – were especially vulnerable. Relatives work hard to replace services, often putting themselves under great strain.
The chapter presents a case study of a senior centre/day-care centre in Bratislava as a subject of political debate on the communal level in the City Administrative District of Bratislava-Stare Mesto/Old Town. Its establishment in 1994 (connected with the then-unknown concept of active ageing) and its abolition in 2017 reflected the changes in the demographic situation in Slovakia and the resulting public policies of (paid) care for older people connected with its de-familisation and de-institutionalisation. The decision to replace the senior centre with a crèche pitted two age groups against each other, which made the public discussion about the persistence of the centre or its abolition extremely complicated. Thus, the closure of this institution represents an example of an ageist approach. However, the decision triggered a reaction that was unprecedented for Slovakia, initiated by the centre’s older adults themselves and the community concerned – challenging the idea of older people being passive and not interested in the res publica, in the sense of ageivism, as suggested by Israel Doron (2018). The data was collected via ethnographic research: participant observation and in-depth interviews with the centre's seniors, their relatives, personnel, and a broader community of neighbours (2017–2021). The bottom-up perspective is used to understand the impact of the wider public setting and public policies on the regimes of care for older citizens in an era of intense transformation when the roles of the family, the state, and the communities were being negotiated.
This chapter sets out to solve a double enigma: to explain why, in France, there is such a high level of invisibility in the help given to older adults by family carers and professional carers, and to understand the absence of a large-scale public policy on all aspects of the issue of old age. For the second half of the twentieth century, the French system of care for older adults was based on three pillars that cost the state very little: local public and private actors, families and relatives of the frail, and low-skilled and low-paid employees. The injunctions to use home care to limit costs had important consequences on women, as they were the main carers among their relatives. This situation has been invisible for a long time in statistics and sociology of the family approaches. From the 2000s onwards, a new phase began, in which public debates and public policies were developed in response to health crises and scandals, but the adoption of a major public policy was still postponed. However, this contribution shows that families were suspected of abdicating their responsibility towards their elder parents. Ultimately, the absence of an ambitious national political project can be explained by the fact that the approaches to care for older adults have been guided more by a desire to limit the costs of public finance instead of a real societal choice resulting from a debate amongst the French population on this issue.
This chapter looks at trends in the cultural workforce. Starting with the
enduring structural inequalities characteristic of the cultural sector in
the UK, it then examines how efforts to stop Covid-19 affected different
sub-sectors of the creative industries. The analysis reveals how each
sub-sector experienced different consequences: for example, increased demand
for working from home in publishing is contrasted with significant losses of
employment in performing arts. The impacts of the pandemic created different
dilemmas for the organisations, businesses and workers who constitute these
sub-sectors of the creative economy.
The analysis is illustrated by
several case studies. First, it shows what happened with overall employment
and work patterns in cultural occupations and industries, charting the
losses of jobs and hours across the sector and the impact on different
demographic groups in the workforce. Second, it pays particular attention to
freelancers, telling the story of the crisis in the performing arts where
freelancers struggled to get adequate government support. Third, it looks at
the impact of the government’s furlough scheme on jobs in the cultural and
creative industries. Fourth, it explores the impact of the pandemic on
trends in educational upskilling and retraining in the cultural workforce.
Finally, it explores the state of the cultural workforce as the sector
adjusts to the consequences of the pandemic. The chapter draws on secondary
analysis of Office for National Statistics datasets, including the Labour
Force Survey and the Business Impact of Covid Survey.
This chapter makes the case that formal political independence cannot be understood as decolonization. This is not to mitigate the importance of British departure; rather, it is to establish the point that by the time of formal political independence, the territorial and political structure of the state had become the vehicle through which freedom would be achieved as opposed to an “alien” or “contaminated” structure. In making this case, the chapter explores relevant concepts in decolonial international relations that are key to understanding the how and why universality incubates colonial violence.
Chapter 5 returns to the coloniality of the archives and emphasizes their political and historical limits. Seeking to “archive in relief,” it reinterprets what mainstream historians have described as a period of relative tranquillity as a period of simmering insurrection, or what Jayawardena (2010), working from the Marxist tradition, describes as “perpetual ferment.” It makes a case that scholars writing Sri Lanka’s history have taken the structure of the state-nation for granted, and in so doing have perpetuated colonial ontological assumptions about human social, political, and economic development. The chapter contends that this has made possible a modernist reading of history in which “traditional” people were overwhelmed by a technologically superior British; however, the chapter reads the same history in a way that places local (Kandyan) and foreign (British) sovereignties as equal but distinct ontological practices to create a more vibrant picture of simmering resistance. This resistance to the new mode of centralizing state eventually gave way, after the 1848 Matale Rebellion, to a mode and form of anti-colonial resistance that instead sought to inherit or take over the state apparatus rather than resist it. This would happen a full generation later in neighbouring India after the Great Rebellion of 1857 and the rise of national consciousness in the late nineteenth century, but the process began earlier in Ceylon. The chapter concludes by looking at the rise of Protestant Buddhism and Hinduism in the late nineteenth century and the centralization of sites and spaces of protest in Colombo rather than Kandy.
The Conclusion brings together the various threads of ontological collision, political economy, colonial contamination, and imperial transformation to complete a picture of how the process of colonial state formation established the territorial and conceptual space within which toxic forms of anti-colonial nationalism could later flourish. These forms of toxic nationalism arose in response to the acceptance of the statist “rules of the game,” so to speak, that gradually came to shift the strategies of anti-colonial organizing not only in Ceylon by 1848, but also in India a decade later. Here the book returns to the present day, outlining research trajectories and decolonial possibilities for identifying historical sites of sovereign ontological “collisions” in order to study them pluriversally.
The Introduction begins with the violence of the immediate post-civil-war period in Sri Lanka, and the postcolonial obsession with “total territorial rule” as a marker of sovereign independence. It makes the argument for thinking of the “state” as coming decidedly before “nation,” and describes the historical context of 1815, which is taken to be the moment of sovereign consolidation of the island under British rule. Arguing against this date, the Introduction makes the case that 1815–1848 should be understood as a period of sovereign ontological collision, through which Kandyan-Buddhist and British-Christian understandings of sovereignty interacted and co-constituted the state. The Introduction introduces method of “archiving in relief” and the conceptual importance of rejecting the historical narrative that colonized people were “pre-political” with reference to scholarly debates in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, and Sri Lankan studies. Finally the Introduction offers a summary of the chapters, outlining the rest of the book.
This chapter details the historical encounter between the Kandyan Kingdom and the British, which gave rise to the 1815 Kandyan Convention, a single legal document with different ontological meanings for the different signatories. Building on Chapter 1’s description of plural ontology, the chapter makes the case for thinking about sovereign encounters as a kind of “galactic” collision, through a metaphor based on how actual galaxies collide. Rather than bumping against one another, galaxies pass through one another, reformulating and disrupting each other in different ways but ultimately producing something new from the violence of the encounter. Similarly, in the sovereign ontological collision between them, the British and the Kandyans passed through and transformed one another in critical ways, including changing the geography, political economy, and raison d’état. The chapter draws on S. J. Tambiah’s work on the galactic mandala system of states in Buddhist South-East Asia to ground this cosmic metaphor in the political history of the mid nineteenth century.
This book documents the political and cosmological processes through which the idea of “total territorial rule” at the core of the modern international system came into being in the context of early to mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). It develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by a “pluriverse” of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the territorial state itself is an outcome of imperial globalization. Anti-colonialism up to the mid nineteenth century was grounded in genealogies and practices of sovereignty that developed in many localities. By the mid to late nineteenth century, however, the global state system and the states within it were forming through colonizing and anti-colonizing vectors. The modern territorial state predates modern nationalism and created a contaminated container in which anticolonialism had been constricted by the late nineteenth century in Ceylon, but also elsewhere in the British Empire. By focusing on the ontological conflicts that shaped the state and empire, we can rethink the birth of the British Raj and place it in Ceylon some fifty years earlier than in India. In this way, the book makes a theoretical contribution to postcolonial and decolonial studies in globalization and international relations by considering the ontological significance of “total territorial rule” as it emerged historically in Ceylon. Through emphasizing one important manifestation of modernity and coloniality – the territorial state – the book contributes to research that studies the politics of ontological diversity, sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international studies, and globalization through colonial encounters.