How, given that in 1885 those unable to support themselves were considered personal failures, were they seen as victims of the failures of markets and governments to ensure their welfare by 1931?

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The chapter introduces the book, its main claims, and arguments. It is concerned with setting the agenda for how to take labour seriously in Gulf development discourses and the value of centring labour from the margins. The book argues that Oman’s labour market is global and that Omani labour needs to be understood globally and relationally within and beyond the segmentations that divide the labour market. The chapter situates youth and their economic dreams and experiences at the heart of the story of development, discusses how to understand labour within the rentier state, and lays out the framework and empirical analysis to follow.

Offering two case studies – the economic transformations of Sohar and Duqm – this chapter grounds the book’s argument about Oman’s global labour market in material cases of spatial transformation and the integration into global value chains through which both commodities and labour circulate. The chapter argues that millennial citizen expectations take shape in these developments, from the interaction of ostensible outcomes of economic globalisation, neoliberalism, and government responsibilities of governing hydrocarbon windfalls. Citizen reactions emerge from their perceived right to, or exclusion from, these returns. The chapter further substantiates two points through these cases. First, both neoliberal reform and oil wealth explicitly or implicitly make promises to populations about an improved economic life, which, when unrealised, results in disenfranchisement and discontent. Second, capital needs labour and pursues supplies from the global labour market not only because it is cost effective but deliberately because it is both flexible and controllable. It seeks to avert potential labour disruption and secure seamless operations. Together, these findings show the ways Omani labour organises and the power of labour through the threat of its resistance.

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

Chapter Eleven takes up Rogers’ engagment with the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economic disaster that marked the culmination of his influence as a commentator on American political life. The Oklahoman castigated Wall Street for foolish financial practices and criticized Americans for buying on credit, two practices in the 1920s he believed underlay the economic collapse. With typical good-humored civility, he initially sympathized with Herbert Hoover as a victim of circumstances but soon denounced the president’s refusal to promote relief programs and job-creation initiatives. Rogers became an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The humorist became one of the biggest boosters of FDR’s programs as necessary to save the American system. While suspicious of federal government overreach and the encouragement of labor radicalism, he deemed the New Deal largely a success. Throughout the Depression, Rogers maintained his populist outlook, consistently criticizing economic and social elites while laboring to protect and uplife America’s common, working citizens. His acclaim for "the little fellow" further elevated his public stature in America.

This chapter provides a macroeconomic perspective of artificial intelligence’s impacts on labor markets and economic growth – although the analysis remains grounded in microeconomic functions. In this chapter, we provide an economic growth model wherein AI as a possible substitute for human labor is modeled, taking into account the nature of AI as an automation technology. This goes to the heart of the current focus of economists on AI, namely its implications for labor markets, and specifically unemployment and skills requirements. The crucial points that we make here are that economists need to go further than indirectly modeling AI through assumptions on substitution elasticities and need to take the specific nature (narrow focus) of AI into explicit account.

After the Progressive Era of the late 19th century, the unregulated financial markets boomed, encouraging people to go into debt to buy stocks, and when an economic boom went bust, the Great Depression ensued. FDR’s New Deal was a response to the failure of markets to protect people that led to the government taking on the responsibility of preventing, or at least moderating, economic dislocations, regulating the financial and banking systems, providing jobs as an employee of last resort, and establishing a social security system to protect the elderly and disabled Americans. The missing link in these efforts was racial justice, which was largely overlooked for political reasons. While FDR’s critics accused him of betraying capitalism, he in fact saved the market system from destroying itself.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the recognition of the societal value of domestic service affected some aspects of domestic workers’ rights but not others. It analyzes debates around the 1926 law on domestic service and the effects it had on the domestic workers’ ability to resolve conflicts with employers in court or mediation. Domestic workers’ labor rights were limited by the new law to make their labor more accessible to employers: written labor agreements were no longer mandatory and there was no compensation for overtime work. Yet, the state was reluctant to limit domestic workers’ access to their employers housing after termination of contract because female homelessness was closely associated with prostitution. The new law put domestic workers at a disadvantage compared to other workers, which, together with continuing valorization of “productive” labor, made domestics seek employment opportunities outside domestic service. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the effects labor laws have on paid domestic labor and testifies to the importance of government regulations and protection.

This chapter reveals how stories about the past came to cohere around struggles over identity in the final decades of the twentieth century in and around Birmingham. The Second World War was becoming increasingly important across the generations, although it was mainly the children of the inter-war period, now pensioners, who looked back fondly on any part of inter-war life. However, immigration brought in groups with divergent memories of the past, including people whose family experiences of the early twentieth century were of fascism in continental Europe and those who felt that Atlantic slavery, not the struggles of the white working class, was the historical injustice of fundamental importance.

This chapter, looking at the Second World War, foregrounds the concerns about the post-war future that took shape in relation to people’s hopes for the next generation and with their sense of conditions locally at the front of their minds. It first uses a case study of attitudes towards urban reconstruction to probe where people’s ideas about the post-war future came from. The chapter argues that memories of the inter-war period and everyday experiences of wartime were fundamental in shaping these hopes. A second case study, about concerns surrounding post-war employment, highlights the complexity of popular assumptions about what was likely to follow the war, again signalling the importance of place in shaping people’s memories and aspirations.