This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.

As he rose to leadership of the Spencean Philanthropists in 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote and published six issues of Axe Laid to the Root, an inexpensive weekly periodical for working-class readers. Axe Laid to the Root instructed its white audience about the radical potential of African-Jamaican land and food-based liberation. The provision grounds, plots set apart from the plantation for enslaved people to grow their own food, were a source of resistance to plantation capitalism, providing food sovereignty and communal identity. The ecological knowledge of the Jamaican Maroons was another source of resistance to plantation economies. Finally, Wedderburn’s writing in “cheap” periodicals aspired to cultivate a transatlantic alliance between the English lower classes, the colonized Irish, and free and enslaved people in Jamaica. The chapter concludes by discussing George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, which features Wedderburn as a central figure within abolitionist circles.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

State- and market-centric approaches to land redistribution have not worked in South Africa. Instead, South Africa has an agrarian structure marked by concentrated ownership in a shock-prone globalised food system. This chapter argues climate extremes and famines require a new approach to land redistribution and food systems thinking. Critical lessons can be learned about food provisioning from pre-capitalist South Africa’s commons mode of production, which exemplified the first attempts at food sovereignty. This is a decolonial imperative. Moreover, South Africa’s globalised industrial food system is premised on the destruction of nature and has engendered several ecological rifts, including famines and continued starvation faced by many. Campaigning for a food sovereignty commons system, through democratic systemic reform and as part of the deep and just transition, represents an alternative approach to re-agrarianise South Africa on a national and local scale in a heating world. In this regard, large-scale commercial farmers and the state face the challenge of thinking and behaving like commoners to ensure land, climate and more generally ecological justice.

The final chapter turns its attention to considering how fantastic forms facilitate productive exchanges between creators and audiences. It contends that fantasies are made both in communities and for communities – sometimes as gifts, sometimes as challenges, but always with the idea of adding something new to a shared commons that can in its turn be taken up, valued and built upon. The chapter begins by discussing the importance of craft and exchange in Fantasy culture, considering how Fantasy diverges from conflictual models of influence articulated by critics like Harold Bloom and exploring how fantasies such as Jo Walton’s Among Others and Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story express a deep faith in the power of readers and reading. It then explores fan-cultural exchanges, touching on Critical Role, Archive of Our Own, A Very Potter Musical and the practice of modding video games. Finally, the chapter turns to questions of inclusion, discussing works by Patricia A. McKillip and Ursula K. Le Guin, the representation of race in genre fiction, and the changing ways that contemporary communities play Dungeons & Dragons.

Treading the same ground as Ostroms original work, we examine the relevance of caring, empathy, and relationality for governance of the commons. There are numerous instances of commons where group boundaries, rules for resource use, and sanctions are possible, and more diffused modes of coordination and management are needed. It is in these situations that relationality holds the most promise. We examine early evidence, from experiments in the field to smaller real-world situations, where connectedness and empathy serve to bind individuals to collective action. Moreover, we realize that relational and rational mechanisms are not mutually exclusive and suggest that, even in situations where Ostroms design principle take effect, relationality works behind the scenes to strengthen collective action.

How do we motivate the busy urbanite to care about melting glaciers half a world away? In a classroom in Pennsylvania, a teacher and his class begin interacting, online, with other students and teachers in Asia and Africa. Hearing from a teacher in Nepal about problems with glacial melt in their community, the issue of melting glaciers suddenly become immensely important to them. This phenomenon, of a change in individual orientation to connectedness, is what is referred to as relationality. Through empathy and perspective-taking, people are moved to other-regarding action in ways not considered by the literature on collective action and the commons. The book is a necessary addendum to Ostroms tome, Governing the Commons, and presents a new, relational, model of collective action and begins to imagine its implications for real-world institutions.

Three theoretical traditions dominate our understanding of decision-making. The rational actor model assumes individuals are self-interested and maximize their utility subject to budget and time constraints. When outcomes depend on the decisions of others, as in the problem of common pool resources, trust and norms can avoid support sustainability. Social psychological models examine the role of values, especially altruism and self-interest, beliefs, norms, identity, emotions, empathy and trust in decision-making. The heuristics and biases literature shows that decisions are often based on mental shortcuts that deviate from the rational actor model. Our tendency towards biased uptake of new information and communicating mostly with those similar to us can lead to polarization. The three theories can be viewed as complementary: each yields important insights into decision-making.

The content of this book is rather controversial. It paints a rather bleak picture, that the current EU legal economic system being developed for the data-driven economy is both outdated and – to some extent – a policy at war with itself. It promotes dominant platforms to detriment of others. Moreover, the fundamentals for creating rules are also missing. A liberal economic system needs to be based on aspects of a rights system, otherwise, we risk losing innovation, the establishment of new markets, and the creation of wealth, while we will see increasing market failures. Without a legal system for rights to data, we will lose out of a just system for the distribution of wealth. Indeed, it is time that the data-driven economy and the internet economy are granted their ‘property’ rights, reflecting the new paradigm of the data-driven industrial revolution. Moreover, such a regime fits well with the European economic constitution now being established.

Data is vital to the internet-based economy and will become even more important in the old economy as the Internet of Things (IoT) gains ground. The competitiveness of firms will increasingly depend on timely access to relevant data and the ability to use that data to develop new, innovative applications and products. In consumer-oriented businesses, the relevant data is often personal information; although this data is becoming increasingly collectable, only a few firms have access to larger amounts of it.1