This book asks the following incisive questions. Does the body of scholarship on the term “human capital” constitute a species of the meaning of the term “slavery,” and if so, in what way? How has the so-called capabilities approach to human development affected the scholarship of human development, in the context of curbing the catastrophic excesses of market behavior? How is it that some humans can be domesticated to create human capital for other groups of humans? To what extent can the international legal instruments effectively fight and combat child labor? How have dynastic China and India developed very long-term systems for the creation and maintenance of national human capital among its peoples? Have the state responses to pandemics been medicalized as a device for human capital maintenance, and if so, in what ways? What is the true meaning of the term “fit and proper” as it is imported into development and dissolution of human capital at the professional or “mandarin” levels of societies? Taking these questions together, the book Human Capital and Development asks this question: have national forms of slavery developed from what is now described as the capabilities approach to human development, with human domestication and child labor forming national systems of human capital formation, maintained by medicalization and controlled by judgments by authorities of fitness and propriety? Chapter One contains a complete scholarly survey of the field of human capital, covering legal, sociological, regulatory, and economic facets of the field. Chapter Two is a detailed critical literature review of the field of human development, linking this still nascent field to that of human capital. Chapter Three follows from Chapter One, elaborating on the new and virtually unspoken field of human domestication, as it serves to create human capital. Chapter Four discusses the international law field of child labor and elaborates on the dual effects on human capital and human development of child labor in its current form. Chapter Five is a comparative analysis of how the two ancient societies of China and India had deployed systems lasting beyond archaeological spans of time to maintain their national human capital, by regulating their supplies of water to their vast populations. Chapter Six in many ways follows on from chapter Three on human domestication, as it discusses critically how the epideictic rhetoric of pandemic contagion and control might marshal human capital in the various strata of society. Chapter Seven is a critical analysis of how human capital is formed by imperial legislation in the upper levels of society’s “mandarins,” its professional classes, by implementing around the world a common “fit and proper,” or integrity, test. The overall research outcomes suggest that human capital is human differentiation, by the masters onto the servants. Human development is a dynamic conjunction of those capabilities of apparently freely maintaining social networks. Those who had abolished the progymnasmata education system had now reinstated some lower levels of its simpler exercises, ensuring continuing human domestication and maintaining a human capital in explicit knowledge. Thus, child labor remains a national-level program for formation of national employee human capital. In dynastic China, emperors had wholly owned the people’s human capital, and both stabilized and assessed it through local customary registries. In India, sacred rivers were themselves entities containing the culture’s externalized symbology. The International Sanitary Conferences confirmed already-developing European national rules into an international order of human capital medicalization, disguised as human development. The public parties to a “fit and proper” assessment are said to be the court and an ellipsis of members of the public, without the public ever actually participating in the assessment. Thus, human capital in a profession is created in a national professional class purely by the authority of differentiation.
