Speculation: New Vistas on Capitalism and the Global This special section of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and Middle East investigates speculation as a crucial conceptual tool for analyzing contemporary capitalism. Speculation here is understood to be the making present and materializing of uncertain futures. It is an engagement with uncertainty for profit as well as for survival. Read together the articles demonstrate that the situated materialities and magical realities of global capital flows can only be fully understood through attention to such practices of anticipation.The word "speculation" comes into increased circulation at the end of the sixteenth century, its currency tied to the adventures of the age of conquest and the global navigations of mercantilism. If in that era speculation literally mapped the globe, in our contemporary world it marks the new geographies of globalization that extend from the centers of high finance to street vendors. Today, speculation is largely associated with the well--known pirate tactics of finance capitalism. Popular discourse on financial markets thus expresses outrage and writes off speculation as a moral failure. 1 But such moralizing is not sufficient to build a textured understanding of contemporary globality and its radical inequalities. For this, we must address speculation as not simply the effect of greed, but as a range of practices that work with and produce an instability of value. Speculation refers to processes that, like concepts of economy, are located deeply in the ethico--political systems we call culture and society. And like that modern abstraction we call "the economy," speculation must be historicized, situated, and investigated in its intimacies with practices of governing. 2 Analysis of it reveals how knowledge, futurity and value are produced through attempts to predict and govern the economy. These processes and their contradictions are most visible in the context of "emerging markets" such as India and across Africa and the Middle East where feudal forms of expropriation are reproduced within a capitalism fueled by spectacular visions of technology, urbanism and middle class aspiration. So although economists and sociologists continue to make the USA and Europe central to their accounts of capitalism and inequality, this special section illustrates why this is an inadequate approach 3Marking a continuum between epistemology and economy, knowing and managing, and materializing and imagining, speculation evokes myriad ways of seeing. The term's origins in the Latin speculari, to spy out, watch, examine, observe, from specula, a look--1 Eg. Tett, Fool's Gold.

In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of “things” but also that the qualitative scales underpinning and measuring change are themselves changed in the process of growth. We take escalation to refer to this “change of change” within processes of sudden accelerating growth. By introducing a new theoretical concept, we aim to contribute to discussions of social and cultural change in anthropology and elsewhere and to enable and encourage future comparison between different ethnographies of accelerating change.

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This paper examines male friendship at the Delhi racecourse as an example of a sociality amidst an urban South Asian setting defined by uncertainty and the absence of fixed identities. It argues that such friendships are 'relationships of chance', embodying and reflecting the contingency of the gambling arena, rather than sociological or ritual notions which may condition friendship in other settings. This hyper-competitive and hyper-social space configures both the possibility and impossibility of friendship. The paper thus provides insights into how relating to others happens in a heterogeneous, fluid context that is over-determined mainly by a shared passion for self-enrichment.

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