Tony Bennett is Research Professor of Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. He is also a Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK. Recent publications include Culture: A Reformer's Science (Sage, 1998), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (Routledge, 2004), and Culture, Class, Distinction, with Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright (Routledge, 2008).

Patrick Joyce is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, and currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Fernand Braudel Fellow in History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on the history of work, class and popular politics, in recent times developing an interest in historical aspects of governmentality. His publications include Visions of the People (Cambridge University Press, 1991), The Oxford Reader on Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), The Social in Question (Routledge, 2001), and The Rule of Freedom (Verso, 2003).

Material Powers Introduction Part 1: A History of the Categories 1. Matter and Materialism: A Brief Prehistory of the Present 2. Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History 3. The Matter of Materialism: Literary Mediations Part 2: Assembling the State 4. The Unintended State 5. Filing the Raj: Political Technologies of the Imperial British State 6. Abstraction, Materiality and the 'Science of the Concrete' in Engineering Practice Part 3: Colonial Materialities 7. Camerawork as Technical Practice in Colonial India 8. Exploring the Senses and Exploiting the Land : Railroads, Bodies and Measurement in Nineteenth-Century French Colonies 9. Making and Mobilising Worlds: Assembling and Governing the Other