Until the late 1700s, the economy of England was tightly controlled by the government, which limitedthe amount of interest that banks could charge, laid down rules about how employers should treat theirworkers, and set strict standards for how some products should be made. The government set up trademonopolies, giving certain companies the sole right to trade with certain parts of the world, like the EnglishEast India Company. 11 Then in the late 1700s, Adam Smith published a book called The Wealth ofNations, which advocated “laissez-faire,” meaning “to let alone” in French. 12 He said individualsshould be let alone to make their own economic decisions—what products to make, how to make them, andwhat to charge for them. 13 People would be motivated by the opportunity to try new ideas and makemore money. Society, as a result, would become wealthier. 

   After Smith’s book was published, the idea of laissez-faire became more and more popular. 14 Thenew freedom to invent and invest helped spur the Industrial Revolution, creating, as Adam Smith hadpredicted, vast new wealth. 

    But it also created the harsh conditions some employers maintained in the factories. These employerswere believers in laissez-faire. 15 They say it was none of the government’s business how much theirworkers were paid or how many hours a day they worked. For obvious reasons, the idea of laissez-faire wasmore popular among employers than among their workers.

 Just as a passport represents national sovereignty—it is one of the defining categories of a claim to statehood—so harmonizing passports is a sign of cooperation. That can be a slow process. It took the nine members of the-then European Community (now the 27-strong European Union) years to settle on the color of the passport cover that its member states now share. In 1976, a year after a uniform passport was first proposed, Britain shuddered at the suggested shade of delicate lilac. Diplomats then spent four years dismissing maroon and then purple before reaching a wine-colored consensus in 1981.

America’s first passport cover, in 1918, was beige, going green three years later. It changed to various shades of red in 1926 and back to green in 1941. Only on the bicentenary in 1976 did it turn blue, matching the shade in the American flag. 

The common color was supposed to make European passports instantly recognizable. But since colors cannot be patented, nothing stops others with the same idea. Some countries that hoped to join the EU quickly adopted the right color of passport as a branding exercise. In South America the Andean Community, which once had EU-like aspirations, also favors wine-colored passports. Mercosur and Caricom, two other regional groupings, favor an American-style dark blue. 

Countries commonly pick colors that reflect their culture or religion, says Claire Burrows of De La Rue, a British company that has been making passports since 1915. Islamic countries often have green passport covers (though Germany’s passport used to be that color, as are those of members of the Economic Community of West African States). According to Bill Waldron of Holliston, a Tennessee-based firm that prints documents for 65 of the world’s 249 passport-issuing entities, darker colors are popular because they show dirt less, heighten the contrast with the crest and look more official—much as police wear dark uniforms. 

Interpol—one of a handful of international organizations with passport-issuing powers—provides evidence for that theory: its new travel document is black. The UN’s passport, like the helmets of its peacekeeping force, is a pacific blue. 

Fun-colored passports exist too. But they can sometimes seem a punishment: Sweden and the Netherlands issue emergency travel documents for nationals who have lost their passports. They are pink. 

        When contemporary women writers write about mother-daughter relationships, they often put an emphasis on forging a connection between them. In their writing, even though mothers and daughters do have ambivalence toward each other, they are often capable of resolving this problem and finally recognizing their bond as mothers and daughters. Yet, when it comes to writing about mother-son relationships, it becomes a completely different story. Most women writers stress the alienation between mothers and sons owing to the fact that they are of different gender. Therefore, when women writers write about their experiences of raising sons, they usually find themselves crossing over into a different territory. Feelings of apprehension and distress arise when mothers discover to their astonishment that their sons have become a total stranger to them especially when the sons have stepped into adulthood. In addition, since mothers are constrained by the society at large to avoid being too close to their sons in fear that they might smother their sons, contemporary women writers have depicted mostly the separation between them but have also unveiled how mothers come to terms with this separation from their sons. 

        Take the two contemporary novels, Margaret Forster’s Mothers’ Boys and Rosellen Brown’s Before and After, as examples. With a common theme on mother-son relationships, both novels portray a similar incident of a son who is suspected of committing a murder and how this unexpected event has profoundly harmed the mother-son relationships. Coincidently, both novels have an identical scene with a mother-son encounter in a juvenile prison. In this confrontation between mothers and sons, mothers have to their bewilderment come to realize that their sons have become unknown to them. And as these mother-son narratives continue to develop, the mothers and sons in these novels finally separate from each other. The only difference between these novels is their contrast in treating the mother-son relationship. Forster presents the mother as the one who takes up her traditional role by accepting passively this separation from son and waiting patiently until the son returns one day whereas Brown describes a mother who exercises her agency and power to deal with her son’s act of crime. Later, she not only fulfills her social responsibility as a mother but also decides her way of handling the mother-son separation. Despite that the two texts illustrate two conflicting ways of reading and writing mother-son relationships, they also inform us that there exists a powerful reading and writing against the grain.