The contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts, from literary texts to computer games, and from Enlightenment visions of plenty to colonial justifications for famine. The range of examples shown here give some idea of the productivity of “scarcity” as a concept, and the many forms it can take in influencing and absorbing human ideas about our ways of inhabiting the world.