Chapter 4 adds another intellectual dimension and genealogy to Nkrumah’s political-economic philosophy by arguing that he was aware of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas and that the Ghanaian economy existed and functioned within this state capitalist, mixed economic framework. Moreover, this chapter examines how people within and outside Ghana understood the duality of Ghana’s socialist and capitalist economy – its socialist state capitalist project – and its applicability to Ghana’s conditions and the postcolonial world. It demonstrates that the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, Socialist De-Colony merges the nonoverlapping intellectual and geographic spaces of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” and Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” with Maxim Matusevich’s “Africa and the Iron Curtain.” It shows how the cultural and intellectual interchange of ideas between and amongst Black thinkers moved beyond the Atlantic circuit and were simultaneously heavily mediated and impacted by ideas from the East.

With the Depression, the rise of fascism, and ongoing, even more dire civil rights struggles, patriarchal power seemed more than ever a race-work imperative. “Bad girls” offered diversions while Black female civil rights leaders garnered acclaim, but the New Negro hero who led the race forward, was, in the Pittsburgh Courier’s pages, more emphatically and presumptively male.

This chapter argues that by any measure – mass conscription, full economic mobilization, blurring of civilians and combatants, blockades, sieges, scorched earth, murderous occupation, unfree labour, and state control – the Soviet Union was involved in ‘Total War’. The Soviet state set a new benchmark in its exhaustive mobilization of resources, including human labour. The government, reaching the height of its power, achieved a mobilization of resources for the front so complete that the home front population was close to collapse by the war’s end. Covering the period from the invasion in 1941 to the end of the war, the chapter examines the mass evacuation of people, industry, and herds in the face of invasion; the rationing system and supplementary food policies; compulsory labour mobilization of free citizens and prisoners; labour laws and repression; propaganda and popular support; and the liberation of the occupied territories. It examines the deep sacrifices made by ordinary people in terms of consumption, living and working conditions, and daily life in order to provision the front.

Modern European cities have owed much of their distinctive character – both as individual cities and as typical ‘European’ cities – to their landscapes of urban pleasure and recreation. The chapter charts the transformation of modern leisure in cities between the 1850s and 1930s, focusing on the role of state, commercial and civic actors, and on new ideas about leisure in the dramatic expansion of theatres, music halls, cinemas, cafés, dance halls, shopping malls, parks, sporting facilities, libraries and museums. It discusses how changes in modern landscapes of urban leisure have not just reflected but also shaped major trends in urban social change, particularly regarding the interplay of class, gender and ethnic inequalities. The final section touches upon patterns of transnational cultural exchange in the field of leisure which in various ways made European cities more European.

The instructions on ritual of Innocent I to a minor bishop under his immediate authority help explain why Charlemagne looked to Rome for liturgy.