The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Despite enormous variations across medieval and early medieval Europe, the second wave of European urbanisation that started around 1000CE had major repercussions everywhere. The increase in the number and size of European towns coincided with a period of relatively weak state power. This had a variety of consequences: from the diverse ways of organising urban life and space across the continent to the large degree of self-government that many towns enjoyed. It may also be one of the reasons why Europe remained, as it had become during the Roman era, a continent of medium-sized towns, rather than mega-cities – a development that arguably still affects the continent’s patterns of urbanisation today. This Introduction surveys aspects of European urbanisation as they played out across a millennium and their interpretation by urban historians.

This chapter focuses on the diverse manifestations of the feminist movement in Africa and its impact on African literature. It further examines how African women’s writing has contributed to African feminist theorizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Borrowing Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s idea of reading African women’s writing as “theorized fiction” or “fictionalized theory,” the chapter considers, among other issues, how twentieth and twenty-first-century African women’s writing has grappled with questions of gender and how gender is variously conferred and defined; questions of motherhood and how it is configured and contested; and questions of sexuality and the female body. The chapter also pays close attention to the epistemic shifts and various decolonial trajectories that obtain in African feminist thinking and how these are enunciated in African literature.

This chapter illustrates that an emerging geopolitical clash of interests in the Far East and competition on the world grain and oil markets during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were softened by the active development of trade, economic, and technological collaboration, as well as by the alluring prospect of Americans gaining access to Russia’s Asian market. On the one hand, the American reaction to anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, repressions against fighters for Russian freedom there, and mass emigration of ethnic and religious minorities to the United States turned Russia into an object of America’s mission to liberalize the world and stimulated the erosion of the Russia–US “historical friendship.” On the other, America’s philanthropic movement during the Russian famine of 1891–1892 and Russian participation in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 manifested this friendship. While focusing on Russians and Americans discovering each other on a large scale, this chapter emphasizes that contradictions in their mutual perceptions stemmed from domestic developments in each country, leading to their becoming mutual constitutive Others.

The development of urbanism in Europe, beginning in the high Middle Ages, gave rise to many and diverse ways of representing cities. In the beginning these representations show cities as compact units, and as places characterised by a particular social order grounded in the history of salvation. New ways of conceiving cities were explored along with the humanist interest in urbanism, perspective, and historical knowledge. From around 1500, representations experimented with how cities could be displayed as differentiated architectural spaces with an individual sense of self. At the same time the technology of printing helped a market for images of towns and cities to develop. Measuring, but also aesthetic models and the needs of the administration became increasingly important. Scholars, artists and later engineers and photographers contributed to a broad range of images and maps that display cities from manifold angles.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Periyar's reading of social injustice was rooted in a set of conceptual insights on how power shapes economic relations in caste society. A proponent of socialism (samadharmam), he was however critical of the political priorities of mainstream left parties. To him, they failed to recognize the scope of caste-based power in shaping the economy. His insights on the nature of this power continue to unsettle and challenge more popular narratives of justice. Through a close reading of his own work and secondary sources, this chapter maps how Periyar's original conceptualization of power in India fed into his interpretation of the economic domain. Periyar held that status-based stratification and ideological hegemony exercised by caste elites fundamentally shape economic outcomes. The ritually sanctified division between mental and manual labour and their hierarchizing were particularly important to him. Periyar believed that economic justice can therefore be secured only through waging a counter-hegemonic struggle against caste-sanctioned hierarchies and the ideological apparatus that upholds such status-based stratification. The primary contention that the chapter makes is that in Periyar's political imaginary, the ‘economic’ was a sub-set of the ‘social’. Redistribution of economic power could not be sustained without addressing the social institutions that help reproduce economic hierarchies and concentrate economic power.

This chapter documents the development of the wartime Grand Alliance between Britian, the Soviet Union, and the United States, with particular reference to the personal roles, outlooks, and interactions of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. Without the deep personal bonds of the ‘Big Three’, the Grand Alliance may have been stillborn or collapsed under the pressures, contradictions, and challenges of war.

The cultural level was low at the late ninth-century papal court, but an able pope could still have an impact north of the Alps.

This chapter surveys the history of Pan-Africanism as an aesthetic current that paralleled more formalized political solidarity. The chapter asserts that differences across languages and periods complicate Pan-Africanism’s intellectual history. With particular attention to the diversity of origins, it shows how pre-independence African ties with the diaspora fed into continental initiatives along linguistic lines. While the anglophone tradition emerged in close alignment with African American writers, particularly Langston Hughes, the shared roots in negritude between francophone African and Caribbean writers were productive and provocative, lusophone alignments emerged through continent-based anthologies, and arabophone literatures were interpreted through Pan-Arab as well as Pan-African formations. Given the transnational dimension, African languages have figured less prominently in Pan-African literature. In more recent times, feminism, decolonial imperatives, and changes in publishing and educational institutions have been influential. The tensions between Pan-Africanism and other intellectual traditions remain fertile ground for future scholarship.

During the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, polycentric political structures based on fragmented forms of sovereignty, the importance of multinuclear urban systems and respect for constitutional, legal and cultural diversity were predominant in the most densely populated European regions, and even within consolidated monarchical systems, such as the Spanish Monarchy. The strong jurisdictional component of these power structures – the result of the existence of numerous corporations, communities, guilds, estates and militias capable of political action and exclusive rights – explains the need to challenge monolithic and homogeneous visions of the state. In this chapter, this vision is replaced by an urban, bottom-up perspective that follows the experience of early modern legal and political theorists as well as citizens. Cities were the primary stage for political action, where assemblies, councils and guilds competed with one another or joined forces to form common spaces of negotiation with sovereigns or other institutions.

Gender is fundamental to how towns shaped themselves. Women were often, not always, the majority, which had implications for how they inserted themselves in and contributed to shaping the identity of towns. Similarly, where men predominated, their experience and the character of the town could vary appreciably. Gender tensions, over work and political rights, for example, influenced formal and informal urban economies and polity. Economic, political and social transitions through networks, global exchanges, imperial and colonial exploits had important implications for both the character of the urban and the perceptions of gender. Simultaneously, gender shaped urban culture. Historians interrogating femininity and masculinity have expanded our understanding of gender dynamics in the urban world, and furthermore recognised the kaleidoscope of sexual identities in society. Gender relations vary over space and time and are not the same from one city to another. Differences of race and ethnicity further complicate the picture. This chapter examines shifts in gender from a bourgeois ideal to a contemporary vision articulated in a radically changed urban world, where the vote is nominally universal, where equal pay and equal opportunity are mantras for a ‘modern’ democratic city. Transitions were not straightforward and there was no continuous road to modernity.