This chapter examines the shift from almost total estrangement in the early 1920s to broad enmeshment in cultural, economic, and finally diplomatic exchanges in the early 1930s. While acknowledging the importance of converging economic and strategic interests, the chapter argues that images and ideas were also significant, particularly in defining the identities and trajectories of the two countries. It illuminates the divergence between American anticommunists who loathed the atheist Soviet dictatorship and the growing number of intellectuals, journalists, African Americans, and others who became fascinated by the Soviet experiment in social and economic transformation. It also analyzes the ambivalence of Soviet writers, cartoonists, and political leaders about the United States, which they harshly criticized for its imperialism, racism, and economic exploitation, but also admired for its energy, productivity, and advanced technology. The chapter closes with a discussion of how President Franklin Roosevelt disregarded a terrible famine in Ukraine and protests by Ukrainian Americans as he negotiated for the establishment of diplomatic relations.

In the Korean drama My Liberation Notes (Netflix, 2022), written by Park Hay-Young, three office workers sit in the human resources (HR) manager's room. They have been asked to meet with the HR manager to address a specific issue related to the company's HR policy. As part of a neoliberal workplace well-being initiative, the company encourages employees to join a club to explore their hobbies and other interests. According to its institutional logic, if employees are allowed to pursue their personal interests at the workplace, it will make them ‘happy’ and creative, eventually leading to greater productivity. The HR manager regularly emails employees about various clubs, such as photography, hiking, and pottery to encourage them to choose a club.

Three colleagues from different departments receive regular club invitations via email, but none of them find the clubs interesting enough to join. To them, the exercise seems absurd, especially given their challenges, such as the high cost of living, normalized overwork, and dignity violations in the workplace. The HR manager's attempts to persuade them to join a club seem meaningless and futile in the face of their existential crisis. They are tired of the monotony of their lives, which limits their hope and possibilities. Consequently, they frequently reject club suggestions. Eventually, the HR manager asks them to meet her in the office and they provide vague answers, but as they leave, they realize they can create their own club to avoid the pressure of joining one. They name it the ‘Liberation Club’, whose objective is to journal their existential struggles to overcome personal and social reifications.

This chapter focuses on the cities produced by state socialism first in the Soviet Union and then in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Split from the onset between radical change and incremental reform, socialist urbanism created some cities from scratch, yet others were old-timers transformed under the new political impetus. It will be argued that it is the latter type, especially historic capitals, that best represents the evolution of the socialist city. The political economy of making a socialist city is first outlined, discussing the urban impact of ideological tenets such as the elimination of private property and the town–country divide, the industrialisation drive and central planning. This is followed by a review of the evolution of the urban model contextualising trends vis-à-vis political and social changes: from Stalinist monumentality, through de-Stalinisation and its concern for the material conditions of life, to the last two decades when urbanism was overwhelmed by social and environmental problems. The conclusion discusses the afterlife of socialist cities, focusing on the consequences of privatisation, de-industrialisation, deregulation and decommunisation after 1989.

A great king in the North felt the need for a papal privilege even though the pope had no powers to enforce it.

Science, technology, and medicine (STM) and the European city are inextricably linked. In the mid-nineteenth century this intricate relationship became dialectic. The urban space not only served as a facilitator of knowledge production and circulation, but was also transformed by STM.

This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

Chapter 2 examines a period when various European traders attempted to settle in the Amazon by forming local alliances with Indigenous peoples. Although the numbers of these non-Iberian Europeans were tiny, the impact of their partnerships, and the resulting effort by the Portuguese and their allies to eliminate their presence, caused immeasurable damage to native societies in the estuarine areas. By 1640, the Portuguese had expelled the other European interlopers and exacted revenge on the Indigenous allies of their enemies, and started to establish riverbank settlements and plantations. In turn, this led the Portuguese to require labour to service this colonial economy and support their territorial ambitions. They pushed up the Amazon as far as the Tapajós and Madeira rivers to obtain their slaves from the riverbank polities, which gave rise to Belém as the focal point of the Eastern Amazon and marked the beginnings of the formation of a colonial sphere.

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.

The Poona Pact, 1932, was a watershed moment in the history of Dalit politics. Nearly a century later, it remains the subject of debate and discussion. A definite setback to the independent mobilization of the Depressed Classes, the Poona Pact deprived them of the historic right to a separate electorate with a double vote granted by the British government. This chapter seeks to describe and analyse the stance taken by Periyar and his Self-Respect Movement (SRM) towards what B. R. Ambedkar described as ‘a mean deal’ (Ambedkar, 2014 [1994], p. 40).1

The pact was signed at a time when the Indian National Congress was in the ascendant and had demonstrated its all-India character and strength through a series of mass agitations. In response to its rise, in south India, the non-Brahmin castes had mobilized under the Justice Party and Periyar's SRM. At the all-India level, the Depressed Classes had become a force to be reckoned with under the leadership of Ambedkar. Both Periyar and Ambedkar viewed the Congress primarily as a formation that represented the Brahmins and Hindu upper castes.

To understand the position taken by Periyar on the Depressed Classes’ question, we need to trace the emergence of Depressed Class consciousness and the formation of political organizations representing the interests of Depressed Classes in south India—a group that Eleanor Zelliot describes as ‘the other [apart from that of western India] politically vocal group of Untouchables’, the largest in terms of numbers in any region of India then (2013, p. 115). Even though the political demands of the Depressed Classes coalesced only at the time of the Simon Commission (1928), their roots can be traced back much further.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

The Christian military operations against the Iberian Muslim kingdoms (10th -11th centuries) led to the development of walled urban centres inhabited by warriors. During the later Middle Ages, Iberian urban economies benefited from European and Mediterranean trade and a large numbers of slaves, first traded from the Eastern Mediterranean, and later from Africa. The imperial projects of Portugal and Spain had a major impact on big cities like Lisbon and Seville, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The crisis of the seventeenth century and Spain’s decline in international politics facilitated that in the eighteenth century the inner cities became identified with rentier clergy and hidalgos lacking economic initiative, while the most dynamic urban development happened in port cities. Spain’s urban society was by then incapable of absorbing surplus rural populations, despite the positive effect of trade with colonies and the attractiveness of its growing cities.

Louis Dumont’s concept of hierarchy can illuminate not only the famous ‘two powers’ passage in Gelasius I’s letter to the emperor Anastasius but also later history of papal Church–State theory.

Each state has its own direct sales story, but none is richer than the one that played out in Michigan between 2014 and the present. Michigan pitted the power of the Detroit car companies, the United Auto Workers, and the politically active car dealers’ lobby against a California upstart supported by environmentalists, consumer rights organizations, and free market groups. The dealers got the upper hand in 2014 through legislative chicanery involving a single pronoun – “its” – but soon found that word games can backfire. Chapter 6 provides an inside account of the Tesla wars in the author’s own backyard.

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, bankers thrust the disciplinary power of the state between debtors and creditors. They used their influence to criminalise the act of writing an uncovered cheque as fraud. From 1932 until 1984, debtors who wrote bad cheques to guarantee loans faced serious consequences, from fines to jail time. By examining approximately 115 arrest records, Chapter 4 uncovers the early history of financialisation, as more people began to use new financial instruments. When people wrote uncovered cheques, some of them experienced first-hand the growing pains that came with participating in financial modernity. Cheques represented the new dynamics of economic citizenship at mid-century, as the political elite of the PRI shored up the interests of bankers at the expense of bank account holders. As this chapter shows, the criminalisation of bad cheques facilitated the emergence of financial capitalism by establishing new kinds of property rights and creating a new white-collar crime. In the process, political leaders introduced new forms of coercion into the debtor–creditor relationship that left debtors more vulnerable than ever.

This chapter introduces the central puzzle driving the study: Why are Tunisian unions militant and political in their protest behavior, while their Moroccan counterparts remain apolitical and moderate? It outlines the book’s core argument, emphasizing how authoritarian policies of labor exclusion or incorporation shape unions’ interests and capacities by influencing their relationships with political elites and their internal organization. The chapter reviews the current state of research on the topic, situating the study within broader debates on labor politics, authoritarianism, and regime change. It concludes with a justification of the case selection and an overview of the empirical methods guiding the analysis.