Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

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.

Ideologue, reformer, feminist, firebrand secessionist: these are some of the many things E. V. Ramasamy Periyar has been called. If there is one strand of Periyar's thought that runs through all these titles and the politics that informed them, it would be his clarion call for self-respect. Not one to stop at dismantling the hegemonic power structures that he saw around him in India, Periyar was committed to the cause of reform in and for the Tamil diaspora as well. His views on nationhood thus ‘constantly violated the certitude about boundaries, identities, agents of change, and went beyond the territoriality of the nation’ (Pandian, 1993, p. 2282). Periyar emphasized that foreign settlement could enable the regeneration of Tamil society abroad, unfettered by India's oppressive traditions. Moreover, he saw the diaspora as an important source of financial support for the Dravidian movement. To this end, Self-Respect literature often asserted that Tamil people everywhere were bound by obligations of mutual assistance and reciprocity (Alagirisamy, 2016). Periyar visited British Malaya and Singapore twice in his lifetime: once in 1929–1930 and again in 1954–1955. Both visits were pivotal in aiding the development of a settled Tamil political consciousness in Singapore.

Scholars of the Indian Ocean world continue to trace the comings and goings of sojourners and settlers, privileging the ocean itself as a key agent of change (Moorthy and Jamal, 2010; Amrith, 2013; Menon et al., 2022). Yet, settlement also brought with it a sea-change in the lived presents and anticipated futures of migrant communities that aspired to citizenship.

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 popular focus on Periyar and Dravidian—as a person leading his loyal people—may invite placing nationalism's assertion, rather than critique, at the heart of political thought in twentieth-century Tamil-speaking South India. ‘Nationalism’ names the intuition that ‘France [is] for the French, England for the English … and so forth’ (Shaw, 2013) or, more generally, ‘nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy … requir[ing] that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’, insisting on ‘congruence of state and nation’, and refusing ‘ethnic divergence between rulers and ruled’ (Gellner, 1983, pp. 1, 134). Much turns on ‘ethnic’. Considerations include whether ‘ethnic’ is ‘racial’ or ‘historically constituted’ (Lenin and Stalin, 1970, pp. 66–68) and nationalism's ‘inherent contradictoriness’, both because its ‘rational and progressive’ promises of modernity are often premised on ‘traditional and conservative’ gestures to the past and because its anti-colonial articulation usually adopts the very imperial ‘representational structure … nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’ (Chatterjee, 1986, pp. 22, 38). So, when the August 1944 creation of the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) was heralded with ‘Long live Periyar, Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian, let the Dravidar Kazhagam flourish’1—entrenching an ‘ethnic’ idiom for Tamil-speaking South India's politics—an invitation for ‘a chapter on Periyar and nationalism’ encourages the interrogation of a twinned presumption of coherence: not simply of ‘Dravidian’ as a people loyal, but of ‘Periyar’ as a person leading.

In Chapter 3, I examine Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.’s By Sanction of Law, serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore Afro-American. By including a white man, a pregnant Black woman, and a New Negro character as among the lynching victims, describing the lynchings in the novel’s real time, crafting his lynching scenes as “liminal crucibles” propelling dramatic white racial reckonings, and depicting what appears as an interracial romance, Jones offers a more radical antilynching vision than does Rogers. In direct opposition to the dictates of white supremacist eugenicists, Jones evokes Israel Zangwill’s melting pot as the remedy to America’s lynch logic. Although the novel does not directly mention twenties-era racial-purity campaigns or the nativism and interracial marriage bans they generated, within the context of the newspapers, it deeply engages these movements. Like Rogers, Jones emphasized both the essential performative nature of American identity, epitomized by the New Negro’s education, demeanor, and work ethic, but unlike Rogers, Jones raised the nativist specter of radical immigrant agitators.

The roster of industrial cities includes not only single-industry towns but also ports, capitals, suburban factory districts and regional clusters of manufacturing centres. Over time, technological changes turned all modern cities into industrialised cities. This chapter follows the spread of urban industrial production across Europe and into overseas empires and examines its impact on local environments. It then traces the planning efforts of state governments and architects to combat pollution and to redesign manufacturing towns. De-industrialisation in the second half of the twentieth century added unemployment and emigration to the challenges of industrial cities, which had to substitute new functions for manufacturing jobs. Multi-functional cities with well-educated workforces have found this transition easier than smaller, more specialised manufacturing towns.

The Harlem Renaissance Weekly asks that we consider the largely overlooked newspaper serial fiction of the 1920s in relation to, and sometimes in direct response to, events of daily interest to Black people, and especially Black women, who likely constituted its primary readers. By recentering Black newspapers and by reading them as part of a reader-generated weekly montage, I show how this broad-based popular form helped readers renegotiate the cultural work of New Negroes, refiguring civil rights protest as they navigated the pleasures and dangers of the Jazz Age. At the same time, I demonstrate how the twenties New Negro Woman featured in the Pittsburgh Courier increasingly dominated racial representation and contested patriarchal Black leadership. If the New Negro Man led the race on the editorial page, the New Negro Woman represented the race on the front page. It was not Alain Locke’s implicitly male New Negro who defined the Harlem Renaissance week to week, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heterosexual love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black sociopolitical consciousness.

In the late nineteenth century, modern institutional lenders such as banks began to expand into the lives of ordinary and middling people, as well as into the firmament of small and medium enterprises. When the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex) opened its doors in 1884, it hired the American credit-rating agency R. G. Dun to appraise the creditworthiness of people and businesses. The bank needed clients, including people and businesses to whom it could lend money, and it used Dun’s services to find these potential debtors. Dun offered a new solution to the trust problem in credit relations: the credit report. Chapter 3 analyses risk and trust by examining this major shift in economic history, showing how the credit report as a form of bureaucratic economic information began to replace older face-to-face trust mechanisms. Analysing approximately 125 credit reports on people and businesses from the 1880s to the 1920s, the chapter examines changing ideas about creditworthiness as the modern credit economy took root. It argues that financial exclusion was baked in from the start, and that the power struggle between debtors and creditors changed when bankers succeeded in wedging a bureaucratic report between them

In the Middle Ages, Islamic Iberia was home to one of the largest urban networks in Europe, while Sicily saw the exponential growth of cities like Palermo and Syracuse after the Arab conquest in the ninth century. Islamic cities in Iberia and Sicily were not only landmarks of an unprecedented and early economic expansion, they also bear witness to a number of institutional characteristics and forms of urban planning that need to be considered by new and more inclusive historical approaches. In the tenth century, Umayyad Córdoba was by far the most populated city in western Europe, while the Fāṭimid rulers of Sicily embarked on a conscious policy of urbanising the island. During the Naṣrid period (1238-1492), Granada was booming. In many Castilian cities, such as Burgos, Avila, Segovia and Valladolid, flourishing Muslim communities were established during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This chapter tests the claims made by proponents of replacement and superdiversity in Europe in the last 170 years. During this period, not only migrations changed, but also the opportunity structure of cities, which find themselves tossed between the nation state ideal of cultural homogeneity and globalisation. Three approaches are applied: 1) comparative (both in time and space); 2) a distinction between central place and network cities; and 3) a much broader (cross-cultural) definition of ‘migration’, including internal, return and circular moves. An overview of the major shifts in migration and mobility patterns to and from European cities leads to a reconsideration of the idea of mobility transition. Although the composition of urban populations changed drastically, cities have managed to adapt to this transition. Migrations and mobilities created a fertile soil for changes and innovations that produced new forms of liveability and resilience. There are also dark sides, including segregation and discrimination, underclass formation, criminality and gentrification that pushes out less wealthy citizens. The ‘superdiversity’ frame should be handled with care, as it tends to underestimate the homogenising force of integration through urban institutions. Accordingly, what social scientists termed the high ‘liquid’ mobility had characterised cities since the Middle Ages.