In the first years of the twenty-first century, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush sought to develop a strategic and economic partnership. Yet by 2007 US–Russian relations were marked by friction, and after 2012 they deteriorated into bitter enmity. This chapter argues that blaming the degeneration of relations on the KGB background, paranoia, and imperial ambitions of Putin is too simple and one-sided. It shows that the United States also spurred the decline by supporting “color revolutions” in countries around Russia, promoting NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, pushing regime change in countries such as Syria, Libya, and Venezuela, and placing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Although Russia and the United States cooperated on a strategic arms reduction treaty, Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, conflict increasingly overshadowed such collaboration. That outcome was not inevitable. Instead, unwise policy choices led to clashes, dishonest statements eroded trust, needlessly provocative rhetoric exacerbated tensions, and media sensationalism inflamed antipathies between Americans and Russians.

In Chapter 4, I consider the third and most controversial and canonical novel in the Pittsburgh Courier’s anti-lynching trilogy, Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924). Rather than presenting white transformation, the novel ends with the bitterness of a failed cooperative initiative and the lynching of both of its New Negro protagonists. When the New Negro physician’s culminating gesture of selfless professionalism is misconstrued by the town’s Klansmen, a white mob – another such mob had already murdered his more radical New Negro brother – ambushes and kills him. Loosely based on White’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lynching investigations of the 1919 Elaine massacre, the novel is the only work of fiction I examine that generated a published letter to the editor criticizing it. Considered within the montaged paratextual elements that surrounded it, women’s voices gain significantly more agency. In particular, the advertisements for guns around the serial installments emphasize the “ghostly” presence of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching militance. In addition, just one month before the serialization of White’s novel appeared in January of 1926, the Courier began publishing a column by anti-lynching activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

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.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

The legacy Detroit manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place. Having just emerged from near-death experiences during the 2008–09 financial crisis, they now had to face the onslaught not only of EV technology that they had long resisted but also of a company that refused to play by the settled rules on how cars are sold and serviced. Led by General Motors (GM), the legacies decided that their best tactic was to stand with their dealers and argue that Tesla should be denied direct sales, which would not only prevent Tesla from getting ahead but could keep Tesla far behind. This “raising rivals’ costs” strategy ultimately backfired, as Tesla got the right to sell direct in most states, and the legacies missed the chance to get their own right to compete with Tesla on a level playing field.

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.