This chapter examines how the head of the Safavid order, originally a Sufi master, came to acquire the mantle of kingship. Using sociolinguistics to analyze the political language, the chapter explores how the Safavid leader maintained his ties with the Qizilbash tribal chiefs. Their power dynamic was underpinned by a set of moral codes, with the concept of shukr al-niʿma (obligation of gratitude) being central. The chiefs viewed their loyalty as a debt owed to the Safavid leader, who provided them with both material and spiritual benefits.

Chapter 6 provides a detailed empirical case study on the feasibility of mediation in grassroots societies of China. This chapter employs qualitative methods, including participant observation and thick description, to illustrate the entire process of court mediation in a rural village in Yunnan Province. It highlights the unique micro skills and techniques used by grassroots judges to facilitate dispute resolution, emphasising the importance of mediation in preserving face and repairing interpersonal relationships. The chapter argues that mediation is particularly suitable for the rural context due to the social, cultural and economic characteristics of the region. It also discusses the challenges faced by grassroots judges, including their educational background and the mismatch between formal legal training and local needs. The findings suggest that mediation is a more effective and humane approach to dispute resolution in underdeveloped areas, offering a practical alternative to litigation.

This chapter examines the policy influence of churches under autocratic and democratic regimes. The main analysis focuses on Zambia and Ghana, both of which have undergone numerous periods of democratization and autocratization. The chapter shows how liberal democratic institutions improve the ability of churches to accomplish their educational policy goals in these two countries and, suggestively, across sub-Saharan Africa more generally by giving churches greater influence over policymaking and protecting their agreements with the state.

African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

Shah Tahmasb (r. 1524–76), the second Safavid ruler, faced the immense challenge of establishing his legitimacy and power in the shadow of his legendary father, Ismail, the founder of the dynasty. The Turkic tribal chiefs of Anatolia, including the Rumlus, Ustajlus, Afshars, Qajars, and Takkalus, were often resistant to subservience, especially to a ruler they perceived as lacking the military might and charismatic authority of Ismail. During the first half of Tahmasb’s reign, this challenge was particularly acute.

To secure his rule and the loyalty of his chiefs, Tahmasb turned to the spiritual concept of ikhlās (purity of intention), a powerful moral code drawn from the Qurʾan and expounded in Sufi ethics. This concept, used to consecrate the bond of loyalty between the chiefs and their Sufi king, made the loyalty morally binding and more difficult to break. In the face of political instability, marked by civil war and a massive Ottoman invasion, the Safavid dynasty’s survival depended on this cultivation of sacred loyalty.

Despite his lack of immediate personal charisma, Tahmasb’s cultivation of consecrated loyalty solidified the chiefs’ allegiance and helped the Safavids endure their most perilous period, preserving both the dynasty’s cohesion and its long-term survival.

George McCall Theal’s early career in an emergent South African print industry was fragmented, contradictory and ambiguous. Reflecting the volatility of his environment, he strategically shifted careers, voices and readerships. This period in Theal’s career reveals a profound instability that induced the young migrant to occupy a variety of public spaces and to immerse himself in a range of writing and print endeavours. Obscured by his later racist ideologies, Theal’s initial success is based partly on his collaboration with and reliance on African sources for his first major international publication on Xhosa folklore and ethnography. This chapter is primarily concerned with the significance of this collaborative process for Theal’s career and for early print culture in South Africa. Theal’s urge to publish resulted in a mode of writing and publishing that was undeniably ground-breaking, and as history would show, devastating, in its inscription of a racist ideology.

The slave trade was immediately raised as a matter for debate in the First Federal Congress. In February and March 1790, Quaker petitions on the subject were presented to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a body mainly composed of Quakers, took the lead in presenting these memorials and some of their members, notably James Pemberton and Warner Mifflin, were especially active in providing support. South Carolina’s delegates in Congress tried hard to divert attention away from the moral claims of the memorialists. The issue proved to be too divisive for extensive consideration by Congress at a time when politicians were putting all their efforts into the sustained operation of a national government. For most of the 1790s the American Convention of Abolition Societies met annually to coordinate anti-slave trade activity and to pressurise Congress to act in relation to those aspects of the slave trade where it could legitimately intervene. It never translated its good intentions into a wide-ranging anti-slave trade campaign, but it did pressurise Congress to introduce laws in 1794 and 1800 to restrict the participation of American citizens in the foreign slave trade. The elephant in the room of slave trade restriction in the 1790s was South Carolina, which kept its ports closed to African importations throughout the decade and up to 1803. A sectional divide had emerged in South Carolina between upland planters who needed to recruit additional Africans to grow cotton and indigo and tidewater planters who had sufficient black workers cultivating rice. Many smuggled slaves were brought into South Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century and it only needed a change in the state’s prospective economic circumstance to put pressure on a change to laws relating to the slave trade.

The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States was the result of proscribing the traffic step by step. It was determined by complex contingent factors and not by a wave of anti-slave trade campaigning. This was partly because the attack on the slave trade moved at different paces in various parts of North America; partly because of the location of political sovereignty; and partly because the issue of the slave trade was bound up with broader concerns over slavery and politics in the transition from the thirteen British colonies in North America to the new federal nation. Quakers, emphasising moral and humanitarian arguments against the slave trade, made significant inroads into banning the slave trade in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the generation before the American Revolution, and their influence later spread throughout the northern colonies and states and into the Chesapeake by the 1780s. But the Quaker anti-slave trade stance did not spread sufficiently among other groups in North America to produce widespread disapprobation of the Guinea traffic by the time of the American revolutionary war. Thus, there was no national consensus against the slave trade when the United States was created.

This chapter covers the Democrat Party’s first term in office (1950–54), focusing on two aspects of this period: first, its leaders’ consolidation of power; second, the ways in which their economic policies of lower taxes, expanded credit, and increased investment depended on close relations with the United States. To secure economic and military aid, Democrat Party leaders sent soldiers to fight in the Korean War and continuously reminded US officials of Turkey’s strategic value. Drawing on diplomatic archives from the United States, Britain, and Turkey, this chapter reveals the dynamics of these negotiations. Moreover, the chapter shows how control of economic policymaking was a crucial arena of intraparty power struggles, both among the top leadership and at the provincial level. Again, looking at examples from Balıkesir and Malatya, we see how tensions increased between the parties during the early 1950s. We also see how the DP’s control of government allowed it to steer projects to provinces it controlled and penalize provinces that rejected it.

This chapter focuses on the period beginning with the Democrat Party’s electoral triumph in 1954 and ending with its 1955 parliamentary group crisis, when the government nearly fell. In this period, economic conditions ceased to favor the party. A slump in global demand reduced Turkey’s access to foreign exchange, while the government’s expansionary monetary policies encouraged inflation. As economic challenges intensified, economic policy became as much of an electoral liability as a strength. Facing domestic criticism, Democrat-led governments limited the bounds of public dissent in schools, media, and political organizations. Prime Minister Menderes and his allies resisted calls from economic liberals in their own party (as well as the United States) to devalue the lira, increase taxes, and develop a long-term economic plan. The resulting tensions fractured the party, leading to the departure of many of its liberal members. These efforts to constrain institutions that provided checks and balances on the government constituted a policy of de-democratization. At the same time, the party’s leaders played international creditors off against one another and sought access to additional credit.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the Safavid order had militarized, emerging as a significant threat to regional powers like the Aqquyunlu, Qaraquyunlu, Shirvanshah, and later, the Ottomans. This provoked the deaths of key Safavid leaders – Sheikh Junayd, Haydar, and Sultan ʿAli – along with thousands of their followers, who were killed in battle or executed. Despite these devastating losses, the Safavid community’s loyalty to their cause remained steadfast.

Between 1774 and 1787, greater condemnation of the slave trade occurred from mainly Christian individuals and groups, notably Quakers, than was the case before the American War of Independence. The humanitarian arguments made, however, did not translate into coordinated campaigning against continuance of the slave trade. Both Continental Congresses banned slave importations as part of a wider package of non-importation measures on British goods, but neither had any authority to impose enforcement measures. Jefferson’s attempt to insert a clause into the Declaration of Independence to prohibit slave importations backfired as he penned words stretching far beyond the required remit of such a clause and was forced to withdraw his statement. The Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation lacked the political authority to deal with slave imports. Yet positive activity occurred at state level. Delaware and Vermont banned the slave trade in their state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 respectively. The Bill of Rights included in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 proscribed slave imports. The New Hampshire state constitution of 1783 also banned slave imports. In 1778 Virginia passed a statute to end slave importations to the state. The Pennsylvania gradual abolition of slavery law in 1780 incorporated a bill in the same state from the previous year that banned slave imports. Abolitionist views spread widely as a result of efforts by Anthony Benezet and other Quakers, but there was no national campaign against the slave trade. South Carolina was the state where the most acrimonious arguments occurred over the slave trade. The state legislature reopened Charleston to slave importations in 1783 and over the next four years thousands of Africans were imported. Divisions underscored the reality that proscribing the entire slave trade to the United States could only happen under the aegis of national political authority and that was absent in 1787.

The Safavids’ rise to power was deeply intertwined with their Sufi spiritual practices, which provided a unique advantage over their political rivals. Early followers of the order viewed themselves as disciples (murids), accepting the absolute spiritual authority of their leader, the murshid-i kāmil (perfect spiritual guide). The master-disciple relationship, grounded in a power dynamic of domination and submission, created a deep sense of solidarity within the Safavid community.