Chapter 4 follows different groups of conspirators, with differing agendas, who began to find one another and come together. One group was composed of soldiers who felt that they had been passed over for promotions due to racism. Another small group that was disgruntled by a combination of low wages and racism came together in the shop of a master tailor. And a third group was composed of white professionals who were driven by republican ideas they gleaned from studying the French Revolution. For these groups to come together, there needed to be a delicate balance of maintaining secrecy while also growing the plot and preparing to reveal it publicly. This chapter demonstrates that it was the bonds of relation, and a conviction that they could take care of one another and administer society better than the state, that kept people committed to the plan as they worked through this dangerous moment of expanding the conspiracy. Seen from this perspective, their struggle constituted a definition of the political in which care, concern, rest, and the belief that the people were the seat of sovereignty were foundational to being radicalized.

This chapter argues that recent global histories of Europe represent one specific mode of global awareness in a long history of European global historical and social scientific consciousness. European history after our most recent “global turn” must take into account previous modes of global consciousness and examine how globalization has been shaped by this knowledge. Past understanding of global interconnectedness did not necessarily lead to more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were also conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These efforts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. This chapter argues that the half-century following the French Revolution witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization: a moment when the global integration that many considered responsible for the upheaval of the Revolution did not stop but was redirected in the service of a sovereign nation through the birth of new modes of social science and history writing.

Chapter 5 details how the High Court focused on soldiers when they attempted to discover the authors of the pasquins. It also examines how the first arrests that the court ordered triggered an attempt by the other leaders of the conspiracy to start the rebellion earlier than planned. In the final meetings, they were caught in the act of planning the rebellion by men whom they had invited to become part of the plot but who told everything to the authorities and then became spies for the regime. People of different ranks met and assessed each other for the first time at these gatherings and consequently made decisions about whether they would stay committed to the movement or not. The last days of the conspiracy were thus marked by a continuing commitment to rebellion but also by persecution, infiltration, and confusion about who was involved and what the web of relations were between the thirty plus men of African descent who were arrested and their relations with the few whites who were also interrogated.

Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

European history has been defined as a field by a notion of Europe – its borders, values, civilization, and nationalities – that is structured by Christianity and its secular legacies. Rather than seeking to globalize the history of Europe by considering the impact of European Christianity on other parts of the world, and how it was impacted by them, this chapter challenges that narrative. It asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, namely Jews and Muslims. These are historiographies with their own rhythms, conceptual frameworks, and geographies in which Europe carries quite different connotations. They shift our attention from the north and west to the south and east, enjoining us to think differently about Europe and the diversity that has always existed within it. Separately, these historiographies speak to very different experiences. Taken together, they help us to think differently about the interface between Europe and the world and to write the history of Europe itself against the grain.

This chapter argues that scholars of sex, sexuality, and gender have begun to engage with global histories, but in a selective manner and often characterised by ideas of one-way dissemination from Europe to locations beyond its borders. It suggests some entry points for a richer, multidirectional historiography, including the movements of indigenous and colonised peoples, economies of trading sex, the regulation of reproduction, and new histories of feminisms. Non-binary forms of gender and queer sexualities are prominent within such literatures and help to complicate established narratives. The chapter also highlights historiographical contributions that diversify our histories away from ‘great power’ geopolitics and draw out the specificity of regions such as eastern and central Europe and the experiences of ‘non-aligned’ states and of non-state actors such as religious organizations and racialized historical actors.

Chapter 2 recreates winter and spring 1860 in South Carolina, characterized by social calls and events, and demonstrates that while women noted when political events occurred, they quickly returned their thoughts to their daily lives as excessive commentary on electoral politics was improper. It explores a father’s and a daughter’s description of the same event to demonstrate that women’s political consciousnesses were not mere imitations of men’s. It then describes the Democratic National Convention of 1860, held in Charleston, which resulted in the walkout of southern representatives when Stephen Douglas was nominated as presidential candidate. As audience members, women shaped the political discussion and peer-pressured representatives into leaving the convention. Despite its importance in history, the convention quickly faded from women’s conversation, indicating that women did not immediately view this as a life-changing political event.

On the Ethiopia–Somaliland border, harsh checkpoints imposed in 2015 relegated Somali kontarabaan (contraband) traders – mainly women – to precarious livelihoods. Beginning with an ethnographic description of crossing through these checkpoints, this chapter outlines a contradictory dynamic: Jigjiga, Ethiopia’s premier smuggling hub, has become the capital of a local government bent on hyper-securitizing its borders. Intensifying border security interventions and a wave of return-migration among the global Somali diaspora have made many local merchants viscerally aware of their marginality and immobility in contrast to people with foreign passports and government connections. For small-scale traders, Ethiopia’s borders tend to operate as dividers. For government-connected elites and diaspora returnees, the same borders often enable opportunities for business connections and mutually profitable alliances. This chapter uses this observation to critique what it calls the “connective cities, divisive borders” portrait of globalization. It explains the importance of thinking about borders and cities as interconnected spaces of daily life. It introduces the book’s main arguments: that African urbanites are active agents who work to refashion geopolitical borders and create opportunities from them, and that everyday practices of exchange and mobility in the city do not just produce urban space but also resonate more broadly into border management.

Chapter 1 focuses on relations between soldiers and the Bahian people during the War for the Debatable Lands from 1776 to 1777. This war between Spain and the Portugal drew Bahia into an inter-imperial conflict that had a significant impact on local politics. The governor of Bahia tried to conscript young men into military service as well as step up efforts to catch deserters. People used a range of tactics to protect themselves and others from conscription as well as from slave catchers and brutal work conditions. Such protection could take the form of runaway enslaved people who hid deserters, to officers who refused to force young men into the army, to enslaved people and deserters fighting together against conscription officers. In short, many Bahians worked to avoid the wartime dictates of the empire at all costs. Colonial officials cited these relations as proof that the people of Bahia were disorderly. Yet the people castigated the military and the government as disorderly, and they acted accordingly when they felt threatened.

After 2010, hundreds of diaspora Somalis left seemingly stable lives in cities of North America, Europe, and Australia and flocked to invest in Jigjiga, a post-conflict boomtown ruled by an unstable authoritarian administration. This chapter follows these diaspora businesspeople beyond Ethiopia’s borders and explores how their motivations for, and practices of, return-migration to Ethiopia are shaped by the experiences of migrant life in cities outside the Horn of Africa. Drawing on fieldwork among Somali businesspeople in South Africa and the US as well as Jigjiga, I show that Somali return-migrants to Jigjiga are driven by a complex mix of motivations, including responsibilities for family support, perceptions of business opportunity in the Horn of Africa, and experiences of precarity and risk in cities abroad. The implication is that social transformations in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands cannot be analyzed only at a local level. These ongoing shifts in securitization and urbanization in the Horn’s borderlands are entangled with “urban borderwork” in cities far beyond Ethiopia. This analysis not only situates Jigjiga in a broader world of cities and social relations; it also pushes us to think more deeply about the dynamic relationship between city-making and border-making in the world more broadly.