The final days of 1860 demonstrated a marked difference from the joys of secession just weeks before. Chapter 5 explains the relativity of time for South Carolinians as they rapidly approached secession and then spent the next several months waiting for action. The occupation of Fort Sumter caused women in South Carolina to feel constantly on edge and anticipate war. This chapter discusses melancholy Christmases, comparisons of weather to the state of the Union, and a restless energy that caused the most pacifist of women to long for action. Some women used writing to relieve their tensions, and others could not write. Those that did utilized popular conventions of the sentimental novel to express their political misgivings and describe their subdued holidays. Anxious women increasingly predicted a millenarian end of days and prayed for God to take them to heaven rather than allow them to exist in a world with freed African Americans. This chapter takes seriously these women’s frantic, religious pleas and explores the interrelation between emotions, politics, and religion. It ends on the eve of yet another moment of catharsis: the siege of Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this chapter advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926–2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multimedia representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves – Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France – renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings – and continue to do so today.

Perhaps the key area where global history has affected European history has been the study of the trade in commodities and its impact on European consumer behaviour. Yet there remains a divide between study of the production and distribution of goods from coffee and sugar to porcelain and muslins and study of how these goods became desirable, then embedded in European consumption and everyday life. Historians have investigated the profound impact of Asian manufactured goods on the material cultures of Europe, but they know less about their conditions of production and trade in China, India, and Japan. Global history, now combined as it is with the recent rise of the history of capitalism, also challenges European historians of consumer culture and industrialization to connect the European reception of wider world goods and raw materials to the Americas and to slavery. This is a key new direction in historical research. At a time now of historians uncovering Europe’s slavery past, and enquiring further into coerced and low-wage labour systems, we continue to write histories of slavery and slave plantations separately from those of Europe’s consumer cultures of sugar, coffee, and cotton.

For Somali merchants in eastern Ethiopia, border securitization seems to be driving urban inequality. Ethiopia’s governing elites have instrumentalized borders, offering exclusive import–export licenses to political supporters, including diaspora return-migrants. In turn, the beneficiaries of these trade schemes speculate in sectors such as urban real estate. The “informal” kontarabaan (contraband) markets in Jigjiga are a seeming locus of resistance to these new elite collaborations. In contrast to the securitized checkpoints around the city, officials rarely try to regulate smuggling within the dense urban market. But is this really an issue of governance versus informality, political elites versus lower-class traders, and border security versus urban tolerance? Looking closely at people’s transactions in urban space, this chapter shows how expectations about obligation and reciprocity crosscut apparent social divisions in the city. In their daily interactions, both merchants and government regulators often draw on ideals of Somali nonhegemonic or “egalitarian” ethos to explain and justify their activities. Yet the way these egalitarianisms function in the city looks different than the idealized “egalitarian society” of anthropological lore. I show how people’s practices of reciprocity and exchange are spatial work that affects how “transformations of space” including walls, streets, and borders operate in daily life.

Chapter 1 describes the lives of antebellum women and the forms of politics that were socially acceptable before the Civil War in order to demonstrate how 1860 was markedly different from 1859. It explains women’s defense of slavery as well as their reactions to South Carolina’s past slave rebellions, then describes how John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was tied to and augmented this fear of insurrection. South Carolina women’s politics during the Nullification Crisis are explored to both make connections to women during secession and demonstrate how Nullifier women faced criticism for being political. The Nullification Crisis, slave rebellions, and John Brown’s raid eventually faded from women’s writings and they returned to antebellum life, an action they were not able to take in 1860.

Chapter 4 argues that the return of South Carolinian elites from their summer travels by October 1860 marks the end of the antebellum period for the state. By October, men and women alike were unable to avoid discussions of politics, a frenzy which sparked suddenly rather than grew over the summer. Almost all women in this study realized that Lincoln’s impending election brought about a point of no return. This chapter explores how women grappled with this all-consuming political atmosphere, both with religious reservation and wide-eyed patriotism, all within the constraints of political expression considered suitable for “ladies.” It argues that women were more likely to predict the devastating effects of war that disunion would bring and engages with masculinity studies in explaining why men could not, or would not, express similar worry. To make sense of their rapidly changing world, women wove political discussion into letters and diaries alongside social visits, chores, and the weather, and self-consciously defended their right to do so. The chapter closes with the cathartic events surrounding South Carolina’s secession on December 20, 1860.

This chapter explores the global entanglements of Europe’s musical past, showing that the continent’s music culture has never been isolated and has always been shaped by global influences.

When Ethiopia aligned itself with the US in the global war on terror after 2001, top–down security interventions in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands led Somali secessionist conflict to spiral out of control. The protracted “state collapse” of neighboring Somalia spawned regional instability throughout the 1990s. In what is today Somali Regional State (SRS), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) spearheaded Somali-led rebellion against the new Ethiopian federal government. Somali rebels massacred Chinese oil workers in 2007 and attempted to assassinate SRS’s president in Jigjiga in 2008. Why, then, did diaspora Somalis begin returning from stable lives in North America and Europe to invest in Jigjiga before these conflicts had even settled? This chapter addresses this question by tracing how SRS authorities sought to create alliances among the global Somali diaspora. Through an ethnographic analysis of the dramatic change in diaspora–homeland relations that unfolded after 2010, it argues that border securitization in the Horn of Africa is not just a matter of topography – of territorial control, walls and razor wire, and security patrols. It is also a matter of reorganizing a complex topology of transnational relationships.

This chapter reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the chapter explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: The question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

This chapter offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, it discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. It argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the chapter also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.