This chapter offers a pathbreaking urban history of the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands. Eastern Ethiopia’s cultural distinctions and tense interethnic relations are often described in terms of broad contrasts between Somali nomadic pastoralism and the sedentary agriculture of Ethiopian highland populations. A close reading of historical accounts tells a different story. Beginning with a discussion of present-day ethnic competition and cooperation in the marketplace, I trace Jigjiga’s social relations back in time, showing how towns including Jigjiga have been crucial sites of interethnic encounters, identity formation, and cultural change. Shifting the focus away from Ethiopia’s tense history of ethno-territorial politics, I suggest that in the city, everyday interactions between identity groups are significantly shaped by expectations about transactability: who is trustworthy, who is not, and who is a legitimate target for cheating or for collaboration. This argument places urban encounters at the center of understanding the salience of ethnic and clan identities in eastern Ethiopia. I argue, furthermore, that urban encounters in Jigjiga play an important role in how distinct identity groups relate to geopolitical borders outside the city and have done so throughout Jigjiga’s history.

Global art histories predate the emergence of art history as an academic discipline in the early nineteenth century. This chapter considers their emergence in the seventeenth century against the background of religious and political controversy, Enlightenment quests for the origins of human culture, expanding trade empires, and colonialism. Three varieties of world art histories written in Europe can be distinguished, which succeed in chronological order but do not entirely replace each other: those driven by religious considerations; global concept-based projects inspired by nineteenth-century developments in psychology, anthropology, or the life sciences; and globalization studies. All three varieties start from a Western perspective, but the emerging field of global rococo is one of the most promising attempts to develop a history of the global entanglement of European art.

This chapter recounts women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and their short-lived hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession. Their cathartic moment of joy quickly evaporated when soldiers departed for Virginia, leaving them once again in a tormented state of lonely anticipation. Until the events of First Bull Run, men’s letters home expressed a jovial mood. This atmosphere changed drastically when loved ones began to die in combat. Thus, while Fort Sumter may be considered the first shot of the Civil War, it took First Bull Run for South Carolinians to realize the urgency of the conflict and finally, completely, enter the Civil War. The conclusion traces the lives of the elite white women profiled through the Civil War and its aftermath. Many of them earnestly subscribed to the Lost Cause myth after the war, writing rosy memoirs of antebellum days or joining Confederate memorial organizations. That their prewar predictions of doom and destruction do not line up with their postwar remembrances further proves that the Lost Cause mythology is divorced from the reality of the South after the Civil War.

Chapter 3 unpacks the “sickly season,” or the summer of 1860, characterized by the threat of mosquito-related diseases in the Lowcountry. It argues that South Carolinians’ insistence upon traveling to their usual vacation haunts, often ending their trips in New York City, reveals a still-uncertain political future. During this “season” (roughly late May to late October), South Carolinians felt time slow down, and talk of electoral politics faded to the background. South Carolina women continued to express political thoughts, however, revealing rivalries with Virginians that coexisted with desires to form social, and therefore economic and political, relations at Virginia’s healing and resort springs. The annoyance with Virginia reflects a tension between the two states of who is the true inheritor of the American Revolutionary spirit, and this chapter uses the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to explore shifting perceptions of a federalist and yet southern president. It also describes the increasing anxieties surrounding slave rebellion on the eve of secession, and to what extent enslaved women increased their day-to-day resistance as rumors of disunion spread.

Since the 2010s, the writing of European history – in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe and as the histories of nations in Europe – has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations and as responses to global challenges. On the other hand, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of reterritorialization.

This chapter addresses the place of material culture in the global turn in European history. How did extra-European objects come to be part of, and sometimes even define, the materiality of Europe? Goods from outside Europe have gained attention as objects of historical research through several separate pathways: the focus on global goods in the field of economic history on the one hand, and the growing presence of ethnographic objects and anthropological approaches in historical studies on the other. The thinking about material culture in Europe has profoundly changed with the integration of the global turn. From considering European material culture only from within a tightly bordered European perspective, approaches have shifted to not only identifying the ubiquity of non-European goods within European material landscapes but also recognising the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between European and non-European. European material culture is now understood to be full of traces that lead back to empire, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of labour. It includes objects that that were created elsewhere for European consumers, objects that were brought to Europe by collectors and (scientific) explorers, as well as European-made objects consumed and/or recreated in other parts of the world.

In August 2018, ʿAbdi Moḥamoud ʿUmar, president of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, was ousted and arrested by federal security forces. ʿAbdi had led an unprecedented decade-long push to securitize the Ethiopia-Somaliland border, to “Ethiopianize” Somalis, and to entice Somali migrants living abroad to return to Ethiopia and collaborate with the regional government. Yet a significant number of those who collaborated with and benefited from the regime also celebrated its downfall. This concluding chapter describes these more recent events as an entry-point to reflecting on the broader implications of the book’s argument that city-making and border-making are deeply intertwined in today’s world. It addresses three specific possible counterarguments, which serve to highlight the themes of the book and link them to broader debates in economic anthropology, border studies, migration studies, and urban studies.

The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This chapter distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations – and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

Chapter 3 is centered around the appearance in 1798 of twelve handwritten bulletins, known as pasquins, that announced a coming revolution to the people of Bahia. The bulletins denounced Portuguese rule, racism, and unfair wages, among other demands. They were placed in the public squares and markets of the city, and it was this act of encouraging the public to rebel that made the bulletins and their writers seditious. While the writers did speak to all Bahians, they targeted places where soldiers were known to congregate more than others. This chapter thus explores not only the demands of the pasquins but also how the documents were disseminated to the public. While there is little information about how or why most pasquins were found where they were, one bulletin that was found on a market stall brings into sharp focus the daily interactions between soldiers and market women. Studying these relations reveals new ways of thinking about the presence and participation of women in resistance movements.

In the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands, kontarabaan (contraband) trade is not just a source of livelihood. Over decades of efforts to avoid Ethiopian taxation, it has become an integral part of Ethiopian-Somali identity. This chapter locates today’s cross-border trade practices in the broader context of a century-long effort by Ethiopia and foreign colonial powers to impose effective authority and taxation on the Horn of Africa’s borderlands. Following small-scale traders and other travelers across several borders and checkpoints, it ethnographically explores what Jigjigan Somalis call “the cultural economy” (dhaqan-dhaqaalaha). Examining interactions between border-crossers and border-enforcers, it argues that Ethiopian-Somalis’ egalitarian ethos, long associated with pastoralist culture, has taken specific form in the Jigjiga area through practices of evading taxation and border regulation imposed by non-Somali authorities. The lines between governor and governed, tax-collector and tax-evader, border-enforcer and border-crosser have historically been entangled with ethnic distinctions between Somalis and so-called Habesha ethnic groups from central Ethiopia. Because of this, the advent of Somali-led border security since 2010 has prompted not only new challenges for cross-border traders’ livelihoods but also new debates about what it means to be Somali in the Ethiopian borderlands.