A global lens on European military history exposes the racist foundations upon which European empires have gone to war around the world over centuries. The racisms and nationalisms embedded in the narration of Europe’s military past prevent it from fully making the global turn. The study of war and militarization without the global turn enables the continued avoidance of questions that inherently challenge the nationalist, patriotic, and frequently racist and misogynist foundations that have long shaped the field. Moreover, European military historiography tends to ignore the many wars of anti-colonial resistance fought against colonizing powers in the long nineteenth century. Yet they were as much a part of European military history as any other wars. To globalize European military history, scholars must include analysis of anti-colonial resistance within the standard approaches to “military history.” Situating European military history more firmly in the global unsettles assumed knowledge about European military dominance, opening new possibilities for historians to consider armed struggles against empire within the same field of study as the recognized staples of European military history.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the book and traces how trends set by imperial historians of the nineteenth century framed the Tailors’ conspiracy as dangerous and as an isolated phenomenon while championing the 1789 conspiracy in Minas Gerais as foundational to Brazilian independence. Historians of the twentieth century rightly combated those efforts and fought to establish the conspiracy as equally significant as the plot in Minas Gerais. The book ends with the proposition that historians of the Tailors’ Conspiracy no longer need to do this kind of work. Instead, this book demonstrates the richness that comes from studying the conspiracy in an empire-wide context and in studying it from the vantage point of relations and not simply from the vantage points of ideology and rhetoric.

The introduction describes the principal arguments of the book. The first argument is that the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy was defined by the Brazilian High Court as sedition, which was defined as public disloyalty to the monarch. Taking sedition seriously allows us to see how people made public spaces into sites where people strategized and studied revolution together. The second argument presented is that the Tailors’ Conspiracy was not isolated but was rather the coda to three prior resistance movements across the empire: one in India, one in Angola, and one in Brazil. The Tailors’ Conspiracy was thus part of an empire-wide development in which the Portuguese had to contend with groups of revolutionaries who were racially, ethnically, and financially different and who all wanted greater political recognition from the empire. The third argument is that relations between and among people from all ranks of society was the baseline of political action. Differences in rank between conspirators were apparent when men were outlining the goals of the conspiracy. The political culture that sustained them was thus based on relationality, not cohesive demands.

In January 2018, I find myself racing frantically around Jigjiga with a local smuggler and a diaspora Somali known as a raucous opportunist. The two men work collaboratively to release a truck impounded at one of Ethiopia’s border checkpoints. Analyzing this situation, this chapter shows how the problems of moving goods across Ethiopia’s borders facilitate mutual interests and coordinated activities in the city. The situation ultimately scales up to involve a coalition of people from many of Jigjiga’s important social categories: diaspora (qurba-joogs) and locals (wadani), Somalis and non-Somalis, kin and nonkin, wealthy businesspeople and marginalized workers. Delving into situational analysis, this chapter introduces Jigjiga’s dynamic social fabric as it illustrates how people use urban space as a platform for managing cross-border connections and circulations. It focuses specifically on how border-related business collaborations converge in Jigjiga’s chat dens, where men create and evade social connections as they chew the mild narcotic stimulant known as chat or khat. Analyzing these locations and how they function as frontiers of relationship management, the chapter illustrates how elements of Somalis’ nonhegemonic or “egalitarian” cultural ethos converge to reinforce, rather than challenge, government hierarchies, border securitization, and urban inequalities.

Chapter 6 focuses on the men who were caught in the act of trying to start the intended rebellion. They were all free people of African descent, yet some among them also invited enslaved people to join the rebellion. Thus, relations between enslaved and free people are at the center of this chapter. The ways in which these people talked about freedom and bondage with one another presents a picture in which it is impossible to say that the conspiracy was definitively anti- or pro-slavery. There were some men who took abolition of slavery quite seriously, and there were others who had no interest in the matter whatsoever. Those who fit the latter group were connected to a shadowy group of elite white men who had been planning their own rebellion. Evidence of these white men’s participation in a conspiracy showed up frequently during a significant number of different men’s interrogations. The High Court chose to ignore or dismiss all such claims, clearing the way for them to transform the collective insurgencies of 1798 into a so-called Pardo conspiracy, free from confusion, free from uneven relations, and unconnected to the aims of elite white men.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.

This chapter concerns environmental relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe and Europeans, and Europe’s flora and fauna, altered environments on other continents. The content of other continents’ biotas, and their soils, seas, and mineral veins, affected Europe too. These sorts of connections, involving animals, plants, microbes, minerals – and many other components of the natural world – had occasionally powerful impacts on European and indeed world history. They began many millennia ago. This chapter begins with an overview of Europe’s distinctive environmental features. It then turns to four broad and overlapping categories, all considered only as regards European connections to other world regions: Europe’s history of biological exchanges, beginning with the arrival from Southwest Asia of the Neolithic complex of domesticated plants and animals; its imperial environmental history, which began in the fifteenth century; its industrial environmental history, which began in late eighteenth century; and the intellectual environmental history of Europe’s interactions with the wider world, mainly between 1700 and 1950.

This chapter explains the different definitions of politics, both nineteenth-century and modern; how emotions history and political history can be combined to better understand South Carolina women’s responses to secession and their political consciousnesses; the study of epistolary and diary-writing; gaps in the archive relating to secession; and how this work serves as a bridge between antebellum and Civil War studies of women. It also explains that most secession studies do not pay adequate attention to women. It argues that older women were more likely to expect war and destruction from secession, and that women expressed these political ideas through avenues traditionally gendered female and therefore socially acceptable.