How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.

Seen from Europe and America, exhibitions reinforce our understanding of World War I as watershed, marking a turn from the confident embrace of industry and empire to a world of economic anxiety, colonial ambivalence, and modernist experiment. Japan shared in these too, but the evidence of exhibitions also points to continuities, of municipal aspiration, ongoing commercialization, and colonial development. This chapter shows how ongoing urbanization and continental empire increased the demand for exhibitions from private companies, local governments, and colonial authorities, both to tie themselves to the nation and to find a distinctive place for themselves on the imperial map. They were also eager to cater to the emerging middle-class demand for the things that would provide them with a cultured but moral urban life. The demand, in turn, provided employment for a new breed of showmen (rankaiya), who were able to provide the attractions and advertising to make sure the visitors would come.

This chapter offers an introduction to Making India Work. It presents a snapshot of India’s welfare regime today and outlines its distinctive features in comparative perspective. The chapter establishes that the development of social policies has been a significant component of the building of India’s national economy and polity. Historical decisions have had longer-term implications for the shape and size of the country’s social provision, yet social policy has been curiously marginalised within classic scholarship on India’s political economy. The introductory chapter defines the term ‘welfare regime’ as distinct from a ‘welfare state’ and introduces the analytical tools necessary to identify the components of a welfare regime in a context of high economic informality. It provides an overview of methods and historical sources and summarises the book’s main arguments before providing an outline of the book structure.

The book is an attempt to rewrite Atlantic history by reassessing the story of the slave trade. As already noted, it is based on the digital humanities project www.slavevoyages.org, which at the time of writing is fourteen years old. If we include its CD-ROM predecessor published by Cambridge University Press in 1999, the data it provides have been in the public domain for a quarter-century. In that time many millions of visitors, whether scholars, students, the media, or interested members of the public have drawn on it in ways that its compilers and editors could never have imagined. Many more again have passed through exhibitions around the Atlantic world, including the permanent display of Washington, DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Nantes Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery that have incorporated its offerings. Few discussions of the slave trade fail to cite this resource. It is often described as a model of what the social sciences should be trying to achieve – presenting reliable, accessible, and renewable data to the interested public along with some basic interpretations. Consistent with this assessment, it has received financial support from a range of countries that almost matches the reach of the slave trade itself. In what many will see as appropriate, the only continent that has not contributed funding to its development is Africa. Public and private financial support over the years amounts to several million US dollars.

For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

To survive the city and the war, displaced families and friends needed to keep themselves and each other physically, socially, mentally, spiritually, and culturally safe. This chapter is about this discussion of self-preservation and what this entailed when, to many, the war and displacement risked societal disaster. It explores the debates and projects that were built within new churchyards, evening schools, and social spaces, where men and women argued over what integrity and moral order looked like. Social and cultural projects – from night language schools and clan associations to childcare circles and neighbourhood vigilante gangs – all involved setting out definitions of responsibility and standards. They also raised questions about the practical meaning of being displaced ‘southerners’. In a stressful expensive city and a fragmenting southern war, this chapter explores how people developed different limits of mutual support and kinship, and understood their political community based on different standards of Blackness, shared history, and knowledge.