Arnold Schrier’s study, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (1958) set out to analyse the impact of mass emigration to America on the country of origin. Schrier collaborated with the Irish Folklore Commission to devise a questionnaire to gather data on the cultural and folkloristic reaction to emigration. While conducted in 1955, most of those interviewed were in their seventies and eighties and could provide memories and reflections on emigration and returned migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questionnaire is a significant source for those desiring to learn more about Ireland and America and possible Americanising influences. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the questionnaire and the data which emerged from it. Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh notes the nuanced attitudes towards the returned migrant evident in the survey responses, beyond the stereotype of the ‘show off’ returned Yank. Mac Cárthaigh concludes that the disruptive figure of the returned Yank highlighted the gap between the opportunity and novel experiences represented by emigration and the conservatism of the society left behind.

This chapter covers the period starting with the first emergence of commercial banking in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland leading up to the First World War. The chapter emphasises the role of nineteenth-century banking literature in shaping the ideas of what adequate capital meant in numbers. Moreover, the chapter looks at individual banks in all three countries and how they determined the size of their capital. In Switzerland, simple rules of thumb, such as the 1:3 capital/deposits ratio, were surprisingly persistent, while the English banks abandoned such strict guidelines very early on. In the United States, capital ratios were important from the beginning of banking. The chapter argues that the decentral or central organisation of the banknote issuance was a crucial determinant for the relevance of capital in the respective countries.

By the 1910s, the Indian independence movement was well under way. Intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, apprehensive about drawing scrutiny from the British government, hesitated to use the US as a base for actively spreading Indian independence propaganda. However, Indians such as Lala Har Dayal and Taraknath Das rejected such qualms as they sought to build an internationalist coalition to fight against White supremacy and colonialism. The center of this coalition was the Ghadar Party, a political organization created by Har Dayal and other Indian revolutionaries such as Sant Baba Wasakha Singh Dadehar, Baba Jawala Singh, Santokh Singh, and Sohan Singh Bhakna in 1913 in Astoria, Oregon. Mark Naidis argues that the Ghadar Party built alliances with the Irish independence movement and was primarily a promoter of Indian nationalism, seeking only to liberate India from the British. However, the party also had a platform of global decolonization and establishing democracy for all colonized peoples was one of their goals.

The Ghadar Party operated primarily along the West Coast, in states such as California and Washington due to the larger Indian population in the region, and as a result it did not reach many Black or Indigenous Americans, who lived in other areas of the US. Similarly, Ghadar Party members did not actively try to enlist Black Americans, focusing instead on the anti-colonial and self-determination struggles of subjects of European colonization. Lala Har Dayal, however, did compare the Black American experience to the situation of Indians under British colonialism, and theorized that American racism mirrored caste discrimination in India. Other Ghadar Party members such as Das and Ram Chandra believed that the condition of Indians under British rule was akin to the experience of Black slaves in the US prior to the Civil War. However, the party as a whole did not see the plight of Black Americans in the early twentieth century as a direct parallel to their own struggle in India, and they did not believe that the Black American struggle was one of self-determination. That outlook, and the fact that Har Dayal only led the Ghadar Party until 1914, may offer an additional explanation as to why the organization did not foster solidarity with African Americans.

If individual distinction was one criterion for a mansabdar's success, the ability to command men and women was another. The family emerged as a key political institution of the Mughal Empire to meet the latter condition. It supplied martial and marital resources, both of which were essential to expanding political power. The mansabdar, especially in the higher ranks, was a military position. Unlike the modern general, the mansabdar was not given troops and officers to lead. He was expected to recruit and outfit his own men. Rank and emoluments were tied to the number of cavalry a noble was required to maintain. A robust military labor market made the task easier, but a mansabdar also required trusted officers to lead campaigns and manage his estates, or jagirs. These men were often drawn from kith and kin. A noble's command over them was not merely a function of money relation but rather of his patriarchal position as the head of the family. Even as the family served as the basis of power for noblemen, it was also a source of threat. Male relations, including sons, brothers, nephews, uncles, and others, could and did challenge patriarchal authority, sparking off violent contests of power. Affective bonds of marriage and service, the redistribution of wealth, diplomacy, and coercion were some of the tools available to contain opposition.

Marriages helped forge alliances between men of different families. They could also strengthen relationships between men within a family. Consequently, women, too, were important political resources within this patriarchal system. By the end of the sixteenth century, royal and elite women increasingly became associated with the honor of the family. Their protection and violation both came to hold symbolic significance. Concomitantly, a man giving a woman in marriage was an act of trust, and often an act of submission, connoting giving one's honor to another man. Women could facilitate bonds between men in other ways, too. Sharing a woman's milk created meaningful ties between men, who would come to regard each other as foster-brothers. Dara Shukoh attempted to secure a Rajput noble's support in his succession struggle against his brother Aurangzeb by having him drink water that had washed his wife's breast.

WRITTEN ON A STONE AT A SPRING

Babur, the first king of the Mughal Empire, spent much of his early life wandering Central Asia. Though a Timurid prince, he was without a kingdom to rule. In 1501, after losing Samarkand to the Uzbeks for a second time, the nineteen-year-old found himself in the Matcha Hills. At a spring by a shrine, he inscribed the following lines (Image I.1):

The words are scratched into rock in a rough and uneven hand, without much evidence of considered design, and signed by Babur. Perhaps, these were the actions of a downcast prince, spurning power that felt beyond his grasp. It may be that he was seeking morbid comfort in the transience of life and the certainty of death.

However, the words of the ancient Persian king, Jamshed, quoted in the inscription, are more than a reflection on the futility of worldly accomplishment. They are an instruction to attend not to what one can take beyond death but to what one can successfully leave behind. Speech and conquest are ephemeral acts—“gone in the twinkling of an eye”—particularly in contrast to geological time immanent in the spring. In inscribing the verse, Jamshed introduces writing as another form that endures. It stays constant like the spring and constant by the spring. The longevity of the inscribed words is put in service of a literary reflection on transience, whose lesson returns the reader to the material visualization of the enduring nature of writing. By Babur's time, Jamshed's kingdom had long turned to dust. Yet these words, first carved in stone, persisted. If nothing can be taken to the grave, then Babur's act of leaving an inscription was not an admission of defeat, or a resignation to namelessness, but rather the resolve to leave behind something more enduring than conquest—a remainder, a reminder, a legacy.

Neurath’s first port of exile after the fascist takeover in Austria was the Netherlands. With the aid of existing connections there, he set up the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague, providing an official haven for the work of the Social and Economic Museum. It also acted as a base for the International Institute for the Unity of Science, through which Neurath organized its congresses during the 1930s. Neurath’s Dutch period was marked by increasing contacts with England and the USA: he wrote books in C. K. Ogden’s Basic English and for New York publisher Knopf; he also became editor-in-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. On several visits to the USA, he secured high-profile contracts for Isotype work, while also exploring the possibility of a foothold in Britain.