Between the 1910s and the 1930s, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to build several alliances with Indians in his quest for transnational racial solidarity. While his “To the Nations of the World” address at the 1900 Pan African Congress was his first major example of internationalizing the Black struggle, his initial impact on Indians came at the First Universal Races in 1911. At the Congress Du Bois's speech entitled “The Negro Race in the United States of America” made a lasting impression on some Indians associated with the Gandhian movement. In his speech he sought to inform the international community about the problems of Black Americans in the hope that he could build international allies to sympathize with the Black American struggle. Du Bois argued that although the Civil War had formally ended slavery, White Americans in the US South were still “determined to deprive the Negroes of political power and force them to occupy the position of a labouring caste.” Du Bois came to the meeting armed with a plethora of statistics to prove that Black Americans were relegated to menial labor and were not equally represented in the higher divisions of labor. He gave additional examples of Black Americans being forced to attend underfunded schools and concluded that in addition to racism, a lack of educational funding was the greatest factor for Black Americans being denied the same career paths as their White counterparts.

Du Bois hoped to prove to the Congress that there was no real biological difference between races. White Americans simply chose to subjugate Black Americans to lower socioeconomic positions based on phenotypical features and skin color. He stressed that if Black Americans were offered a more democratic form of government and better educational facilities, they could eventually prove that there were no intellectual deficiencies amongst Black Americans in the US.

Although Gandhi did not attend the Congress, he sent his associate H. S. L. Polak, an English ally from South Africa, in his stead. The event was also attended by Indian National Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

I have chosen to connect the unique histories of both India and the United States (US) for a multitude of reasons. My grandfather, Lakhan H. Massand, was an activist and a freedom fighter during British rule in India. He had an idealistic vision of a free and secular India where there was no oppression, and everyone was equal. To achieve this lofty goal, he was willing to make supreme sacrifices and even withstand the tortures of imprisonment. In fact, when India finally achieved independence in 1947, my grandfather was in jail and was released only in 1948. Unfortunately, my research and visits to India have impressed upon me that my grandfather's vision for an egalitarian Indian society never truly came to fruition. I noticed that many low-caste Indians in Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, and New Delhi lived in dilapidated homes in a hyper-segregated region with a history of especially pernicious race and caste prejudice. Likewise, while I studied at Tulane University, I came to understand that a similar form of class and social stratification existed in New Orleans, which consistently disadvantaged local Black Americans. This situation became clearest to me when a fellow academic and friend was racially profiled by the New Orleans Police Department. When he was eighteen, he was picked up at random, physically assaulted by the police, and driven to meet a White woman who had been mugged near Tulane and Loyola University. The police tried to get her to name my friend as the perpetrator. The woman refused and insisted that the man who mugged her was someone else. Yet the police persevered with the false charges until he revealed that one of his relatives was the Deputy Superintendent of Police in New Orleans.

Inspired by my friend's story, and countless others who have experienced discrimination based on their racial background, I have chosen to write a book which further disseminates the realities of the lived experiences of low-caste Indians and Black Americans. Defenders of the American Dream preach that one of the core American values is equality for all, regardless of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, or social status.

India finally achieved independence in 1947. Afterwards, W. E.B. Du Bois sought to utilize the newly free country to put pressure on the US to address its racism. His strategy was to build publicity and awareness of White supremacy in the US amongst the international community. His primary means for doing so was by drafting a petition for the United Nations (UN) in collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), hoping that the UN could mandate a resolution for Black civil rights. Du Bois's efforts caught the attention of B. R. Ambedkar who saw parallels between the Black American struggle and Indian untouchability. Using Du Bois as a source of inspiration, Ambedkar sought to create his own UN petition to solve India's caste problem. Du Bois's petition did not reach the floor of the UN, however. Prominent NAACP members such as Eleanor Roosevelt refused to present it, fearing that it could tarnish the international reputation of the US. Ambedkar also did not follow through on his UN petition and instead tried to address caste by working with the Nehru government.

One of the most significant aspects of Du Bois's work during the 1950s was his generation and harnessing of negative Indian sentiment toward the US to apply pressure upon the US government to address Black civil rights. In 1951, Du Bois collaborated with fellow Black Americans Paul Robeson and William Patterson to draft a second UN petition. While the petition again stopped short of the floor of the UN, it tarnished America's image amongst some Indians and the Indian media and increased Indian awareness of American racism. As a result, it prompted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to urgently repair the image of the US abroad. Indian public opinion played a part in pressuring the US Supreme Court to desegregate public schools through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Douglas along with fellow justice Earl Warren acknowledged it as an influential factor, although international concerns were not cited explicitly in the ruling's text.

When Japanese people confronted the international community in the interwar era, their concerns and ideals about the fringes of the family and marriage were aimed at not only the Japanese metropole but also its colonies like Taiwan. Metropole–colony relations were not as clear as one might expect in that there was no direct institutional connection between Japan and Taiwan regarding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships. However, this chapter reconstructs their discursive links and reveals how cultural critics, social workers, jurists, and others simultaneously presented their competing visions of social progress in Japan and colonial Taiwan. In Japan, progress appeared in the visions of assuming and ensuring women’s personal independence, choice, and self-awareness; in Taiwan, Japanese colonizers defined progress as incorporating women into society. Despite the hierarchical divergence of the metropolitan and colonial perspectives, however, they converged on emphasizing women’s expected behavior as members of the family and society in the 1930s. Women became the sole bearers of progress, which ultimately engendered the empire.

The Bedouin stateless economy relies upon taking what is within reach. The sedentary state–led economy builds its skills through time and accumulation. Sedentary life outlives the state.

A new kind of book emerged in Sindh at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Written by Islamic scholars, it contained Sindhi verse in the Arabic or modified Arabic script. The latter script, which first appeared in these books, would later become the standard for writing modern Sindhi. These early authors translated Islamic law of the Sunni Hanafi variety from Arabic into simple rhyming Sindhi verse. In particular, they described the law on obligatory ritual performance such as ablutions and prayers, fasting, and animal sacrifice and slaughter. This genre had already existed as oral performance in the form of preaching and sermonizing in seventeenth-century Sindh. Its appearance as a book broke a century-long, sustained focus on Persian-language book writing. It marked an important watershed in the history of Sindhi literature, inaugurating a textual tradition in Sindhi that, over the course of the eighteenth century, grew to include Sufi and court poetry, along with prose as well.

This book signaled a transformation in the early modern self and the practice of leaving legacies. Before, Sindhi verse was performed for elite literary gatherings and other audiences, recited in Sufi khanaqahs as part of ecstatic practice, and sometimes abstracted in Persian prose. It was not written as book manuscripts to represent the work and legacy of an individual. The previous chapters have shown that Persian was the language of individual self-representation in the form of books and epigraphy for men associated with Mughal officialdom. Even written memorialization of Sufi saints at this time occurred in Persian and emphasized the saint's facility in elite languages. Qazi Qadan (1463–1551), the earliest Sufi known to have composed Sindhi verse, was remembered in Masum's The History of Sindh (1600–01) for his command over Arabic-language knowledge of Quranic commentaries and Prophetic hadith and Persian-language knowledge of letter-writing and accounting. Masum made no mention of Qazi Qadan's Sindhi verse. In fact, the most extensive collection of his Sindhi poetry is preserved in a Dadupanthi anthology of bhakti saints. Similarly, Shah Karim of Bulri (1538–1622/23), another Sufi saint known today as an early Sindhi poet, has no contemporary manuscript of Sindhi verse.

The chapter examines tangible and intangible evidence associated with the Irish who emigrated and settled in America and who sometimes returned to Ireland and evaluates whether it can be considered as part of an Americanising of Irish identity. Material culture associated with Irish emigration to America such as posters, guidebooks, newspapers, wakes, places, spaces, letters, remittances and the returner, ideas and behaviours became integral parts of Irish society and their influence went beyond their practical use in facilitating departure. Each created a vision of America in Ireland which accords with Mark Wyman and Dirk Hoerder’s European-wide findings that two distinct images of America emerged in the home country: the ‘materialistic view of the land of wealth, and the idealistic view of the land of equal rights and democracy’. These largely positive views of America translated into ‘Americanising’ forces in Irish society alongside British and other European economic, political and cultural forces in Ireland. These two-way forces revolving around America as a destination and as a swiftly modernising country, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards, meant that Irish women and men of all backgrounds were exposed to American ideas, practices and behaviours.

Like the migrants from many other regions of India, Bengalis cherished high hopes of better lives when they left for British Malaya. As seen in the preceding three chapters, a group of migrants improved the conditions of their lives throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some became quite successful in their professions. A majority, however, continued to suffer existential challenges under colonial and postcolonial conditions. From their journey to their settlement, the life and times of Bengali expatriates in the Malay world were full of stories of aspiration and struggle. This chapter captures a glimpse of these stories.

Pre-embarkation Difficulties

The embarkation process for migrant labourers was generally dreadful. Their grievances started at the very beginning of their journey. The Government of Bengal erected many depots and sub-depots to collect potential labourers in rural areas. The labourers were taken to a musafir khana (like a modern shelter house) at Calcutta port for overseas embarkation from these depots. One sub-depot at Goalundo (presently Rajbari district in Bangladesh) sent labourers to Calcutta port or the Assam tea gardens. Government medical officers had to prepare annual reports on these depots, which often positively depicted sanitary issues, accommodation and food supplies. However, such positive reports contradict the reality as reflected in other historical sources. For instance, about 615 emigrants were registered in the sub-depots at Garden Reach in Calcutta in May and June of 1918. Although a majority of them were able to reach the Calcutta shelter house, some emigrants were returned on account of their lack of physical fitness, by demand of their relatives, or simply because some of them refused to go any further than the Goalundo depot. Therefore, the pre-embarkation process was anything but easy.

In addition to the contracted or indentured labourers, ‘free’ migrants also embarked from the Calcutta port and experienced a frustrating process. They left their villages and found their way to the Calcutta port by trains or bullock carts. After that, they boarded a ship for a ten- to fifteen-day voyage to Southeast Asian ports. Thousands of them disembarked at Penang or Port Swettenham.

This chapter uncovers the unintended trajectory of Taiwanese women’s freedom among younger adopted daughters in the Japanese colonial courts. Family-centric, gender-based physical unfreedom continued to be one of the salient administrative and legal problems in Taiwan from the precolonial period to the late 1910s. Male household heads were not ready to follow the judicial construction of women’s freedom of movement during the early to mid-1920s. However, Japanese judges involved with female litigants shifted their focus to women’s freedom of choice – defined by intent and contractual freedom among adopted daughters – as a new boundary delineating their relationships with households in civil and criminal cases in the late 1920s. Women’s choice continued to be a central point of dispute when adopted daughters became targets of their parents and strangers. These daughters’ ambiguous capacity regarding their age, class background, and sexual integrity was misrepresented to legitimize their adverse labor and life conditions, including sex work. Yet, it was within the flexible contours of choice that the courts protected women’s agency, which, in turn, became a constitutive part of colonial history.

Exporting goods from Bengal into the Malay world took a new turn with British imperial expansion. The EIC established monopolistic maritime trade, which reshaped the commercial network for the circulation of Bengali commodities across the Indian Ocean world, particularly in the intra-Asian markets around the rim of the Bay of Bengal. They transported Bengali commodities to long-distance seaports, including Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia. The movement of these goods steadily increased, which integrated the market and facilitated Bengali mobility within the British colonies. Most of the formal professions undertaken by the Bengalis in the Malay world have been discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter explores two other aspects related to Bengali migrant employment: the flow of products from Bengal and the involvement of Bengali migrants in trade and commerce. It mainly focuses on Bengali petty traders who played an essential role in shaping a transnational commercial space from the late nineteenth century.

Bengal Commodities across the Indian Ocean World

Before the advent of colonialism, seaports in the Indian Ocean, particularly those located between the coast of Bengal and the Malay Archipelago, were integrated into local, intra-regional and inter-regional networks of merchant communities and zones of commodity exchange. In other words, these commercial zones were structured in micro-, meso- and macro-regions. The increasing dominance of European, and especially EIC, shipping from the mid-eighteenth century did not change this spatial organisation of commercial activities around the seaports. After getting hold of Bencoolen, Bengal and Penang by the end of the eighteenth century, the British controlled the trade network across the northeastern Indian Ocean. During the early nineteenth century, the British took over Malacca and Singapore and formed the Straits Settlements, which included three main seaports: Penang, Malacca and Singapore. These seaports were made duty free for all merchants and were clearinghouses of intra-Asian and long-distance trade. A large quantity of Bengal commodities was transported from the Calcutta port to the ports of the Malay Peninsula, notably Malacca, Penang and Singapore. The EIC re-exported most of the commodities from these seaports to the eastern coast of the Indian Ocean, particularly Java, China, Thailand and Australia. Thus, the British created an exclusive commercial zone between South and Southeast Asia.

This chapter discusses images and objects associated with Byzantine betrothal and marriage, especially those examples that date prior to the earliest manuscripts of the marriage ceremony (which begin only from the eighth century). Special attention is given to art historical debates on the use and purpose of early Byzantine “marriage rings,” as well as marriage belts. The chapter concludes with an analysis of some later examples of marriage representations in fresco and manuscript illuminations.