The marginalization of Black Americans due to White supremacy and the oppression of Indians under British colonialism featured inescapable similarities. At the turn of the twentieth century, these parallels led Indian and Black nationalists, intellectuals, and activists to share their experiences and engage in dialogues toward improving the social status of their people. Specifically, Black internationalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Paul Robeson studied the Indian independence movement and came to regard India as a template in the fight against White supremacy in the United States (US). Ultimately, they came together in their desire to overthrow the structures that subjugated them. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Indians and Americans exchanged ideas about race, caste, and class, creating lasting cultural connections.

In this book, I explore the foundational cultural and political connections between India and the US between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries by focusing on a small select group of Indians and Americans and their ideas on race, caste, and class. Several key figures of the time, on both sides, attempted to assess whether the Black experience in the US mirrored caste, colonialism, or racial discrimination in India. Both Indians and Americans studied race, caste, and class dynamics outside their own countries in order to learn what they could apply to their own struggles. This study spans from the start of the twentieth century when W. E. B. Du Bois notably declared at the first Pan African Conference in 1900 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” until the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

In a June 2021 seminar, historian Dwaipayan Sen noted that although alliances between oppressed groups are interesting and worthy of discussion, he queried whether any meaningful social change can be accomplished by race and caste solidarities between Americans and Indians. Sen argued that since Black American and Dalit struggles are local issues that exist within separate nation states, it is doubtful that that Black and Dalit alliances possess a transnational impact.

The bridal chamber has a rich history in ancient and medieval marriage practices. For some Byzantine communities, rites for inaugurating a couple’s sexual life in the bridal chamber were the most important ceremonies of the wedding process. This chapter traces the history of bridal chamber rituals and the church’s involvement in them through liturgical blessings performed by priests at the bed of consummation.

Henri Lefebvre's ideas concerning the production of space have been the subject of nuanced debates since the 1970s. These debates primarily focused on the relationship between physical space, capitalist flows and conscious human actions. This book has combined Lefebvre's notion of the capitalist production of space with the idea of space produced by transnational mobility. The Bengali diasporas and their transnational community in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei during the colonial and postcolonial periods form the central theme of this book, which has attempted to demonstrate the temporal and spatial dimensions of Bengali mobility, filling a significant gap in the historical migration literature on Asia.

This book has countered the impression that most South Asians in the Malay world were ‘Indians’, of whom the Tamils constituted a significant portion. The size of the Bengali community was remarkable. However, they were underestimated because many who settled in Malaysia and Singapore adopted Malay identities, forming a highly conspicuous and essential section of the middle classes. Their established ‘networks’ may promote present-day migration from Bangladesh, especially to Singapore and Malaysia. All these discussions have been categorised into two broad areas. Chapters 1–3 explored the background and processes of the emergence of the Bengali diasporic community in the Malay world and the masking of their identity within the generic term ‘Indian’. The second set of aspects, spanning Chapters 4–8, offers a detailed understanding of facets of Bengali space-making in British Malaya, dealing with the professional world, the domain of petty traders and the spaces of politics and civil society.

Historical migrations of diverse ethnic groups from South Asia, as seen today, were generally described as ‘Indian’ in the historical literature. In recent years, the dominant ‘Pan-Indian identity’ has been dissected as heterogeneous, with a focus on ethnic and linguistic aspects. In the context of recent trends in the studies of South Asian migration and diasporic communities within Asia, this book has explored the Bengali transnational community through multiple temporal and spatial contexts. Trans-regional connectivity between the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Sea has a historical pedigree. The British colonial authority introduced rules and regulations to govern the flow of human mobility.

In Pakistan today, people look forward. Cars and motorbikes on the roads of Karachi and Hyderabad hurtle full speed ahead. Sideview mirrors are systematically removed from motorbikes, leaving no way to look back. Museums run empty. On most days, the National Museum in Karachi has more feline visitors than human. In schools, the past is taught by rote. It is transferred verbatim from textbooks into examination booklets. To score the highest marks, students must not change even a word of the text. The individual, the student, the reader, the present are set apart from history. Even if people present are confronted with the past, it is a vision they do not much like.

This book has shown that this has not always been the case. In the early modern, the past was not contained in chronicles alone. Nor was it rehearsed only in schools. It was immanent in buildings and books, and engaged with considerable enthusiasm. This past did not singularly signify collective histories of the political, religious, kinship, or corporate variety. Rather, it foregrounded individuals. Individuals crafted themselves in close engagement with the past. They remembered and responded to individuals past in the hope of a similar reception for themselves in the future. The past was not inert or over; it was responsive and pliable, yielding ever-new opportunities for individuals in changing times.

I have described this as leaving legacies. It denotes early modern people's concern for enduring beyond their own lives. People ensured self-extension not only through wealth and children but also by leaving material traces of themselves in monuments and books. These did not showcase individuality through a display of interiority or through a narrativization of the particular events and circumstances of a person's life history but rather by paying homage to other individuals or engaging in similar selfless actions. It is in this very gesture of selflessness that the named individual often appeared: humble, abased, and self-effacing. To take the acts of self-effacement in these legacies at face value is to continue to misread South Asia's past. By acting on behalf of another, praising another, helping another, legacies taught ethical lessons to their audience to do the same for the individual responsible as well.

This Conclusion brings together some of the major contributions of this volume and discusses how marriage in Byzantium overlaps with and differs from post-Byzantine practices employed in the contemporary Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Afterword returns to the origin of the volume, a project conceived by the late historian David Fitzpatrick. Foster reflects on Fitzpatrick’s legacy as an historian of modern Ireland and the diaspora, examining his influence on Irish and international historiography. He traces Fitzpatrick’s scholarship from his pioneering first monograph, Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution (1977) to his posthumous monograph, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925, and his plans for this volume. Fitzpatrick pioneered new methods for his historical research of the Irish Revolution and his explorations of emigrant letters, and Foster highlights the influence of his scholarship on later generations. He draws connections between this volume and Fitzpatrick’s publications, noting the enduring legacy of Fitzpatrick’s work and his influence.

This chapter presents a detailed overview of the area studied in the book. It focuses on the seigneurie of Delle and the seigneurie of Florimont between 1650 and 1790 with special attention given to the social and economic life of these communities. This chapter presents the milieu in which dwellers in the south of Alsace lived and experienced credit. It gives the necessary background to comprehend the making of credit.

A new data set shows the evolution of capital ratios for the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany. The chapter questions the accuracy of capital/assets ratios and argues that cross-country comparisons of capital ratios are of little explanatory value without a historical narrative. Firstly, the capital/assets ratios used by the academic literature usually consider paid-up capital and disclosed reserves only. However, the total liability of shareholders can go beyond the paid-up capital (double or unlimited liability), which influences the level of capital/assets ratios. Secondly, accounting standards allowed the extensive build-up of hidden reserves in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The chapter shows that the capital strength of banks, considering hidden reserves and shareholder liabilities, is underestimated. Existing publications comparing capital/assets ratios on an international level neglect such issues. Additionally, the chapter analyses structural changes in the assets of British, Swiss, and US banks using the Basel I framework of 1988 for a historical simulation.

This chapter examines an intriguing debate that Neurath started along with co-author J. A. Lauwerys by denouncing Plato’s Republic as a totalitarian vision with affinities to Nazism. They did this in the context of planning German re-education after the war. Neurath had a theory about the inherent tendencies in what he called the ‘German climate’ for subservience to grand ideas of duty, and he felt that continued reverence for Plato could lead young Germans astray in this respect. His attack on Plato provoked an angry response from countless educators and scholars in 1944, raising issues that are still relevant today. Neurath and Lauwerys’ views were overshadowed by Popper’s similar treatment of Plato in The Open Society and Its Enemies and, to Popper’s annoyance, he was lumped together with them by some critics.

Scholars have observed that Schopenhauer did not develop much of a political philosophy but have failed to recognize that this is a deliberate deflationary strategy. Schopenhauer’s aim was to circumscribe the function of politics narrowly and assign it a place in a broader range of human responses to the agony of existence. However, his attempt to differentiate politics from religion and the state from the church led to contradictions. One the one hand, Schopenhauer favored a strong state that could control social strife and noted that political leadership can rely on religious justifications to ensure stability. On the other hand, he observed that state-affiliated religious institutions often eliminate critical perspectives on their doctrines by silencing philosophical reflection, an attitude he could not accept. Schopenhauer thus ended up with an ambivalent conception of statehood as simultaneously protective of life and property and damaging to free inquiry.