The chapter examines heated debates about Heimat, federalism, and regional identity in the German Southwest during referendum campaigns over the construction of new federal states in the region. While this history has often been glossed over as the pre-history of Baden-Württemberg, the chapter shows how it was saturated with debates about the spatial foundations of democracy. Opposing groups of regionalists who had different cognitive maps of region advanced similar ideas about “democracy” and “openness to the world” as regional values. Abandoning narratives of their region as a bulwark of the nation, many on both sides competed over whose regional vision would offer a better “bridge” to France and Switzerland. Many federalist regionalists in the Southwest further argued that Heimat feeling should bolster decentred ideas of nation. As in the case of Cologne and the Hanseatic cities, the case of the Southwest again demonstrates how early post-war denizens used regional identities to forge early identifications with democracy and European unification. At the same time, the referenda simultaneously demonstrated the same serious shortcomings in democratic mentalities and practice.

Chapter 2 will begin by emphasizing the role of elite patrons in the production of educational treatises on the science of music. The chapter will then provide an analysis of the relationship between learning the science of music, and musical practice, including performance, poetic skills, and listening to music. After providing some medieval philosophical arguments regarding the necessity of learning the science of music in order to better appreciate music performance, the chapter pivots toward presenting the sociocultural benefits of learning the science itself, especially among the elite of the city of Baghdad between third/ninth–seventh/thirteenth centuries. Through aphorisms and entertaining anecdotes by famous Baghdadi literati such as Ibn Khurdadhbih, al-Sarakhsi, and al-Tawhidi, I demonstrate how knowledge about music – as opposed to art-music itself – was used by the elite as a social currency to gain access to certain social circles that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to them.

Chapter 5 describes the dramatic changes of situation surrounding paper currency in post-war Britain. It focuses on the forgery crisis of 1818, which significantly undermined public trust in the Bank and its notes. Forgery became an acute problem after 1815, when the risk of becoming a victim (and unintended perpetrator) of the crime was not negligible. As the Bank claimed to be the sole arbiter of Bank notes’ authenticity, note users regarded the Bank’s ability to nullify economic transactions as a grave threat to the security of economic relations and private property. This chapter discusses the public backlash against the Bank as a radicalised version of communal currency. Britain’s note users rejected the idea that the Bank had the exclusive claim to authentic and unauthentic notes as Bank notes, according to the Bank’s critics, belonged to note users and their community. The forgery crisis gave ammunition to anti-paper radicals like Cobbett, while Britain’s note users were losing faith in the system of inconvertible paper, which now rested upon the state’s power to enforce currency circulation – under the Stanhope Act – and the Bank’s judicial violence.

In recent decades, South Asian book history has stimulated new conversations to understand the impact of seemingly mundane print artefacts such as schoolbooks in shaping linguistic and script cultures. Many scholars studying education, childhood, print histories, and state formation, among other areas of interest, have begun scrutinizing schoolbooks to understand socially embedded norms and entangled knowledge networks in colonial India. Their circulation and reception across various age groups in the past may be difficult to discern, but they continue to be one of the few printed mass artefacts consumed together by school-going children globally at a given point in time. As a result, we can gain a deeper understanding of pedagogy as an outcome of broad social and political discourse across multiple spatial and temporal scales.

In 1800, the Baptist missionary trio William Carey, Joshua Marshman, and William Ward established the first printing press in the subcontinent in the Danish-controlled territory of Srirampur (Serampore), near Calcutta, and undertook several translations of European texts into local languages and printing of schoolbooks, which soon gained great popularity in the Bengal Presidency. For evangelical purposes, these Protestant missionaries printed numerous tracts, pamphlets, newspapers, and treatises which were usually sold with the help of colporteurs and book sale depots. But it was the popularization of schoolbook writing as a separate genre that witnessed significant missionary influence on a new culture of literacy and educational practices in the colony. In subsequent years, many Protestant missionaries and upper-caste social reformers compiled grammars, primers, readers, and dictionaries that aided the process of script standardization and regional literature alongside a thriving print culture by the late nineteenth century. The circulation of printed texts for child readers was closely interconnected with the spread of public instruction in the mofussil towns and villages, established through the network of government, aided, and unaided vernacular and English-medium schools. With organizations such as the Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay schoolbook societies drawing up lists of textbooks suitable for instruction and with the recruitment of popular writers and administrators as authors, schoolbooks, especially language readers, began to enjoy a slow and steady demand from the late 1820s onwards.

In India of the 1940s and 1950s, democracy was itself the revolution. After two centuries of oppressive and unjust colonial rule and thousands of years of monarchical rule before that, the makers and thinkers of the newly minted republic thought democracy to be the appropriate political form with the possibility of peaceful revolutionary change embodied within it. After the tremendous violence of the Second World War, the spectre of the atom bombs in Japan and the brutal massacres accompanying the partition of the Indian colony into India and Pakistan, many felt it necessary to enact a peaceful revolution. Democracy was to be the means and end of that peaceful revolution. In order, however, to make sense of and to justify what seemed at first glance to be an imported political form, Indian thinkers dug deep to find native resources that could help the process of democratization of the polity. A striking solution was located in that ancient faith that was not quite separate from the universe of Hindu thought but which contained an attractive history of subversion and dissent against upper-caste Vedic religion, that heterodox 6th-century BCE sect of Buddhism. In the last century of British rule, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a modern nation reveals a secret history undergirding the rise of the republic itself in 1950. Buddhism played its own role in the making of modern India just as both Buddhism and India were in-the-making.

In the following pages, I present to you an intellectual genealogy of Buddhism in modern India. Like all modern religions on the subcontinent, Buddhism too was reimagined and reconfigured in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of British colonialism. In the historiography of modern South Asia, Hinduism and Islam have got the lion's share of attention. Buddhism's story is unique for the extent of its re-imagination in India, where its followers were insignificant in number and politically marginalized. A host of British and European orientalists, archaeologists and Indologists are credited with discovering ‘Buddhism’ and India's Buddhist heritage in this period.

THIS YEAR WILL ‘TEST US TO THE UTTERMOST …’

The year 1951 is a somewhat overlooked year, sandwiched between the year of the republic and that of electoral democracy, with its overshadowed clearing of decks via, as this section shows, an interplay between pre-existing structures and their succeeding shapes. The first casualty of this was the Hindu Code Bill, which got kicked into the long grass given, as Nehru listed to Ambedkar, ‘strong opposition, governmental reconstruction [and] Patel's death’. A second were those Muslims of West Bengal, who had left before the Delhi Pact for either East Bengal or elsewhere in India and then returned afterwards. They had been promised and, in many cases, received grants of INR 200 by the state government to repair their houses, in lieu of their taken-away land and looted shops. An accompanying central loan for a sum between INR 500 and INR 750 for artisans/traders, like Hindu migrants from East Bengal, was, however, not forthcoming. A related and sensitive issue was with whom to arrange for this delivery, as B. C. Roy mistrusted old Khilafat leaders from Bengal and preferred ‘the Jamiat’. A third casualty was the government's grow-more-food campaign, which was overtaken by more than 5 million tons of import. Its concomitant tragedy was the unsustainable rural rationing and integrated controls, as the deficit had to be ‘spread over the country’. Indeed, it was not just food grains and essential items like sugar, but even the newsprint situation that now needed ‘control’.

Control was also what the prime minister was seeking on the States Ministry now, especially on its treatment of Hyderabad. Receiving a file from it about services there, he found that one of its objectives was the ‘dispersal’ of Muslim officers to other parts of India and to replace them by people from Madras, Bombay and the Central Provinces. Nehru did not forget that New Delhi had entered Hyderabad by ‘military occupation’, and, two years and two months later, it had a ‘civilian occupation’. Outsiders sent there had no ability in any of the languages but had a conqueror's attitude, and the so-called ministry was ‘very communal in the Hindu sense’. What was communal in a regional sense was ‘the demand for more food’ from Bombay, without regard to others.

Chapter 4 considers another major actor in the learning of musical knowledge, besides the patrons: professional scholars. While it is true that musical treatises were for the most part commissioned for the elites, once a text was out in the market, anyone with an interest in the subject and a small amount of money in their pocket could acquire a copy. Professional scholars pursued music as a part of their training in mathematics. I center my discussion around the studies of one such scholar of music at the madrasa of Mustansiriyya, who was a student of al-Urmawi himself. I analyze a rare manuscript that contains marginal notes written by this scholar who studied the subject matter under the master. This rare manuscript grants us a unique perspective into how scholars actually went about learning their subject matter.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

This chapter presents a brief background. It treats the Old Regime in Central Europe, the impact of the French Revolution, the postwar settlement, social and economic change, revolution in 1848, and national unification.

The Epilogue traces the afterlives of West German debates about Heimat in post-reunification Germany. It shows how public debates about the concept over the past three decades have primarily revolved around three issues: popular desires for home in the face of economic demands for mobility and flexibility, questions around immigration and integration, and the ongoing question of left-wing engagement with or disavowal of Heimat. All three issues have clear connections to the earlier West German debates, even if memories of these connections have often been lost. While the Epilogue shows how attempts to define the Heimat concept from the political left have remained contested, it demonstrates a growing trend towards engagement in the most recent Heimat debates over the past decade. Disengagement with desires for home, many have argued, has proven self-defeating, while many immigrant groups themselves have expressed deep desires for home in new places and have often argued for engagement with Heimat.