During the war, American industries depended on a steady stream of Chinese hog bristles, tungsten and tin ore, alongside a whole host of other raw materials. This chapter focuses on how demand for these products prompted the US government to forge new connections to Chinese businessmen and government agencies. These connections served as the foundation for lucrative postwar trans-Pacific business networks between American and Chinese that enriched Chinese and American businessmen alike and continued throughout the 1940s. The Chinese case served as the blueprint for an idealized postwar economic order that, envisioned by Wilsonian liberals in the US government, was anchored by free trade, private business, and the circulation of American dollars.

This chapter introduces Argentina’s Black movement and situates it within discussions of Black movements in Latin America and social movements theory more broadly. I introduce evidence that the movement has made progress in combating historical erasure and racism and show that despite societal denial, activists mobilize collective emotions to raise awareness, increase participation, and access state resources. The book argues that emotions, both at the societal and interpersonal levels, play a crucial role in the efficacy of transnational Black social movements in spaces of invisibility. Focusing on Argentina’s understudied Black movement, I employ critical race theory and Black feminist perspectives to examine racialization processes, challenge myths of homogeneous Whiteness, and highlight Afrodescendants’ marginalization in Argentina. Additionally, I show that this study contributes to understanding emotions in social movements by analyzing emotional opportunity structures and the role of emotions in mobilization, particularly within the context of Black feminist activism.

The chapter discusses Abdolhossein Zarirnkoub’s Persian-language biography of Ghazālī, Farār az Madrasa (Escape from Madrasa), which argues that Ghazālī’s intellectual formation was significantly shaped by the Persian mystical tradition of his time as well as by a broader Islamic tradition of learnedness. An appreciation of the historical and cultural confluence of the Abbasid and Seljuq Empires is crucial to explaining Ghazālī’s reformist vision. Within Ghazālī’s lifetime, the ideals and promises of the Seljuq state gave way to sudden, chaotic collapse, revealing in the process the malfunctioning of a self-professed regime of salvation. Ghazālī was a child of the Niẓām al-Mulk revolution in administration and politics, with its hopes for unifying the Seljuq and Abbasid states under the banner of justice and governance. Yet Ghazālī witnessed the sudden and tragic collapse of the Seljuq state, after Niẓām al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshāh were assassinated in an explosive chain of events. Ghazālī was witness to a failed state-building project, who nevertheless clung to the ideals of that lost revolution while plotting to reinstate its normative mission by other means.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

This chapter examines every muster roll from the Thirty Years War in the Saxon State Archives in Dresden to determine the demographics of the entire Saxon army during the entire war. In contrast to enduring stereotypes of early seventeenth-century soldiers as rootless social outcasts, these soldiers were recruited and often served near their homes. Both infantry and cavalry were far more urban than the average central European population. Soldiers called themselves righteous guys and lived within a dense thicket of social networks that included friendship, similar religion, and place of origin.

The layout of Tang Chang’an and the daily routines it fostered were stunning expressions of state power at the heart of an urban network. The city was a microcosm of the vast empire it managed, down to the tightly controlled rural growing regions, with trading routes reaching far west. It was an empire rooted in spatial order, the city’s modular layout designed to conform as closely as possible to the cosmos, the emperor at the heart of the city mandated to rule all under heaven. For all these zealous efforts at social control, Chang’an was paradoxically the world’s most cosmopolitan city. The imported religions of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism existed alongside Chinese Taoist and Confucian thought. In all, dynastic China engaged in unparalleled expansions of urban bureaucracy through the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties. This chapter explores the complex cultural interactions between urban civilization and nomadic societies, exploring in particular the role of the Great Wall in urban governance.

The Church’s victory in the “Investiture Controversy,” throwing off the domination achieved over it by secular powers following the death of Charlemagne, made it the first domain to successfully assert the right to manage its activities in accord with its own principles. But victory was only partial, leaving spiritual and secular powers facing each other across a field of constantly shifting relationships, giving heterodoxy more room to survive than elsewhere. An early example was the contrast between European universities, established as associations of teachers and students formed to assert autonomy from town authorities, and Islamic madrasas subject to direction by their elite patrons. When the corpus of Aristotelian texts became available, first in Arabic and later in Latin, it was first greeted with enthusiasm by readers of both, followed by suspicion because Greek materialism posed threats to religious doctrines. In Muslim lands, this led to a widespread rejection of philosophical inquiry as a path to truth; in Europe, attempts to impose similar restrictions failed, because university faculties resisted the claims of churchly conservatives to limit what could be taught. In this situation, scholastic speculation generated radical ideas about cosmology and physics, foreshadowing the break with traditional cosmology two centuries later.

This chapter presents Republican-era efforts to turn the Yangtze River into an engine of developmental nation-building by erecting a Three Gorges Dam. Starting with Sun Yat-sen’s initial proposal in 1919 and closing with the Sino-American attempt in the 1940s, this chapter examines how Chinese and foreign actors pursued this developmental dream.Undeterred by the financial challenges of the project, the dam’s backers argued China could overcome a domestic dearth of capital by working with foreign collaborators. This joint venture would benefit both China and foreigners by not only easing trade with the Chinese interior and creating a marvel of modern engineering, but also because the dam would furnish a gargantuan electrical stimulus to the transformation of China into an industrial powerhouse with a growing demand for foreign products. Although the dam was not constructed in the Republican period, Chinese and foreign actors would continue to pursue the infrastructural fantasy of installing mammoth dams on China’s rivers to fuel national industrialization on both sides of the Taiwan Straits during the Cold War.

Previous research has established Sweden as a case of environmental exceptionalism: a pioneering country with the Stockholm Conference in 1972, a long tradition of nature interest and out of door practices, and early reforms such as a ban on CFCs (1989), a carbon tax (1991), and early and strong advocacy for cap and trade solutions on the European level, to mention a few. However, many indicators demonstrate that Sweden’s vanguard position is no longer obvious, a change perceptibly manifested in the timid performance of Sweden in hosting the Stockholm+50 two-day commemoration conference in 2022. The chapter offers an analysis of why small-state progressivism and attention to Global South interests was a rational choice for the nonaligned nation-state of Sweden in the Cold War. The chapter argues further that as this position is now eroding, it should be seen as a consequence of a wider shift in the political landscape with conservative populist nationalism undermining the electoral base for exceptionalism, policies that after the change to a conservative government in 2022 have accelerated.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

This chapter offers a brief environmental history of modern Sweden. The focus is on identifying factors that can explain the role Sweden took as an early adopter of environmental conservation in the twentieth century and as a promotor of international cooperation and agreements. Environmentalism became a defining feature of civil society, and the political landscape from left to right absorbed environmentalism and climate change as relevant issues. This was propelled by a decisive “environmental turn” in the 1960s, where public intellectuals, artists, authors, and activists nurtured public support. A feature of Sweden’s environmental exceptionalism was “realist sustainability” in a corporatist tradition. The state made environmental reforms, while also protecting wealth-building industry, including extractivist industries central to the highly natural resource-based Swedish economy. Another key factor in the “Stockholm story” was the concentration of power – in politics, industry, organizations, science, and media – in the capital, which also started to cultivate its position in an increasingly globally competitive game where being green was a key component of success.

Convict transportation and assisted ‘free’ immigration were both ambitious projects engineered by the British imperial state. Not just a mode of punishment, transportation was also a source of labour that was central to the British settlement of Australia. By the 1840s, however, too many Australian settlers had become convinced that transportation was a moral stain on New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land that had to be wiped clean. The rise of free emigration in the 1830s that made transportation much less necessary as a source of labour was just as much a government enterprise, however. Colonial opinion frequently assailed British ‘government’ immigrants as too Irish, too poor, and ostensibly too unchaste. But the women and men thus recruited helped to provide a free labour force that ultimately made transportation expendable. They also helped ensure that Australia would preserve its status as a white settler colony by obviating the need for the mass importation of Asian-Pacific workers.