Chapter 5 addresses new challenges that emerged for the Movimiento Negro during the COVID−19 pandemic. During the crisis, many Afrodescendants saw their precarious and sometimes informal housing and employment situations worsen. Additionally, the international media attention of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder invigorated the Movimiento Negro’s efforts to address police brutality and criminal (in)justice, as witnessed in numerous newspaper articles and virtual discussions on the theme, “Police Brutality Exists Here [Argentina] Too!” Here, I engage with Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” as a disruptor of the immanence and imminence of Black death to analyze two pandemic-era campaigns that were about sustaining Black life: a mutual aid campaign to secure food, medicine, and housing for vulnerable African and Afrodescendent populations and a series of web events and projects to continue discussions about racism in Argentina at the community, national, and international level. The data suggests that despite fractures in the movement that emerged because of the pandemic, the movement is still gaining traction in institutional spaces.

This chapter demonstrates how the emergence of ethnicity led to the ‘domestication’ of race. During the nineteenth century, ‘race’ was an incredibly malleable term that could be used to describe both vast transnational populations differentiated by physical characteristics and smaller national communities such as the French or the Jews. With the emergence of a sharper divide between the biological and sociocultural spheres in the early twentieth century, this polyvalence came to be seen as a problem. To specify the meaning of race with greater precision, a cluster of new ethnos-based terms (ethnic group, ethnicity, ethnie, ethnos) was coined around the turn of the century. One important consequence of this conceptual shift was the effacement of the transnational stratum of race: there is no global ethnic line comparable to the global colour line. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how a pluralised concept of civilisation has filled in for the suppressed transnational stratum of race.

In the 1930s-40s, American peace activists increasingly turned to the war in China to make a wide range of arguments around intervention, sanctions, embargos, the efficacy of international institutions, and appropriate political and ethical responses. At the same time, Chinese activists also sought to establish connections with these different transnational organizations for their own political goals and ideals. While some of these efforts undoubtedly helped raise support for China’s war of resistance, they also enmeshed Chinese actors and organizations within a larger international network of cooperation and exchange over the course of the war. Two prominent American peace movements, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD), cultivated a series of engagements between American and Chinese activists that saw a shift in emphasis from non-violence and anti-war positions to an acceptance of forceful resistance against fascist aggression.

Religious discourse in a specific environment, such as the Pashtun Borderland, was decidedly shaped by highly localized, traditional Islamic articulations, while ideational cross-pollination with more universalist ones appears to have historically been rather limited, especially among the subaltern strata of society. The most dominant expressions belong, first and foremost, to a spectrum of Sufi Islam that ranged from the ecstatic kind of the mendicant dervish to the sober variety epitomized in the Naqshbandiyyah-Mujaddidiyyah. During the first decades of the twentieth century, as we have seen, the latter especially was widely absorbed into diverse local manifestations of “Frontier Deobandiyyat”, which turned this particular Islamic response to the challenges of an aggressively expanding global modernity into the one that, despite its origins outside the region, had been establishing itself across the Pashtun Borderland much more successfully than any of its various competitors.

This investigation of Ghazālī’s life and thought is contextualized within the social and intellectual dynamics of the expanding Abbasid Empire of the philosopher’s lifetime. This close contextualization refutes prevailing Islamist and postmodernist readings of Ghazālī that decontextualize his thought in the service of ideological predilection. We use Persian sources to show how Ghazālī’s Islam revolutionized language, creating an accessible discourse intended to transcend the narrow ulema and madrasa milieu that had been in Arabic. Ghazālī’s Islam created an autonomous space for nonreligious sciences, notably logic and mathematics, as part of a reformist project responding to the Abbasid crisis of governance. This reformist discourse, based on the din/donya duality, helped to create an Islamic worldview suited to an expanding multi-civilizational society that depended on new economic and technological ensembles to flourish and survive.

The Cochin Harbor Project (1920–1936) forms the subject of Chapter 4. Through a close reading of the official correspondence relating to the development project, this chapter will trace the differing visions of development articulated by those involved with the project and analyze how these changed over time. Conceived as a solution for the political and environmental issues confronting multiple state authorities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Cochin Harbor Project would be dogged by uncertainties from the time of its inception. These uncertainties stemmed not only from the participation of princely states in the modernization of a port in British India but also from the technological choices made during the project’s execution to reconcile divergent interests. Through a close analysis of the technological choices made over the course of the project’s execution, this chapter will examine the reasons why the harbour’s development took the form that it did. It will discuss these decisions not only in the context of the economic aims of the colonial state but also equally of the political aspirations of the region’s princely states.

The Mansfeld Regiment was raised in Dresden in early 1625, traveled to northern Italy later that year, and collapsed in 1627. The conflict that brought it to Italy was one part of the wider Thirty Years War, as well as an ongoing struggle between Spain and France over the Valtelline.

Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

This final chapter relates the Norwegian treason trials to comparable processes in both Eastern and Western Europe following the Second World War. In contextualising the Norwegian trials, the chapter looks in particular at events in Denmark, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Lands, Poland, Italy and Hungary. In its analysis, the chapter identifies four key aspects of the Norwegian trials that help mark them out as distinctive within a wider European context: 1) the considerable planning capacities enjoyed by the exile government; 2) the relative absence of extrajudicial violence upon liberation; 3) the unparalleled scope of the trials; and 4) the strong focus placed by the Norwegian authorities on the trials’ legality. The more fundamental tensions and challenges that Norway experienced as a result of occupation and collaboration were shared across Europe, however.

Against the dominant tendencies to either overlook the interwar period, or to dismiss it as dead-end conservative nationalism irrelevant to the important history that will unfold after WWII, this chapter reveals it as an engagement with problems of ongoing relevance in Ghana. Resting on different ideas about Akan culture and political values, thus chiefs, the debates are conscious of contemporary thinking in the wider world, and based on different opinions about how to go forward. It is a defining moment in time when the notion of Akan homogeneity enmeshed debaters in personality squabbles, factional and party rivalry. The chapter employs Emma Hunter’s insight about other liberalisms, arguing that the debaters had a vision that employed an older but still relevant communal, group rights liberal vision. This connects them to the contemporary, and removes them from the place they are often placed: as backward looking and refusing to think constructively.

The concepts of the fiscal-military state, the military revolution, and increasing control over the ordinary soldier have been intertwined in European historiography. But the assumption that the growth and development of military finance was accompanied by increasing discipline within military units has not yet been seriously tested for the early seventeenth century. The War People is a historical social anthropology of ordinary central European soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which interrogates this assumption. It focuses on the understudied political entity of Electoral Saxony, once the most important Protestant German state and a rich source of unpublished archival records, including the legal books of a single regiment. These rich archival sources are the basis not only for statistical inquiry but for a deep microhistorical study of ordinary soldiers as human beings.

The label “cultural nationalist,” deployed by David Kimble in 1963 continues to be used by scholars to describe early Gold Coast intellectuals. Kimble and others like Kweku Larbi Korang assumed that nationalism in the Gold Coast was a continuum of anti-colonial “resentment and criticism.” Contrary to the theme of the early twentieth century as a period of cultural nationalism and of opposition to colonialism, it was a period of constructive criticism of an inchoate colonial system and advocacy for synthesis of local customs within a liberal imperial frame. Regarding the intellectuals as anti-colonial cultural nationalists proved difficult because of their apparent pro imperial statements and actions. Critics disparaged the intellectuals as motivated by self-preservation, blindly pro-colonial, deluded, or traitorous to their culture. So-called cultural nationalists can be more properly understood by not assuming Kimble’s unchanging problematic and recognising the British presence then, now homogenized as “colonialism,” as something less cogent.

This introduction sets out the aims and approach of the book. Following an introduction to the Norwegian post-war reckoning and a review of the existing literature on the topic, it argues that only an analysis of the full time span of the trials can uncover their complex dynamics and the changing positions of their key actors over time. The introduction then sets out the analytical framework of the book, which is to explore the – at times competing – legal and political rationales of the trials in face of a rapidly changing political and social climate.

During the consolidation of free migration to Australia in the late 1840s and 1850s, there remained much conflict about the kind of emigrants the Australian authorities wanted, and the kind the British authorities were able to procure. Australian criticisms of immigrants’ shortcomings as workers and moral agents were greatly exaggerated, however. Assisted emigration to Australia was, in fact, exceptionally well regulated. The vast majority of assisted women appear to have settled into productive work followed by fertile domesticity, and the overall quality of assisted Australian immigrants was high by any reasonable standard. Still, the gender ratio and strengthening Australia’s moral fibre were nevertheless abiding concerns throughout the 1850s and remained a source of chronic tension between the Colonial Office and the Australian authorities, as the gold rush to Victoria brought a vast influx of ‘masterless’ single young men. Controversies riddled the effort to counteract their potentially corrupt influence through the recruitment of the proper kind of immigrants. This effort, in turn, marked the origin of Chinese exclusion and the White Australia policies designed to protect the racial purity of Australia’s ‘civilised’ temperate regions. By the 1860s, eastern Australia was overwhelmingly white and British because carefully planned migration policies had made it so.

By the mid 1850s, Caribbean planters and imperial officials alike embraced Indian migration not simply as the only viable option for the sugar estates, but as a reasonably good one in its own right. However, the indentured immigration system remained piecemeal and improvisatory in ways scarcely less deadly than the experimental migration of the later 1840s. The acceptance of collateral Indian death as part of the providential order of things was a marked feature of the British approach to constructing the migratory apparatus. The indenture regime built over the course of the 1850s was based on the abiding unfreedom of the increasingly Brown workforce on the sugar estates. Colonial and imperial statesmen insisted no less than the planters that indentured immigration was rooted in the autonomous choice of Indian labourers, and that it lifted those labourers not only in the scale of affluence, but also in the civilisational scale. But the fortunes of Indian migrants were decidedly mixed, and their conditions of life and labour became more, not less, restrictive over the first two decades of sustained indentured immigration from 1850 to 1870.

Now, at least for the time being, we have reached the end of our journey across the Pashtun Borderland through the last few centuries, in our attempt to trace the ideational roots of those who gained international renown as “The Taliban”. What emerges is a rather complex and multilayered picture that seems to make it even more difficult to adequately frame “The Taliban”. However, it would perhaps have to be considered a disproportionate effort if the only result were to affirm that the ideational and ideological underpinnings of those who, as the ṬIT and IEA, governed most of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, and have done again, since the summer of 2021, are not so straightforward, as investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid prominently claimed back in 2000 (and confirmed in each of the subsequent editions and revisions of his best-selling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia).1

Ecological and political instability have time and again emerged as catalysts for risky development projects along India’s southwest coastline. Devika Shankar probes this complicated relationship between crisis and development through a focus on a port development project executed in Cochin in the first quarter of the twentieth century amidst significant political and ecological uncertainty. While ecological concerns were triggered by increasing coastal erosion, a political crisis was precipitated by a neighbouring princely state’s unprecedented attempt to extend its sovereignty over the British port. This integrative environmental, legal and political history brings together the history of British India and the princely states to show how these anxieties ultimately paved the way for an ambitious port development project in the final years of colonial rule. In the process, it deepens our understanding of environmental transformations and development in modern South Asia and the uneven nature of colonial sovereignty.