With his latest book, The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma makes a successful attempt to “decompress history”. Apart from praising his work, I want to offer two critical comments and a suggestion for global comparison. First, I argue that the role of colonialism/imperialism is somewhat downplayed in the book. Second, although I am impressed by the vast body of literature cited, I believe that at several instances the book might have benefited from its arguments being underpinned by more solid empirical quantitative data. Finally, I raise the question how unique the “plantation economies” of Island South East Asia actually were, which also implies a suggestion for further research along the lines of Bosma's impressive monograph.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Minas Gerais was heavily reliant on its slave labor force and invested in the social order shaped by slavery. The main systematic challenge to slavery was discrete negotiations of manumission that resulted in the freedom of a few individual slaves. This practice fueled the expansion of a free population of African descendants, who congregated most visibly in the captaincy's urban centers. Through an examination of manumission stories from two African-descendant families in the towns of Sabará and São José, this article underscores the relevance of family ties and social networks to the pursuit and experience of freedom in the region. As slavery remained entrenched in Brazil, despite Atlantic abolitionist efforts elsewhere, urban families’ pursuit and negotiation of manumissions shaped a historical process that naturalized the idea and possibility of black freedom.

This review introduces the broad themes and methods of Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations and focuses on the author's portrait of actual practices of citizenship in early modern cities of Europe. It highlights the strengths of Prak's study in formidable archival work and broad comparative reading. It points out the central place of practices of poor relief to the building of urban networks of citizenship, drawing out the importance of women in participating in these informal yet critical practices of citizenship. Taking the relationship between provisioning for the poor and community building seriously, and building on Prak's view of Britain's relatively smooth transition from early modern to modern practices of citizenship, the essay speculates on whether England's unusual nationwide poor law (born in the early modern period and exemplifying ideals of citizenship usually associated with “urban republicanism”) played its own critical role in the rise of an integrated nation there.

Gypsies (Ciganos in Portuguese) have been present in Brazil since the earliest days of Portuguese colonization. Part of the (free) masses (o povo, “the people”), they were known primarily as itinerant traders of trinkets, slaves, and animals, and were one category of intermediaries who made the internal economy function. Authorities viewed their lifestyle and activities with suspicion. Focusing on the state of Bahia, in the north-eastern region of Brazil, between the late sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, this article shows that the tenuous position of Gypsies was amenable to transformations reflecting political priorities and ideas about the proper social order. The continued difference of Ciganos and their independent way of making a living were at times problematized by elites, embodying wider tensions between the authorities and the people. The case of Bahian Ciganos is revelatory within Romani-related historiography in that it foregrounds connected developments within locales enmeshed in a metropole–periphery relationship, continuities between imperial and nation-building projects, and the centrality of race on which they were built.

Cultural, discursive, and technological differences notwithstanding, the peripheralization effects of plantation agriculture-based development pathways seem to be as vibrant today as during the height of the modern era's imperialism. This, at least, is what Bosma suggests, and I fully agree with him. The plantation, that modern labour-expelling periphery-making machine, is alive and kicking hard amid convergent socioecological crises nowadays. And this is an analytically but also politically salient phenomenon. Most often, development models which rely on predatory extractivism not only leave the majority of the population behind the well-being bandwagon, thereby turning a deaf ear to the pledge of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to “leave no one behind”; they also erode the ecological base, socioeconomic fabric, and institutions that enable more just and environmentally sound life projects to blossom. Thus, the careful examination of the complex and generative interplay between the model and intensity of resource extractivism and the broader political economy, as developed by Bosma in The Making of a Periphery, calls into question any non-transformative climate stewardship and sustainable development efforts, like the “business as usual” one represented by the flex crops and commodities complexes of the twenty-first century.

Maarten Prak argues that urban citizen associations remained vigorous in the West from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, and that their support for commercial activity helped bring about that Revolution. That is half correct. During the two thousand years from 300 BC to 1750 AD, numerous societies had similar peaks of urbanization, commercial activity, and per capita income (often approaching, but never exceeding, a “peak pre-industrial income” level of roughly $1,900 in 1990 international dollars.) Vigorous urban societies produced repeated episodes of comparably high incomes, not ever-escalating levels of GDP/capita. What produced the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution was a particular manifestation of urban citizenship that occurred only in Great Britain – the victory of Parliament over royal authority creating exceptional religious and intellectual freedom and institutionalized pluralism. This was not common to urbanized, commercial societies except in rare periods; only in Britain did urban associations and culture blend with scientific culture, producing a broad surge of scientific and technical activity that overcame the prior limits on organic societies.

This article examines why Boston's slave and free black population consisted of more than 1,500 people in 1750, but by 1790 Boston was home to only 766 people of African descent. This disappearing act, where the town's black population declined by at least fifty per cent between 1763 and 1790, can only be explained by exploring slavery, abolition, and their legacies in Boston. Slaves were vital to the town's economy, filling skilled positions and providing labor for numerous industries. Using the skills acquired to challenge their enslavement, Afro-Bostonians found freedom during the American revolutionary era. Nevertheless, as New England's rural economy collapsed, young white men and women from all over the region flooded Boston looking for work, driving down wages, and competing with black people for menial employment. Forced out of the labor market, many former slaves and their descendants left the region entirely. Others joined the Continental or British armies and never returned home. Moreover, many slave owners, knowing that slavery was coming to an end in Massachusetts, sold their bondsmen and women to other colonies in the Americas where slavery was still legal and profitable. Thus, the long-term legacy of abolition for black Bostonians was that Boston's original enslaved population largely disappeared, while the city became a hub of abolitionism by the 1830s. Boston's abolitionist community – many the descendants of slaveholders – did not have to live with their forefathers’ sins. Instead, they crafted a narrative of a free Boston, making it an attractive destination for runaway slaves from across the Atlantic world.

The starting point of this article is the observation that thousands of enslaved people escaped bondage and managed to find refuge in the city of Baltimore between 1800 and 1860. There, they integrated into a large free black community. Given the use of the term “urban marronage” to categorize slave flight to cities in some historical literature, this chapter discusses the concept of marronage and its applicability to the urban context of antebellum Baltimore. It examines individual escapees from slavery, the communities they joined, and the broader slaveholding society to emphasize that the interplay and mutual relations of all three should be considered when assessing the applicability of this concept. Discussing the historiography around marronage and the arguments that speak both in favour of and against applying the concept of urban maroons to Baltimore's runaway slaves, this article ultimately dismisses its suitability for this case. In the process, this examination reveals the core of the concept, which, above all, concerns the aspect of resistance. In this context, it will be argued that resistance in the sense of rejecting the control of the dominant society should be included in the general definition of marronage.

This rejoinder is part of the round table discussion on the book The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor. It pays tribute to the development economist and Nobel Prize winner Arthur W. Lewis, who studied the predicaments of plantation societies. The rejoinder addresses critical observations made about the above-mentioned book by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Pim de Zwart, Corey Ross, and Alberto Alonso-Fradejas. It underscores the importance of the role of demography and long histories of labour coercion to explain processes of peripheralization and mass emigration. It also points out the limits of classical development economics, namely a relative neglect of the ecological damage attending plantation exploitation. The commodity frontier approach is suggested as a way to address this shortcoming.

Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept of citizenship to China and the Ottoman Empire where neither the ideological, nor the institutional features of European citizenship existed by discussing Chinese and Ottoman urban social, economic, and political practices that in early modern Europe relate to citizenship. Such a move makes invisible the early modern ideological and institutional foundations of the Chinese and Ottoman practices he recounts. It additionally creates the problem of determining how, if at all, what he calls Chinese and Ottoman citizenship mattered to nineteenth-century Chinese and Ottoman subjects as they encountered for the first time Western notions of citizenship. In order to write global history, we need more studies of Chinese, Ottoman, and other histories, which explain the changing political architecture of relations between people and those who ruled them to complement what Maarten Prak's fine study of citizens without nations gives us for European history.

In Citizens without Nations, I argued that national histories have overlooked a large and significant range of citizenship practices that can be found in towns and cities across the pre-modern world. These practices related to local politics (elections, consultations), to economic activities (guilds), to social policies (poor relief), and to military defence (civic militias). This rejoinder addresses three issues raised by critics Jack Goldstone, Katherine Lynch, and R. Bin Wong in relation to my book on urban citizenship in Europe, Asia, and the Americas: ideas, including religion, nations, and economic growth. All three have a lot to do with the implications of global comparisons. Ideas and nations have taken distinct forms in the various world regions. Foregrounding them makes comparisons more difficult. Urban contexts, on the other hand, can be more easily compared. Economic development was introduced in the book as a benchmark to see if and how citizenship arrangements might have impacted prosperity. The economic numbers are, however, still fragile for the pre-industrial era. Therefore, they will have to be supplemented with qualitative studies, which are slowly but surely emerging also outside Europe.

This article examines how slavery has been remembered in the urban space of Cape Town over time. It explores how individuals and groups have commemorated the history of slavery from the late nineteenth century onwards. It outlines how memory of slavery faded as the number of people with direct experience of enslavement decreased, with burgeoning racial segregation influencing the way that the past was viewed. It then examines how post-1994 democracy in South Africa has once again changed approaches to history. Colonial-era abuses such as slavery have not always been readily remembered in an urban space where their legacies are visible, and this article examines the interplay of politics and identity at the heart of public memorialization of these contested pasts.

This afterword engages with the theme of this Special Issue by discussing the significance of urban slavery in slave societies and societies where chattel slavery existed in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It discusses how, despite the omnipresence of slavery in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, New York, and Charleston, the tangible traces of the inhuman institution were gradually erased from the public space. It also emphasizes that, despite this annihilation, over the last three decades, black social actors have made significant interventions to make the slavery past of Atlantic cities visible again.