This chapter expands on the material underpinning of popular sovereignty and self-and-other-determination by theorizing racialized alienation from nature and manual labor as allowing for environmental destruction, a process mediated by technology. Diagnostically, Du Bois’s essays on development and economic value first connect the intensification of racism to western technological needs, turning upside down techno-racist claims that equated whiteness and technological superiority. Instead, he argues that racism and colonialism are necessary to procure raw materials on the cheap to secure industrial profits. Racist ideologies operate within this context to confine nonwhite bodies to strenuous manual labor close to nature. Relatedly, Du Bois contests the inferior value assigned to manual labor that follows, showing both the centrality of raw materials and manual labor to high-tech societies and clarifying its political origins. On the critical side, Du Bois first contests the desirability of speedy “development” and forced integration into the global economy, which curtails racialized peoples’ orientation toward their wellbeing. Second, Du Bois claims the technological mindset and orientation toward profit are poor standards of progress because they obscure the cooperative character of production and prevent the political imagination from envisioning new worlds.

This chapter examines issues related to the definition and valuation of environmental damage in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ): what general principles govern reparation for environmental damage; what types of environmental damage should give rise to compensation or other measures of reparation; and how should such compensation or other measures be assessed in monetary terms? The chapter draws out the characteristics of, and considerations relating to, the global commons areas that might affect the approach taken to these questions, and how, if at all, compensation for environmental damage has been addressed in the existing regimes governing ABNJ under consideration in this study. To inform the discussion, the chapter examines other relevant international principles and rules that have been adopted or applied to address compensation for environmental damage at the international level.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the development of racialized subjectivities as an historical problem in nineteenth-century Brazil. It analyzes the letters and writings of the Afro-descendant engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças (1838–1898), with special attention to the role of racial silence in Rebouças’ personal diary and in the edited papers of his father, lawyer and statesman Antônio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880). The self-narratives André Rebouças left to posterity are powerful testimony to the significance of transnational politics for universalist Black intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In exploring them, this chapter illuminates the racialized subjectivization engendered by the stigma of slavery and portrays the ways in which its politicization was shaped by a collective transnational experience.

Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.

This chapter explores the legacy of the patriarchal family structures that were central to Brazilian slavery by exploring the stories of two filhos de criação who brought paternity suits against their natal families in early twentieth-century Brazil. Each was born to an enslaved mother and raised in his alleged white father’s household at the end of the nineteenth century. Their experiences offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. These children seldom moved into the class status of their “legitimate” relatives but instead often maintained life-long, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Their stories reveal continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.

Chapter 14 reviews the texts published in French in 1814 by A. W. Schlegel, Staël, and Sismondi – core members of the Groupe de Coppet – which led to them being dubbed a confédération romantique. The texts furnish a Romantic dialectic and a vision of the new man for the various anti-classical reactions playing out in Europe over the previous fifty years. Schlegel offers Shakespeare and arguments to reject France, Staël proposes Faust and Kant, and in Sismondi, finally, one finds a free Middle Ages opposing that of Chateaubriand. But the three also offer an idea of the nation that seems as influential as their literary ideas, and tools to transform the Europe of the nineteenth century. These writers elaborate a new Europe of the imagination to confront the dead Europe of the Emperor. Romanticism is vast, and these texts are distinguished above all by the immense scope of the subjects they treat.

This chapter tells the stories of three young people, living in the northeastern city of Recife, on the cusp of freedom during Brazil’s last decade of slavery. Their stories unveil the malleability of Brazilian bondage in its last gasp but also place in sharp relief the limitations and contradictions of both urban freedom and liberal modernity in a city structured by slavery. In highlighting the continuity and intersectionality inherent in urban struggles for freedom, the chapter seeks to open windows on relational dynamics that shape cities across the globe.