This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

This chapter builds on Chapter 2 by explaining the etymologies of the complainant parents’ vernacular normative convictions – centring on Ubu-Ntu – that were woefully misunderstood and dismissed by the court in Komape. Thus, using language to uncover the self-conception and values of pre-colonial southern Africans, such as relational personhood and social organization, it explores how decolonising ‘the common law’ by recognising the Komape family’s world-sense requires focusing on the indigenous intellectual roots of the Ntu. It argues that these offer alter-Native ways of understanding concepts, challenging dominant European frameworks and (il)legalities. The analysis draws from ethnographic constitutional research and the sociolinguistic record, aiming to recover neglected histories of indigenous peoples’ identities and normative frameworks, often oversimplified as ‘customary law’, that still influence contemporary legal norms and social orders. Reclaiming indigenous ways of being and knowing, it highlights the often-muted gendered aspects of indigenous intellectual histories that would contribute to a more holistic understanding of social justice. Ultimately, the chapter calls for rethinking South African constitutionalism beyond Euro-American conceptions thereof, focusing on Ntu legalities and intellectual traditions. This offers a pathway to justice rooted in vernacular perspectives, which remain critical to addressing contemporary socio-legal challenges, as exemplified by the Komape case.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

According to Dazai Shundai, systems of bureaucratic offices will inevitably change over time and must be suited to the circumstances of the present, but in establishing these, it is important to look back to the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan emulated these systems of bureaucratic offices from China, but even then Japan departed from the Chinese model by making offices hereditary. Since the advent of military rule in Japan, the situation has only worsened, with simplified military regulations taking the place of a proper system of offices.

The area covered by Romance languages, literatures and cultures between 1550 and 1800 is characterised by a decline in the Arthurian tradition and by exchanges which led to the dissolution of the Arthurian romance into the chivalric narrative. The vogue for Carolingian matter may well have led, episodically, to the preservation of Arthurian memories, but overall, it accelerated the decline of the Round Table romances, particularly in Italy. The Iberian and Italian areas promoted heroes such as Amadis and Roland, who were destined for European success, whilst France recovers the Beau Tenebreux, thanks to Herberay des Essarts. During that period, the erosion of the Matter of Britain was more marked in the Roman area than in Britain, where Arthur remained something of a national symbol. Including these derivative heroes (Amadis, Roland/Orlando) allows us to bring to light the specificities of the areas under consideration.

This chapter examines the career of Tristram (Jimmy) Betts, a former civil servant in Nigeria, Oxfam’s first Field Director in Southern Africa and the brother of the Labour Party’s first Minister for Overseas Development, Barbara Castle. Figures such as Betts ensured that charities were important intermediaries in the shift from the colonial to the postcolonial world. Through their extensive connections, they were the conduit through which late-colonial states invited in charities to play important roles in the delivery of social services. Through a case study of the three High Commission Territories of Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland (Eswatini), it argues charities were a key part of the new world of development through the international agencies. The United Nations’ Freedom From Hunger Committees enrolled the charities into the broader machinery of official aid and development in the 1960s. It meant they were transformed from organisations focused on emergency relief to ones funding long-term development.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of the relationship between multinationals enterprises and global value chains, highlighting their role in shaping global capitalism. Since the late nineteenth century, multinationals have used global value chains to integrate resources, labor, and markets, reinforcing economic specialization while promoting technological transfer. However, these processes have also entrenched inequalities, reinforced economic dependencies and exacerbated social disparities. The chapter traces the development of global value chains from the first global economy to post–World War II industrial expansion, exploring how multinational strategies both influenced and were shaped by technological advances and geopolitical changes. It also addresses the impact of recent trends such as a slowdown in global economic integration and geopolitical tensions, which have triggered a shift toward regionalization and the restructuring of global value chains.

This chapter reconstructs the argument of two essays, Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, which were published posthumously. In these essays Hume defends that in specific circumstances suicide is morally acceptable and shows himself critical about the doctrine of a ‘future state’. Comparing the two essays with Part 12 of the Dialogues, I elucidate how Hume left us posthumously a testimony of his ambition to counter the religious spirit of his age. In the Dialogues Philo’s challenges Cleanthes’ view that religion forms a necessary support of morality. In ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Hume attacks in a more openly provocative way the Christian morality of his age. As I show in a second part of this chapter, Hume’s views were in the eighteenth century still controversial. It is no coincidence that one of the first editions of the two polemic essays contained a translation of two letters of Rousseau’s Héloïse which offered a more nuanced view on the moral acceptability of suicide and the sacredness of human life. Apparently, some contemporaries were convinced Hume could learn from Rousseau: whether today this view would still prevail, I leave to the reader to decide.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

The District of Columbia, a federal district overseen by Congress, was a constitutional battleground where freedom nationalists, proslavery firebrands, and supporters of sectional harmony clashed over federal responsibility for slavery. From 1838 to 1859, US Representative Joshua Giddings (Ohio) insisted that the federal government had no constitutional authority to uphold slavery there. His signature claim was that the framers had granted northern states the right not to be made complicit in slavery through any action or policy of the federal government, beyond the Constitution’s requirements. Giddings railed against the persistent battering of this political and moral quarantine. The sensational attempt by over seventy-five enslaved Black residents to flee the nation’s capital in 1848 onboard the Pearl brought unprecedented attention to Giddings’ defense of northern purity rights. This chapter examines Giddings’ notion of a northern right to political innocence and its role in his congressional brawls over slavery in the District of Columbia.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

Chapter 5 considers the role of railroads and the various railroad land grants as complementary policies to homesteading during the twenty-five years following the Civil War.

‘Non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema’ is a diffuse collection of films held together only by the fact that they are not in English and they all bear some kind of nominal or narrative relationship to the tradition of Arthurian story-telling. Despite scant evidence of continuous tradition, including between films in the same language, and long gaps in the corpus, three main strands can be identified: cinematic versions of the Tristan and Iseult legend, films about Perceval and the Holy Grail, and films centred on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. The third strand is minor: one of the most notable aspects of non-Anglophone Arthurian cinema is the relative paucity of films about Arthur himself, suggesting a distinct relationship to the Arthurian tradition. This corpus of Arthurian screen texts differs from Anglophone cinema in its narrative emphasis, avant-garde techniques, and in its engagement with cultural, historical and ideological concerns that extend well beyond the Anglosphere.

This chapter explores the connections of a species-exceeding neighbor love with self-love, love of God, and the imitation of Christ. By defining the neighbor in Works of Love beyond merely the human being, it provides an alternative to the entrenched dichotomy in ecological thought that sets loving the planet and self-love in opposition. Such a dichotomy suggests that the measures necessary to avert a planetary catastrophe include a radical change in the Western way of living – a change usually understood as unattractive asceticism. The interpretation of Kierkegaard’s exposition of Matthew 22:39, however, proposes that sacrificing the egocentric self leads to a flourishing of the neighbor as much as one’s "deeper self." Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that such an understanding of neighbor love is compatible with recent arguments in eco-theology (e.g., Sallie McFague’s concept of a kenotic "universal self"). Finally, the chapter discusses the challenges of an ecological reading of Works of Love. It brings Works of Love into a constructive dialogue with Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist ethics of zoe, pointing out the strong resonances with Braidotti’s non-religious eco-philosophy.