This chapter maps aesthetic modernism across Europe as a whole, showing its key generational clusters in their multiple transnational circuits of influence and exchange. It focuses on the major literary modernists and the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. It finds coherence in a range of shared thematics: outsiderliness; journeying; formal innovation; abandonment of narrative causality and linear time; estrangement and alienation; subjectivity and the unconscious; assertive and experimental sexualities. The gendered dynamics of insistent masculinity and women’s effacement again reappears. The collective generational esprit of the aesthetic modernists is carefully demonstrated via the various regional circuits: Scandinavian; northwest European; Balkan; Soviet-centered; German-speaking central-European. Cinematic modernism was a particular instance, emanating from Moscow across Berlin to Paris. Using Piscator and Brecht within a larger argument about Weimar Berlin, the chapter concludes by identifying a distinctive left modernism.

This chapter explores organizational configuration—how work is structured through task division, coordination, authority, and hierarchy. It introduces four configurations: Simple (centralized, small firms), Functional (grouped by specialization, efficient but less adaptive), Divisional (semi-independent units by product or region, flexible but may duplicate efforts), and Matrix (combines functional and divisional, supports adaptability but complex to manage). Firms may also use contract-based or digital configurations to enhance responsiveness. The Law of Requisite Variety suggests that organizational complexity must match environmental complexity. Misfits between configuration and external demands can cause inefficiencies, poor coordination, and performance loss. Aligning structure with strategy and environment is essential for long-term success

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter explores the ‘forgetting’ of the region as a unique form of public amnesia and the implications of this for conflict transformation. While conflict is often understood on multiple levels, including its regional dimension, peacebuilding and memory work are rarely put in conversation at this level. The chapter explores regional dimensions of memory and argues that these open up a novel and analytically productive lens on the nature and legacy of cross-border conflict and can bolster peacebuilding approaches. Taking the key case study of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and specifically the regionalising dimensions of the Rwandan genocide, the chapter investigates the impact of two very different regional dimensions of memory on social cohesion. First, it considers the more intuitive ways in which grievances that extend across borders and fractured regional memories continue to fuel conflict. Second, and pushing beyond this, it considers the ways in which the returning diaspora deploys memory born in the wider region in attempts at nation-building. The chapter thus deploys a dynamic approach to memory, exploring mobile memories and the ways in which regional experiences are carried and deployed back in a national context. Overall, it urges us to extend the regional lens beyond the study of the roots of conflict and operational action to the study of post-conflict peacebuilding and commemoration.

In this chapter, the book is introduced by interrogating how a political community is constructed and with what membership boundaries, especially when it lies across borders, or at another level than the nation-state. I argue that the political belonging found at the local level and based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ – whereby the individual is bound to a particular community and has access to a bundle of rights by virtue of the ‘first-comer’ or ‘early-comer rule’– informs and contributes to the making of other types of political belonging at different levels.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.

The American war, as the War of American Independence was known in Britain, was a highly misleading description; it was much more than just a bilateral struggle between Britain and the rebel colonies that became the United States. Though the conflict began in North America, from when the French intervened in 1778 to support the new states, the war spread to the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia, and the waters off the British Isles. When the Spanish became belligerents in 1779, the geographical reach of the struggle expanded still further, taking in Central America and Britain’s Mediterranean outposts of Gibraltar and Minorca. At the end of 1780, the list of Britain’s enemies extended when the British (rather quixotically) declared war on the Dutch. Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia were drawn into a truly worldwide contest. In all theaters of the war, including in North America, the European belligerents called on the military support of local manpower and the services of other Europeans, making it a transnational as well as a global conflict.

China has always had a space in the British imagination. Beginning in the eighteenth century, images and the aesthetic of China were a part of daily life – the glint of a blue and white willow teacup, a fan or screen with a Chinese landscape, a silk dress with a pagoda pattern, a rock garden. This new aesthetic flourished alongside the pragmatic reality that China was an imperial space for trade and exploitation by England. Though the aesthetic and transnational crossings were heralded by art historian, Roger Fry, and others in Bloomsbury in the 1920–30s, the transnational conversation has been neglected in modernist scholarship until recently. This chapter addresses the gap and describes a resurgence of interest in the cultural, literary, and aesthetic crossings between England and China through a specific study of the literary Crescent Moon group in China founded by Xu Zhimo in 1925 and Bloomsbury. Extensive study in British and Chinese libraries and travel reveals a transnational modernist discourse and relationships among the two literary groups, including Ling Shuhua, Virginia Woolf, Julian Bell, Xu Zhimo, and Xiao Qian, as well as several other British and Chinese intellectuals and artists.

Mapping the statements of Afro-Cuban artists on the Afrodescendant social condition and their cultural heritage during the revolutionary period, this chapter delves into the Afro-centric art of Manuel Mendive, Rafael Queneditt, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, and others who, during the 1960s–1980s, pointed their emphasis to the Yoruba and Bantú worlds that shaped Antillean societies despite the regime’s religious intolerance. Along with Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés Borrero, and others, they formed the Group Antillano, the first visual art collective grounded on notions of Afrodescendant consciousness that Cuba had ever experienced. The chapter moves chronologically, noting how what could constitute the groundbreaking “New Cuban Art” of the post-1959 period is not Volumen I, but the art of the Queloides collective. While their works were not the first to be concerned with issues of structural racism, they were an unprecedented endeavor that moved beyond previous reformist visions and instead aimed to dismantle the fundamental tenets of Cuban national narratives. The chapter concludes with the internationalization of Afro-Cuban art and how migration and diaspora shape the work of contemporary Afro-Cuban artists.

This chapter defines the theoretical terms – networks, nodes, and nuclei – explains the choice of dates between two revolutions in communication (print and the internet), and gives some concrete historical examples of the tangible benefits of looking at the history of Christianity through transnational flows and networks. This approach allows us to cross national and denominational boundaries and borders and to think more deeply about the underlying social and cultural conditions promoting or resisting adaptation and change. It also enables us to explore the crossroads or junction boxes where religious personnel and ideas encountered different traditions and from which something new and dynamic emerged.

The aim of this chapter is to apply the book’s general organizing principle and method to some of the most significant developments in the English-speaking Protestant world in the last four centuries, including the transition from pietism to evangelicalism, the explosive growth of Protestant missions, the origins of premillennial dispensationalism and its contribution to the rise of American fundamentalism, and finally the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism. None of these developments in the creation of a “Protestant International” can be studied within a single denominational or national tradition, and none can be understood without coming to terms with its nucleus of ideas/theologies, the nodal points of transmission and dissemination, and the transnational networks that facilitated growth.

The conclusion operates around four questions. First, the appropriate extent and limitations of networks and who should set the boundaries. Self-evidently, the less well-known networks created by the most marginalized, particularly lower-class women of color and Indigenous people at the outer edges of empires and religious traditions, are still the most under-researched and the least understood. Second, how to critically evaluate the relationship between Christianity and empire in the early modern and modern world. Christian expansion and the rise of the European empires are inextricably linked; they are not always in synchronicity regarding objectives or consequences. Third, how did the various revolutions in communications, from the print to the digital revolutions, shape the content of nuclei, the nature and location of nodes that became most important, and the ways networks expanded? Finally, how helpful is it to think of religious traditions capable of transnational mobility in terms of a religious nucleus with a particular DNA core? What inner cores of ideas and practices enabled these disparate religious traditions to grow and thrive thousands of miles from their origins?