In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Angola was a colonial contact zone where diverse populations – penal exiles, colonists, free local populations enslaved Africans and fugitives from the Inquisition – converged. Among these were Romani people (Ciganos), who had been banished from Portugal or its colonies. This chapter argues that Lusophone antigypsy laws evolved alongside the penal transportation system (degredo), a dynamic that racialized Romani individuals in a very specific manner. Viewed as undesirable at home but beneficial abroad, they were forced into the colonial army in Angola and treated as useful colonists. Colonial authorities, seeking to bolster the white population, permitted their limited mobility within designated areas. Like other marginalized groups, including New Christians, some Romani individuals engaged in trade, sometimes even transatlantic trade, dealing in enslaved people, ivory and other goods. Their experiences reveal how colonial structures both constrained and enabled Romani mobility, connecting Europe, Africa and South America through circuits of forced and opportunistic movement.

Agglomeration effects and an abundant supply of skilled workers were not the only reasons Britain industrialized first. Its political institutions also gave it a century’s lead over the rest of western Europe. By the early 1700s, it had a national representative body – Parliament – and something approaching a unified legal and fiscal system. Parliament could pass legislation valid anywhere in Britain, and it allowed Britain to raise more tax revenue and borrow at a lower cost. The revenue let Britain win wars and garner the lion’s share of intercontinental trade as spoils of victory, which spurred innovation. Parliament also facilitated lobbying by entrepreneurs, and it could pass acts that rearranged property rights to improve transportation and agriculture, with a credible promise of compensation for property owners. The legislation helped entrepreneurs build canals and toll roads, which greatly improved transportation. The rest of northwestern Europe had wait until at least the French Revolution to have similar institutional advantages. The delay took a significant economic toll on agriculture and on transportation in Continental Europe, as French evidence shows.

The chapter explores the phenomenon of ocean-to-land globalization, a shift in global production that increasingly relocates industrial activities to aquatic surfaces while consumption remains land-based. It argues that advances in radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies since the mid-twentieth century were critical enablers of this transformation. By dramatically reducing communication and transport costs, these technologies removed the geo-ontological association of marine regions as remote peripheries to terrestrial centers of production. From a cybernetic viewpoint, extending human audiovisual senses through radiocommunication and radionavigation technologies—including radio telegraphs, radiophones, communication satellites, Decca, or GPS—enabled offshore production sites—such as oil rigs, salmon farms, and rocket launch platforms—to function similarly to terrestrial centers. The post-WWII civilian proliferation of such technologies was the essential enabler for reconceptualizing industrialized marine regions and their artificial islands as inhabited spaces and as new production centers in ocean-to-land globalization.

The forces of history have weighed on the Framers’ constitutional design. Their extended republic has grown geographically but shrunk in terms of transportation and communication. Representation as a filter of popular passions and the extended republic as a protection against majority faction have been less effective than the Framers anticipated. Significant changes to the Framers’ design by amendment, interpretation, and practice have also created openings for the influence of political factions.

The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

The colonial period, roughly between 1600 and 1900, saw an unprecedented movement of speakers of English to locations overseas. The reasons for this movement vary considerably, from deportation of prisoners and political opponents to voluntary emigration by groups with economic motives, sometimes mixed with religious ones. The rise of first-language overseas varieties depends heavily on the founder generation and the sociolinguistic scenarios they found themselves in. In addition, many countries have second-language varieties which in general have arisen through an English-oriented educational system and, previously, through contact in colonies with English speakers.

The chapter articulates a new history of motion based on the lives of residents who pushed carts over small bridges and steered horses and mules across the city’s streets. Carters gained concessions from city officials by creating new businesses that supported government efforts to maintain public order, defined at the time as building and maintaining the city’s infrastructure. Coachmen created safe havens across the city in response to officials’ attempts to regulate the movement of enslaved and formerly enslaved people at night. During the day, they gathered information to make money on the side. Their history shows that residents took over the streets to sustain themselves, and in doing so, facilitated commercial activity.

Food was the most important resource during the First World War. Without it, the massive armies on the Eastern and the Western Fronts, in Africa and in Asia could not have been assembled, let alone made to fight. And at the 'home front', which during the First World War came to be seen as integral to the war effort, food was crucial in maintaining production and morale. Any analysis of why and how the First World War was fought and won is incomplete without a consideration of how states, armies, communities, and individuals fought over the globe's supplies of grains, livestock, fertilizers, feeding stocks, and agricultural labour. This chapter will provide an analysis of the impact of this first global war on the worldwide food distribution system that had evolved since the Industrial Revolution. Its aim is to provide both an introduction to the reader on the impact of the First World War on food, and vice versa, and to provide essential contexts for both the chapters that follow and the data on changes in food supply and consumption, and its manifold effects on state, social structures, and health.

Cities are economic entities. Their location, functioning, growth, decline, and internal structure are all heavily influenced by economic forces. This chapter draws from the fields of urban economics, economic geography, and regional science in order to present some core concepts of urban growth and change organized around three questions: Why are cities where they are? What drives urban growth and change? And how does a city grow across a landscape? Foundational concepts (e.g., first and second nature, competition between cities, agglomeration economies, density gradients, transport technology and urban form, the monocentric city model, nonmarket forces) are explained narratively and illustrated through examples from cities around the world. A key message is that the economic logic of urban development is constrained by geography, enabled by technology, and shaped by human institutions, including urban planning. The chapter emphasizes that the urban built environment at risk from hazards is a tangible accumulation of the city’s economic history.

This chapter depicts major events in the evolution of the deportation system (precursor “Nisko,” early isolated deportations from the Reich), the role of the RSHA/Eichmann and local/regional authorities; discusses transportation logistics (roundups, transit camps, railways, police guards, confiscation of property), destination sites, treatment of deportees after arrival and agencies involved; and points to lacunas in scholarship on key features of the deportation process and its place in Holocaust history.

There are two barriers to realizing the promise of the 100-year life in the US. The first is that few get to live it: unlike peers in other high-income countries, the life expectancy of Americans is short. Paradoxically, however, boosting American longevity would aggravate a second problem: on important dimensions, Americans enjoy less independence in old age than their peers. These problems have something perhaps unexpected in common: a built environment that requires driving as the price of first-class citizenship. That bargain, a legacy of twentieth-century transportation and land use policy, first lops years off of life expectancy by claiming lives at disproportionately young ages and then saps independence and quality of life among the small share of Americans who are fortunate to reach very old age. This chapter proposes two solutions. First, it urges road safety interventions that maximize life expectancy and thus expand the promise of the 100-year life. Second, it develops a variant on the classic Tiebout model of residential sorting that applies the concept more narrowly to enable retirees to thrive (transportation-based “gray Tiebout sorting”). It details the instrumental promise of such a market and its potential for broad spillover benefits.

This chapter provides an overview of Tehran’s urban development and shows how the city’s growth has been influenced by natural settings, cultural ideals, and economic and political processes. I explain the class structure of the city (moving from the north to the south, one perceives a gradual shift from wealthier neighborhoods to poorer ones) and its historical and geographical evolution. With an emphasis on grand urban visions, I discuss how natural, historical, and political forces have contributed to the unequal structure of the city.

With the foundation of Imperial Germany in 1871, Berlin became capital of an enlarged and increasingly significant Empire, or Reich. Unification precipitated an economic boom, soon followed by a crash; but industry continued to expand rapidly, with an exponential growth of the population through immigrants seeking work in the city. In the half century following unification the population quadrupled, from around one million in 1871 to nearly four million in the expanded metropolis of Greater Berlin in 1920. New forms of transportation altered the dynamics of the city, while adequate housing and public health became matters of growing concern. In an era of competing nation states, Imperial Germany too began to acquire overseas colonies, including in southwest Africa and eastern Africa (today’s Namibia and Tanzania) as well as elsewhere in Africa and the Pacific. But defeat in the First World War shattered the dreams of the newly rich, the imperialists and colonisers, those who trumpeted racial superiority and dreamed of world mastery.

This chapter discusses the resilience of caravans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by suggesting a move from competition and technologies-focused narratives to more comprehensive histories of mobility. The aim is not to deny the transformative effects of steam and, later, automobiles. It rather promotes a synergy approach in which speed was not systematically the decisive factor and the experience of mobility and the ‘channelling’ (V. Huber) was not yet an unescapable feature. Geography, season, markets’ specific features provided economic rationality to slow, incremental and yet efficient type of mobility. As suggested by the intertwined histories of the chapter, this did not influence economic calculations only. The persistence of caravan trade and its connection to a widening array of means of mobility also had an influence on the very working of inland territories from urban settlements along caravan routes to the cities’ daily connections with the steppe and desert.