This chapter examines the work of three contemporary US poets – Daniel Borzutzky, Rosa Alcalá, and Wendy W. Walters – who explore how capitalist processes help to construct and “translate” race and gender into partitioned conditions of subjectivation and what Iris Marion Young, after Jean-Paul Sartre, calls serial collective identities. All three authors help us to reimagine the political economy of race in terms of bounded yet globally interconnected material contexts of action rather than as relations between collective subjects with fixed group attributes. These poets instead represent race as a social form of constraint and possibility powerfully conditioned by a capitalist logic of accumulation, spatial containment, and an international division of labor simultaneously dividing and connecting populations across great distances and differences.

This chapter posits that water’s repudiation of containment transforms this element into a space, place, and being that can usher in new directions for Latinx studies. Specifically, the chapter contends that when water overflows it “undoes” the work of borders, a move signaled by the Spanish word for this action, desbordar. Underscoring how water can generate theoretical frameworks that reach across geographic divides, the chapter provides a succinct analysis of this element in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, and Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper. The chapter also stresses the connections between environmentalism and spirituality by emphasizing readings of water informed by Afro-diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou and Santería/Regla de Ocha. By highlighting water’s capacity to sustain conversations regarding such topics as violence, memory, and repair, the chapter offers water as an entryway into critical conversations in Latinx literature that do not disregard cultural and/or national specificity but remain provocatively untethered to these allegiances.

Embodied movement within and across national borders has been increasing. Prompted by intensifying local–global unsettling, it has led to a series of tensions concerning the way even the most supposedly cosmopolitan of countries now treat the refugees and migrants. Those who seek refuge have become a problem. In this conflict-ridden world in which the displacement has become endemic – and in this mediated world where the hope of finding a better place to live is held out as part of the dominant global imaginary – countries across the globe are now attempting to manage the global flow of non-citizens. Here the visceral immediacy of human needs and hopes is confronted by the abstracting machinery of state surveillance and management. This chapter explores the tensions between the continuing embodied movement of those who seek refuge and the intensifying abstraction of state engagement with those persons. The chapter takes three liberal democracies as its focus – Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are settler colonial countries which we might expect to be cosmopolitan and welcoming. The history of refugee reception is, however, a movement away from that sensibility.

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this chapter advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926–2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multimedia representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves – Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France – renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings – and continue to do so today.

This chapter offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, it discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. It argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the chapter also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.

Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

This chapter illustrates how the United Kingdom’s distinctive understanding of sovereignty combined with New Labour’s vision of the United Kingdom’s place in the global economy to shape the government’s approach to human trafficking. Targeting trafficking for sexual exploitation, the government cracked down on migrant sex workers and domestic prostitution. It also associated labour trafficking with illegal working and cast society as a victim of exploitation along with individuals who had been trafficked. The chapter describes New Labour’s selective acceptance of European Union and Council of Europe antitrafficking instruments; it adopted those instruments that reinforced the United Kingdom’s borders while avoiding those that gave rights to victims of trafficking. By equating its action plan for tackling human trafficking with the abolition of the slave trade, the government elevated its antitrafficking policies to a moral crusade.

As Chapter 4 has already made clear, this chapter is not another caravan-to-car story. Nor is it another case study of threatening mobility vs. governmentality. It is rather a continuation of Chapter 4 on the transformations of economic and political geography that put caravans to the test. Building on Chapter 4 and contrary to developmentalist notions of modernisation, this chapter argues that the end of caravans was a cumulative process, just like its persistence until the interwar period. New kinds of territorialisation (automobility and what I define as the ‘evening of mobility’ were part of it, indeed) fostered gradual disintegration and divergence across the caravan regional market. This would gradually erode the caravans’ raison d’être and deepen their transition to shorter routes while camels and traders would find new employments.

This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

The premise of this volume is that borders are shifting, and that as borders shift, rights and democratic legitimacy ought to shift with them. For good reasons, the focus of this discussion is on sovereign states and their borders. However, sovereign borders do not exhaust the types of boundaries that shape and circumscribe human freedom. In this chapter, the focus is on the private geographies that shape our lives. These private geographies – and here special economic zones are discussed – are both embedded in the sovereign states system and also help to consolidate its structure. Private geographies, which are characterized by private sources of capital and property-ownership, rely on public actors and institutions to thrive. Private economic enclaves also help funnel capital and trade rights around restrictive sovereign borders. These private geographies are of special interest because they reveal how states and capital cooperate in monopolizing land and carving up the earth, acting in ways that consolidate each other’s power. Therefore, private borders and public properties call into question the public–private divide and reveal how power over land is determined in the global age, often in ways that evade democratic control.

In the last decade, states have fixated on policing their borders beyond their territorial limits. This practice, which has been called “shifting borders,” undermines state legitimacy, because the latter depends on how states exercise their power, who they exercise it over, and also on where they exercise it. As the chapter shows, shifting borders generates a tension among rights, territory, and people, where it seems that we can have any two, but not all three. This chapter examines three responses to this tension. First, Sovereigntism seeks to stabilize the relation of people and territory. Second, Democratic Cosmopolitanism tolerates shifts in territory, as long as people and rights remain. Finally, the Watershed Model keeps borders in their place, but it accepts changes in the people, as it decouples democratic governance and rights from a particular national identity. It is argued that, in the long run, this model best handles the challenges in times of planetary crises, such as global poverty and climate change. For the Watershed Model, like the grass-roots movements of indigenous peoples and transnational migrant activists, can redefine territory, allow for human mobility, and resist state overreach in border control.

For many postcolonies, a national currency—like a constitution, flag, or passport—was a necessary accompaniment to independence. Money and credit were more than potent symbols of decolonization; they were means of constituting a new political order. This Introduction argues that the monetary regimes established in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania aimed to remake their independent societies, turning savings, loans, and other financial instruments into the infrastructure of citizenship and statecraft. These instruments tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through mechanisms that were simultaneously ethical and economic, cultural and political. They did so because colonial subjects experienced empire as not only political domination but also a constraint on economic liberties. Yet, the ensuing decolonization was at best partial, not least because the value of national currencies depended on the accumulation of foreign money. Moreover, the independent political economy of East Africa created new inequalities and divisions. Struggles over money, credit, and commodities would animate a series of struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers in the coming decades. By detailing the notion of the “moneychanger state,” this chapter provides the conceptual frameworks to understand these conflicts in new ways.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.