Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

This chapter examines the renewal of British–Miskitu relations in the 1830s and the actions of Belizean Superintendent Alexander MacDonald and his aide (later, Consul) Patrick Walker that entangled the British imperial government in the affairs of the Mosquito Kingdom, particularly in relation to its Central American neighbors and in the context of a growing interest in the Nicaragua Canal that prompted the British government to reestablish its official presence over the Mosquito Coast.

After Union forces captured New Orleans in spring 1862, they determined to fight their way upriver through the Felicianas to a showdown in Vicksburg. The battle at Port Hudson, known as the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, is remembered as the first time Black men fought as Union soldiers. There they battled bravely but suffered dearly in a victory they hoped would make a new world. The available evidence suggests my ancestor Virgil Harrell did not enlist. But after the war he and other Feliciana freedpersons claimed themselves. In the presence of their enemies, freedpersons named themselves, married, created homes, abandoned homes, voted, and recreated themselves and their communities on land drenched in generations of their blood. They would have to draw on the lessons of slavery to create something like freedom.

By the time of his death, Lincoln had earned substantial recognition as a great president, even admiration as a statesman of outstanding quality. His assassination heightened the sense of loss and mourning Americans and others felt, in tributes, eulogies and sermons.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Abraham Lincoln was conscious that the constitution gave him no authority to emancipate slaves under peacetime circumstances. Hence, his first movement toward emancipation was a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation of the slaves of the loyal border states. But even this plan was opposed by those states. So, in mid-1862, Lincoln turned to the powers he believed the constitution conferred on him as commander-in-chief to liberate the confederacy's slaves as a military measure for winning the war. He issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation in September, 1862, attempting to make it palatable beforehand by extracting promises of colonization abroad by the freed slaves. He then proceeded to issue a final proclamation on January 1, 1863. The colonization plan came to nothing. But Lincoln remained anxious about the constitutionality of his proclamation, and in January, 1865, obtained from congress a 13th amendment entirely abolishing slavery.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

What were rights in seventeenth-century France, within the kingdom and its possessions? The French word ‘droits’ (rights) was rarely used. Jurists and claimants talked about liberties, privileges, exemptions, franchises. Liberties were understood in terms of entitlements, which were collective rather than personal. Subjects were granted different privileges depending on the order or estate to which they belonged. The clergy and the nobility enjoyed privileges denied to the common people (they did not, for example, pay taxes) because of the specific social roles they performed. People also enjoyed additional privileges and exemptions to the ones attached to their orders. They belonged to other groups, whether they were provinces, cities, communities, corporations, that granted specific privileges which the sovereign had to respect.

In this chapter we examine the connection between religion and abolition. After discussing early antislavery voices, such as the Essenes and St. Gregory of Nyssa, we recount in detail the growing Christian rejection of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Attention is given to the arguments and action of early Quaker abolitionists, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, to Anglicans like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and to antislavery activism in North America leading up to the American Civil War. We then provide a theoretical evaluation of the role of Christianity in the nineteenth-century rejection of slavery. The chapter closes with an exposition of Islamic abolitionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Ahmad Bey, Rashid Rida, Mohsen Kadivar, and Bernard Freamon.

This chapter traces the experiences of Sarah Osborne Benjamin, who married a soldier in the Third New York Regiment and traveled with him from West Point to Philadelphia and Yorktown. Although she never learned to write, she left behind a rich oral autobiography: her application for a Revolutionary War pension. In it, she recalls her work as a washerwoman and cook, her relationships with other Continental Army women, and her postwar financial challenges. She offers a nuanced picture of the Continental Army as a place of oppressive surveillance but also complex social networking and protest. By exploring her interpretation of the American Revolution, I argue that, even as Continental Army women confronted bodily scrutiny and restrictive military regulations, they also derived power from their relationships. After the war, they used oral testimony, material culture, and strategic storytelling to exercise a distinctive form of archival agency.