The story of Brexit in Scotland was about whether – and, if so, how – Scotland’s vote to Remain in the EU was to be acknowledged. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, was it to be through the exercise of voice – a role for Scotland’s representatives in influencing the form of EU withdrawal and its domestic implications or through exit, by triggering a second independence referendum? In the end it was neither. The UK-wide majority to Leave the EU prevailed, with no concessions to the Scottish government’s preferred form of Brexit and no second independence referendum. This result exposed radically conflicting visions of the nature of the UK’s territorial constitution – a Union State based on Scottish popular sovereignty, or a Unitary State based on the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. A Brexit premised on the restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty and the desire to ‘take back control’ laid bare the subaltern nature of the Union-State account and the fragility of Scotland’s constitutional protections within the Union. Devolution in Scotland has been left diminished and the pathway towards independence mired in uncertainty.

Representation was believed to serve as a filter on the passions and excesses of direct democracy, but representatives could be influenced and even become the leaders of political factions. A central concern was to assure that representatives were insulated from such influence and focused on the public interest. As with the selection of executive and judicial officials, the questions that most occupied the Framers were the method of selection of representatives (appointment or popular election) and their term of service and eligibility for reelection.

Florentino González (1805–1875) was one of the “founders” of classical liberalism in nineteenth-century Colombia. His early life was marked by the experience of independence since his family was forced to move from their home by the loyalists when he was still a child. He completed his studies in jurisprudence in Bogota in 1825. As Gran Colombia tore apart, González participated in the plot to assassinate Bolívar in 1828, and subsequently suffered prison and exile. He was back in Bogota shortly after Bolívar’s death and became actively involved in politics and journalism for the next two decades, when he held a succession of important posts, including elected member of Congress and State Secretary of Finance. In 1840, he published Elementos de ciencia administrativa, a two-volume treatise about public administration, a subject he then taught at the university in Bogota. He authored a significant number of essays, some of them in the newspapers he edited. Appointed to a diplomatic mission that took him to Lima and Santiago de Chile, he resigned it in 1861 and remained in exile until the end of his life, first in Chile and later in Argentina.

Central banks around the world are increasingly shaping, as well as following, broader climate policies, a development we theorize as policy coordination. In this chapter, we study how and why the European Central Bank (ECB), previously narrowly focused on its primary objective of price stability, has moved towards more extensive coordination with the political institutions of the EU. Based on an analysis of actual policies and views held by ECB top officials, we trace the evolution of the practice and ideological backing of ECB coordination with fiscal and climate policies. Our findings document an interesting paradox: although the ECB has increasingly engaged in policy coordination, it has done so on a unilateral basis by choosing on its own whether, when, and with which economic policies it coordinates monetary policy. We refer to this practice as “independent policy coordination”. Analysed against recent case law by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the legal limits to independent policy coordination are only vaguely defined. As it is notoriously difficult to distinguish independent policy coordination from autonomous policymaking by the ECB, we conclude that multilateral coordination, to the extent it remains compatible with the primacy of price stability, would be the next logical step.

Chapter 2 examines changes in colonial mercy proceedings from the late 1940s to the 1960s, and the tensions that arose between decolonisation and British involvement in determining the fate of condemned prisoners. These tensions were apparent in cases from British Guiana, Malaya and Kenya, among others, but in the immediate aftermath of British abolition they were especially pronounced in the Bahamas, which had a constitutionally advanced system of internal self-government and where, in 1968, British ministers prevented the execution of two prisoners whom locally elected political leaders and the governor had decided should hang. Analysis of these cases reveals the dynamics of death penalty culture and political debates in the Bahamas and demonstrates that Britain could not divorce itself from the ramifications of colonial capital cases, even as successive British governments remained formally committed to the Creech Jones doctrine that they should not interfere in determining the fate of condemned prisoners.

This chapter focuses on the place of work in Wollstonecraft’s moral and political philosophy, and in particular her feminist thought, as she argues that one way in which women are held back is by not being allowed to investigate the world, and move freely in the public space. She sometimes blames early marriage, as it simply removes a young woman from her parent’s home to that of her husband, who will himself have left home as a child to go to school, later possibly to travel, and still leaves most days to go to work. Women, Wollstonecraft argues, both in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman should pursue their development outside the home, either by leading professional lives or pursuing intellectual or artistic interests once their children are old enough to go to school. There can be no independence for women, Wollstonecraft argues, without work that goes beyond unpaid domestic work.

This chapter discusses the contested place of the Declaration of Independence in black political thought. As a document that provided a rationale for American independence, the Declaration of Independence in its own way also provided one for black political equality in the United States. This tension between intention and interpretation has made the Declaration stubbornly immune from attack by black intellectuals, politicians, and movement leaders. With rare exception, the Declaration has been attacked mostly for its exclusivity, not its content or core ethos. Even Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) modest dissent from the Declaration has been limited in its ability to transform the persistence of black support for it, making arguments for CRT’s abandonment of America’s founding principles ring hollow. Instead, the history of black political thought from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, stands squarely on the side of the Declaration’s essential truths, while admonishing America’s enduring failure to live up to them.

The scholarly discussion of Kant’s republicanism focuses heavily on his ‘negative’ conception of freedom: independence or not being subject to another master. What has received much less attention is Kant’s ‘positive’ conception of freedom: being subject to one’s own legislation. This chapter argues that Kant’s positive conception of external freedom plays a crucial role in his Doctrine of Right: external freedom in the negative sense (mutual independence) requires and is realized by freedom in the positive sense (joint self-legislation). After first discussing the ‘innate right to freedom’, it is shown that, on Kant’s account, this fundamental right is realized fully only when external freedom is realized in both senses and in all three spheres of public right. Any satisfactory account of Kant’s republican theory must complement the focus on independence with an emphasis on citizenship and joint self-legislation.

This chapter explores how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and ratified. Congress created and assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence to a committee of lawyers. When the draft went to the Congress, lawyers like Edward Rutledge had their chance to weigh in. The draft document and the final version was a legal document designed to place rebellion on a legal foundation. Jefferson later recalled that his draft of the Declaration of Independence merely recombined ideas that had long been discussed, and terminology long adopted, by Congress. The Declaration assumed independence, otherwise it would have had no foundation. Following this logic, as the members did, surely Jefferson among them, the Declaration was simply stating the reasons – a justification like the Declaratory Act of 1766, by which Parliament explained its authority over the colonies – for an event already transpired. The ringing elaboration of the rights of mankind, various borrowings from John Locke, echoes of natural law, and the language of prior resolves and declarations were not really pertinent to a declaration for the independence of a continent, but make sense in the more limited framework of Virginia constitutional change.

Chapter 5 offers a critical reappraisal of King’s Pan-Africanist credentials, challenging prevailing interpretations that downplay his alignment with Pan-Africanist thought. While some, like George M. Houser, have argued that King was not fundamentally a Pan-Africanist, and others, such as Lewis Baldwin, have emphasized his integrationist leanings, this chapter contends that King’s extensive advocacy for African independence and unity positions him squarely within the Pan-African tradition. Through a nuanced exploration of definitional debates and King’s unique approach, the chapter invites renewed scholarly discussion regarding his place in the broader history of Pan-African theory and praxis, revealing how his vision both reflected and shaped the perspectives of Black Americans in his era.

Chapter 3 delves into King’s deepening engagement with the international liberation of African-descended peoples from March 1957 through early 1961. Central to this discussion is King’s sermon “The Birth of a New Nation,” delivered after his return from Ghana’s independence celebrations – a moment that profoundly shaped his worldview. The chapter chronicles King’s subsequent travels to Nigeria at the invitation of Governor-General Nnamdi Azikiwe, further solidifying his identity as an “Africanist.” His active participation in the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and collaboration with prominent activists such as George Houser and Bayard Rustin are examined as pivotal to his organizational and ideological maturation. This period marks the crystallization of King’s Beloved Pan-Africanism, as he forged powerful connections between domestic and international struggles for justice.

This chapter traces the progression of nationalist writing in Wales and Scotland from the Popular Front fiction of the 1930s through to the devolved nations of the twenty-first century. Raymond Williams’s changing position on the nationalist question is charted and related to the work of the political theorist Tom Nairn. Williams is further analysed in the second half of the chapter as an indicative case study of a creative writer who drew on the legacy of the 1930s writers in order to tackle the centralist tendencies of English literature. In the process, Williams himself became a protagonist in the devolution struggle and is portrayed as such in John Osmond’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018). The chapter concludes by discussing why documentary approaches, such as Osmond’s novel and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010), are important to the fictional representations of the struggle for Welsh and Scottish independence.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

After gaining independence in 1821, the Mexican government passed laws that abolished the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico in 1824 and the institution of slavery in 1829. While these dates are concrete, the process and implementation of both laws entailed more complexity than these firm dates suggest, and created real and perceived consequences for inhabitants in Mexican territories. This chapter argues that abolition was a contentious social and political process that placed settlement, citizenship, and freedom at the forefront of discussions for the nascent nation in the 1820s and 1830s. The chapter also argues that the process of abolishing slavery in Mexico was steeped in colonial history and set the stage for contentious individual and collective action through the national government in Mexico City and the state/local government of Coahuila y Tejas from 1821 to 1836.