Race had a key role in the construction of madness and literary value and thus in periodical production in asylums, especially in the United States. Contributing to a periodical enabled educated white patients not only to express their creativity, enlightenment, and agency, but to reclaim their citizenship, at least figuratively. The launch of the Meteor in 1872 by a former plantation owner and patient at the Alabama Insane Hospital, Joseph Alexander Goree, was an act of rebellion against the irony of losing his own liberty and rights once he was certified as insane. The periodical was part of a larger campaign of literary activity through which he demonstrated his erudition, high taste, and reason. Recasting himself as an ally and collaborator to the superintendent, Goree found empowerment in maintaining the high literary quality of his publication and keeping madness out of it. Yet, the Meteor was far from a homogeneous polished account of the asylum: during its irregular run, it embodied different viewpoints as well as Goree’s declining enthusiasm and growing discontent, as he realised that his project of self-empowerment would fail to earn him his freedom and rights.

Chapter 25 delves into Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 2006 Um defeito de cor. The novel opens with a stark portrayal of the brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade and the harsh labor endured in nineteenth-century Brazil, evoking deep, collective trauma. Yet Gonçalves’ work defies the typical mold of historical fiction. Instead, Um defeito de cor expands the understanding of history by weaving in Afro-diasporic ritual objects, practices, and belief systems. These cultural elements reshape memory as the story of Kehinde, the protagonist of the novel, unfolds. Through this approach, history becomes both a discovery that feels familiar and a recognition that surprises. This complex interplay is captured, for instance, in the idea of serendipitous encounters, a concept also rooted in African traditions. In the end, the novel carves out a space for the literary assentamento (settlement) of an Afro-Atlantic identity and existence.

My prologue introduces the main arguments and arc of the book. As I explain, Revolutionary Ink traces two interrelated but ultimately opposing currents. Beginning in 1693, it shows how New York’s printing presses initially inspired fealty to the British Commonwealth. It then registers a seismic shift at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 when loyalty to the “ancient” liberties of all Freeborn Englishmen became paramount, a process of “Americanization” spurred by colonial presses up and down the Atlantic seaboard. I also point out that the work is neither a triumphant Whig narrative nor a teleologically inevitable one. More accurately, sheets printed in ink are transformative agents of change, with largely unforeseen consequences across changing historical and interpretive contexts. Drawing on a large body of scholarship across disciplines, Revolutionary Ink seeks to identify some of these changes in a distinct and crucial setting, unveiling a history of a city of divergent ideas, people, and institutions evolving over time, both influenced by print media and influencing it.

Chapter 4 departs from a key idea: “thinking about the history of the Brazilian novel without considering slavery would be as misleading as imagining the history of Brazil itself without mentioning forced captive labor.” The chapter dives into how slavery and enslaved people appear in some of Brazil’s major nineteenth-century novels, from Teixeira e Sousa’s O filho do pescador to Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-crioulo (1895). It carefully traces these portrayals across different works, highlighting an important distinction. On one side, there’s what the chapter calls “the white perspective,” which you can see in Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s novels A moreninha and As vítimas-algozes. On the other, there’s “the Black perspective,” represented powerfully by Maria Firmino dos Reis in her novel Úrsula. This contrast shows how authors from different backgrounds approached the topic of slavery, shaping how the institution and its human toll were fictionalized and understood in Brazilian literature.

This chapter is devoted to the imperial eunuchate and begins by looking at the place of eunuchs in the life of the empire prior to 1658. This is followed by an examination of the rising presence of eunuchs in Aurangzeb’s princely household and the central role eunuch loyalists played in helping ‘Alamgir consolidate his power post-1658. Despite ‘Alamgir’s concerns about the existence and trafficking of eunuchs, he also appreciated the strength and usefulness of the imperial eunuchate, and contributed to its growing power. This chapter also evaluates Khidmatgar Khan III, the most powerful eunuch in Mughal history and the head of the imperial eunuchate from the early 1690s to his death in 1704. Such power did not come without resistance from uncastrated men who were jealous of the eunuchate’s wealth and power. This included ‘Alamgir himself, who, despite heavy dependence on imperial eunuchs, tried to maintain some checks on them, even if these weakened toward the end of his life.

Chapter 5 focuses entirely on Naturalism. It challenges the common elite opinion that sees the naturalist novel as a low-quality or failed form of literature. Instead, it looks at the topic from a fresh and insightful angle by examining the nineteenth-century publishing market. A key part of this study is sexuality, which helped naturalist fiction sell well but also made it a target for criticism. The chapter uses sexuality to explore popular naturalist types like the “hysterical girl” and the “spent man,” while also showing how Naturalism included queer characters. It also discusses the criticism of slavery, featuring characters like Bertoleza from Aluísio Azevedo’s O cortiço and Amaro from Bom-crioulo. Bertoleza and Amaro are two complex, self-aware Black characters, something not seen before Naturalism.

This chapter examines the important role of Thomas Greenleaf, who used his press to oppose New York’s ratification of the Constitution and keep a wary eye on leaders of the Republic until his death from Yellow Fever in 1798. In revisiting the Anti-Federalist positions in his columns and tracts vis-a-vis those found in The Federalist Papers, I argue that the importance of this debate was not simply in its outcome, but how positions on both sides responded to each other and evolved – the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in 1791 being the most prominent result. Greenleaf’s press, purchased from the family of John Holt, took the side of the tradesman, the mechanic, and small landowner. Central to Greenleaf’s convictions was a concern that the rights of the common man would be stripped by powerful, self-serving “aristocrats.” As I examine, several of Greenleaf’s contributors were also strident in their critique of slavery. Greenleaf’s press was also a key disseminator of a pamphlet by Mercy Otis Warren, the only woman known to publish on the Federalism debates. Many of the issues raised in Greenleaf’s prints have renewed relevancy today, adding to the value of a reconsideration of Anti-Federalist positions.

How is death different from life? Or, what precisely is the relationship between life and death, categories generally defined in terms of each other? In anthropology, two strands of scholarship have unsettled any presuppositions that life and death are opposite and wholly separate domains: on the one hand, cosmological and ontological frames of regeneration and continuity and, on the other, political and political economic analytics of exclusion and exploitation. These strands likewise have generally been engaged as wholly separate discourses. In this part, our authors address construing and producing life from death in both ontological and political economic registers. In doing so, they provide a critical bridge between the reflections on dying, deathcare, and the material of the corpse found in the preceding two parts and the more explicit framing of necropolitics that ties together Part IV as well as Part V’s look beyond death.

Economic growth boosted living standards after it first surfaced in Britain in the 1700s. Why did it not arise earlier or somewhere else? Why did it spread quickly to northwestern Europe, but take longer to reach much of the rest of the world? The answer is not slavery, colonialism, or capitalism. Rather, it lies with advantages shared by much of northwestern Europe: institutions that secured property rights with benefits beyond a narrow elite; states that could rearrange property rights with credible compensation to improve transportation and agricultural productivity; cities made possible by productive agriculture that spawned agglomeration effects like those at work in Silicon Valley; skilled workers who could implement new ideas; and access to the ideas themselves from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Northwestern Europe had these advantages for four reasons: its history, its religion, its intellectual heritage, and its distance from Eurasia’s steppes. Those four reasons are the ultimate causes for the onset of sustained economic growth in Britain in the 1700s and for its spread to northwestern Europe.

Chapter 5 addresses how writers defined racial and national difference according to bodily deportment in the context of Atlantic slaveocracy. Historical theorizations of “wanton cruelty” and involuntary motion are crucial to our understanding of the largest forced migration in human history, in which more than twelve million African people were enslaved. The aesthetics of motion also played a crucial role in how whiteness was constructed in opposition to the paradoxical claim that Black and Brown bodies were too antic and yet too languorous. The Woman of Colour reframes racialized movement in terms of “flexibleness,” which is a way of moving through the world that is hyperactive and yet especially vulnerable to being acted upon. Olivia Fairfield’s deportment challenges racialized aesthetics of motion but nevertheless embraces a form of narcissistic amelioration in which deserving white English gentlemen – and not the biracial heroine – ultimately have the capacity to enact social change.

“Slavery and abolition” are simultaneously ubiquitous and obscured in the Romantic era. While contemporary scholarship now makes slavery more apprehensible, it has also become a representative limit for what Blackness can mean and do in the period. The two sections in this chapter seek to revise Romantic notions of resistance and of libertation. The first, on slavery, looks to the period’s slave rebellions and figures of enslavement to propose new means of reading Romanticism and new modes of Romantic reading. The second looks to “abolition” for a revolutionary alternative to Romantic amelioration. Both sections turn to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “destituent power” to explore how slavery and abolition continue to trouble our ideas of captivity and liberation, institutionalization and revolution.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

This chapter analyses a set of rarely utilised recorded interviews produced by linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s. This chapter argues that through using oral history and memory studies methods, recorded testimonies provide historians with unique opportunities to consider formerly enslaved people’s memories about, and feelings towards, slavery. In their interviews, the elderly African Americans evidenced the complex long-term emotional legacy of slavery: the lingering emotional impact of violence, the communal fear of slavery’s return, the anger about exploitative labour regimes and the pride they felt in their labour achievements. Despite this complex emotional legacy, the interviewees composed their memories with statements of survival and hope, utilising these emotions as scaffolds to create a coherent narrative of their life from slavery into freedom. In doing so, formerly enslaved people created their own emotional framework to understand and document slavery’s impact, counteracting white people’s continued attempts to present slavery as a benevolent institution and restrict African Americans’ emotional expressions.

This chapter mediates on the creation and afterlives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s emotional testimonies. Engaging with debates over archival silences, this chapter argues that power has entered the production of knowledge relating to US slavery, limiting access to sources that emphasise enslaved people’s complex emotional lives. Revealing how racist attitudes shaped the creation and evaluation of the Works Progress Administration interviews produced by Black interviewers, this chapter also notes that these sources were archived as part of a white institutional project at the Library of Congress. In contrast, Lorenzo Dow Turner’s interviews, papers and photographs, which emphasise the complex emotional legacy of slavery, are scattered across various archives, limiting historians’ access to the emotional narrative portrayed within them. Despite the silences in relation to slavery and emotion, this chapter argues that the archive is still rich for researching enslaved people’s emotional lives if we privilege Black source producers, explore smaller repositories, use sound and image archives, utilise imaginative methodologies, and recognise and utilise our own emotions in our research.

Most of the classical empires collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, but despite this collapse various regions of the world became more culturally, commercially, and politically integrated in the millennium that followed, a process traced in this chapter. Mercantile and religious networks, including Islam, linked growing cities and glittering courts, where hereditary rulers and their entourages of elites developed institutions and ceremonies that strengthened royal authority, and created courtly cultures with distinctive codes of behavior. All of these relied for their wealth on a spread and intensification of agriculture, which happened in both the eastern and western hemispheres, and was interwoven with changes in social and gender structures. Cites such as Constantinople, Tenochtitlan, and Hangzhou grew into large metropolises, and religion, trade, and diplomacy motivated people to travel, creating regional and transregional zones of exchange in goods and ideas.

The references to liberty and equality in the Declaration have been contested from the very beginning. Although some have argued that they had no application to slavery, many people in the late eighteenth century perceived them as clearly inconsistent with slavery. These references have triggered equally conflicting responses from courts, where judges have relied on them to abolish minimum wage laws and to strike down regulations of businesses. Other judges have invoked these references in support of more equal legislative chambers and same-sex marriage. Supporters of every conceivable position have relied on this part of the Declaration. These references have become in effect a national Rorhschach test – one sees in them what one is already inclined to see. Given this contested history, courts invoking this language should do so with caution.

The passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 represented a hard-won victory, but its monumentalizing can obscure the complex time of abolition. Temporal complexity defines British literary and material–cultural representations of abolition, from the testimonies of formerly enslaved people (Cugoano and Prince), to the writings of prominent white abolitionists (Clarkson and Wilberforce), to work by ‘canonical’ Romantic-era writers (Wordsworth, Austen, and Coleridge). Through readings of key texts and artefacts around 1807, this chapter considers how the literature and material cultures of the era configure the spaces and temporalities of abolition. It argues that abolitionist arguments and sentiment depended on shifting notions of time and space in the age of interconnected global revolutions, producing abolitionist materials that worked upon the spatial and temporal gaps between the metropole and the colonies, and in many cases deliberately obscured the connections between the two.