Devotional objects, such as rosaries, medals, and relics, have always stood at the heart of the Catholic veneration of saints. Using two Bavarian rosaries as a case study, this chapter examines how such material objects allowed individual believers to tailor their faith in tactile ways, linking their devotions to wider trends within global Catholicism.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

The German army invaded the Soviet Union in hopes of destroying it in a blitz campaign in 1941. Its professional and experienced officer corps utilized Auftragstaktik to achieve early victories on the battlefield. The men they led were well-motivated, generally well-trained, loyal to the Nazi regime, and confident in victory. The emphasis on tactical flexibility and independence helped balance out the army’s numerical inferiority in weapons and equipment. The enormous casualties suffered in 1941 and early 1942, however, ensured that the army’s qualitative edge soon dulled, leading to complete defeat.

At the end of the nineteenth century, settler states gained implicit imperial sanction to practice racialised border-policing on disingenuous grounds of language proficiency. As is well known, this outcome was the result of settler dominion efforts through the late nineteenth century to consolidate ‘whiteness’ as the structuring principle of future settler nationhood. But the pathway to this outcome was neither smooth nor inexorable: it emerged from an interconnected colonial world that was inherently multiracial and unsettled. Although the nineteenth-century experiment of settler colonisation was dominated by British migrants motivated by land ownership, the settler colonies were also occupied by a diverse mix of non-European people on the move. Their contributions formed an essential underpinning of settler colonial growth in ways that highlighted Australia’s dependency on broader patterns of colonial trade and migration around and beyond the empire. Of the ethnically diverse peoples who migrated to colonial Australia, some were already British subjects; others were not. But a great many became permanent settlers who asserted their own understandings of citizenship in empire.

Premised on the assumption that Afropolitan immobilities are as central to Afropolitanism as the forms of liquid flows and circulations that scholarship on Afropolitanism tends to focalize, this chapter uses modes of spatial and digital immobility in the production of Afropolitan subjectivities to read mainly anglophone Afropolitan literatures. Drawing on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, with occasional references to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Teju Cole’s Open City, the essay lingers on how the mobilities of Afropolitan cultural productions are intimately connected to symbolic and concrete geographies of stasis and technologies of nonmovement. Although Afropolitanism is often discussed as exhibiting affinities with the earlier Pan-Africanism, its ontological poetics similarly connects to digital cosmopolitanism, the condition of digital connectivity that centers the multiple roots and routes of global subjects whose cosmopolitanism is often entangled with forms of immobility and the quotidian use of digital social networks.

One check on the abuse of power by the political elite is the ability of people to move away from those who abuse their power. In agricultural societies, this is difficult to do because individuals who move must leave their land behind. Land is not mobile. One result of the Industrial Revolution was that capital displaced land as the most significant factor of production, and capital is more mobile than land. The mobility of physical and human capital has constrained the abuse of authority and has contributed to the shift from feudal political institutions toward democracy.

The introduction grounds African literary studies in practical and material considerations, and shows how print is a site of innovation and transformation. The print archive is shown to be full of texts which are now overlooked, but which enable us to understand much more about the literary productivity of the period, including what printed texts meant, socially and culturally, to their readers. An overview of the three sections of the volume is given, from Part I, which asks when independent African-owned printing presses emerged on the continent, what they published and where their readers were located, to Part II, which asks about the audiences for print culture and how they were convened, and Part III, which asks about the international networks of producers, distributors and readers behind the flows of texts on the continent. Emphasising specificities of language, religion and education, as well as the tangible social and political networks behind the circulation of texts, the introduction suggests that a locally sensitive approach to the study of print networks is essential to our understanding of global movements such as Black internationalism and Islam.

US founders sought to build a republic of citizens who improved themselves and their nation, free of unearned aristocratic entitlements, but that fostered an unfamiliar mobility. Reactions against aristocratic idleness elevated the importance of self-improvement and work for winning cultural esteem as well as for material well-being. Benjamin Franklin led in promoting these values to nurture useful citizens; only after his death did a revised version of his autobiography portray him as having “raised myself.” Although mobility came to be expected of White men, legal and cultural presumptions marginalized most others, who were subject to harsh physical and social penalties if they attempted to claim self-agency or to seek self-improvement and work that brought respect. Georgia’s early history illustrates how self-serving stories about work and initiative both defended enslavement and closed off opportunities for poor White people. The elderly George Washington was among the rare citizens who took seriously Revolutionary-era rhetoric about equality, and he came to appreciate how the work of enslaved people made his self-improvement and prosperity possible.

In the seventeenth century the Renaissance and Reformation inspired worldly ambitions and self-fashioning among Europeans. New opportunities, such as commercialization and exploration, along with new pressures such as mounting poverty and vagrancy in England, threatened communities and traditions. English adventurers sought their fortunes in Virginia and New England, but their loyalties to traditional duties to God and community varied widely. The lives, worries, and circumstances of Captain John Smith, explorer and self-promoter, and Robert Keayne, a prosperous Boston merchant, illustrate emerging ways of thinking about self-made fates among these colonists. Both pursued their worldly ambitions through incessant work, and they participated in an early stage of shaping the criteria by which Americans would judge successes and failures. They also expressed strong beliefs about fostering communities and working for them while they pursued their own ambitions. At the same time, and like their peers, they guarded the boundaries of inclusion in those communities, defining narrowly who could belong, who merited respect, and whose exploitation and destruction they felt was justified.

Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.

The silent film Grass (1925), which follows the seasonal migration of members of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation and their herds, shows mobile pastoralism as a changeless, remote, environmentally driven, and primitive way of life. An anthropological and historical analysis of the film explores problematic conceptions that still underlie the contemporary study of historical and ancient pastoralism.

This chapter extends the conceptual framework laid out in Chapter 2 to a series of basic questions about various dimensions of ancient and historical pastoralism, using constellations of methods reviewed in Chapters 4 and 5. Answering these questions on the basis of empirical archaeological data also builds a broader basis for comparing ancient pastoralism to historically and ethnographically documented practices, providing the means to generate stronger ethnographic analogies for archaeological interpretation, as discussed in Chapter 3.

Various biomolecular methods increasingly augment foundational methodologies for the study of pastoralism, including isotopic analyses, analyses of ancient human and animal DNA, identification of milk proteins, and residue analyses that identify animal carcass fat and milk fat. Although the results of biomolecular analyses can significantly expand the evidentiary basis for the archaeology of pastoralism and have in many ways revolutionized the field, they are not some sort of panacea that can easily solve all of the conceptual, interpretive, empirical, and disciplinary problems laid out in Chapter 1.

Twentieth-century scholars defined “pastoral nomadism” as an environmental adaptation inherently linked to specific political, social, and economic traits: long-distance mobility; tribalism, social egalitarianism, and dependence on sedentary agricultural communities; economic specialization in pastoralism; and “marginal” land. To resolve conceptual conflation and promote the writing of histories of pastoralism, archaeologists require a new framework that draws on anthropological ideas about mobility, political complexity, intensification of production, and pastoral landscapes.

Railway infrastructure defines the narrative parameters of two texts by Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South and ‘Cousin Phillis’. Focusing on small-scale interim stations, and the construction of new lines, this chapter examineslogistical options that even dormant railway infrastructure can bring to stories otherwise concerned with being-in-place. This infrastructural reading of North and South focuses on a scene set at Outwood Station, a small but well-connected hinge between North and South. It shows that proximity to physically iterated railway infrastructure reconnects the narrative to a broad system of global exchange and mobility. In ‘Cousin Phillis’, meanwhile, Gaskell’s civil engineer narrator lays both railway lines and plot lines but neither quite coheres into a functioning, connective system. This chapter traces the uneven degrees of narrative integration in Gaskell’s works back to their differing publication intervals, with North and South’s weekly serialisation providing far greater opportunity to situate its local plot within global circulation than the monthly release of ‘Cousin Phillis’.

Daily life in cities is often about balance and compromise. Urban densities facilitate things being in close proximity and provide convenience for residents, but they also create an opportunity for traffic congestion and increased social and environmental inequity, and the possibility of lower-density suburban sprawl. To promote urban sustainability, a careful balance of economic development, ecology, and equity is required. In this chapter, four examples of urban sustainability crises and the dramatic response to them are examined. The cases include Miami, US; Oslo, Norway; St. Georges, Grenada; and Shenzhen, China. In each situation, the sustainability crisis emerges from a deeply set awareness of diminishing environmental quality of life and a feeling that the residents’ sense of place is under threat. The drivers of this threat are deeply embedded in social and economic factors. In each city, the policy switch to enhanced sustainability results from an aggressive, multi-scalar effort to alter and redirect the pattern of urban spatial development.

Knowledge about colonial warfare’s violence was transferred between empires in complex ways. Though differing in degree and over time, British, German and Dutch actors were willing to observe and learn from the colonial wars of others. Writings on colonial warfare became increasingly transimperial in scope from the 1890s onwards, even if this came too late to shape practice and was often distorted by authors’ own agendas and national stereotypes. Observer missions in foreign colonial campaigns were also regular, though their focus was seldom on colonial violence. Whether actively transferring or not, these modes of observation fed knowledge into an ‘imperial cloud’ (Kamissek/Kreienbaum) and reveal that the practitioners of colonial war rarely found the violence of others conspicuous, a fact which gives the lie to exceptionalist historiography. Actual transfers mainly took place through the intra- and transimperial mobility of European and non-European, mostly non-elite, individuals. They lived in frequently highly transnational colonial societies, and a striking number moved from one colonial frontier to the next, forging recurring connections I denote as the ‘routes of violence’.