Chapter 1 presents the contexts for the making and circulation of books in late colonial Peru. It analyses three limiting factors related to society, legislation, and materiality, and concludes that circulation was never unfettered owing to various barriers imposed by the colonial administration. Addressing illiteracy, this chapter shows how educational reforms promoted by contemporary theories of Enlightenment pedagogy and alternative ways of acquiring reading skills created potential book customers. Although a double mechanism of control – before as well as after the publication – determined the book market, actual practice differed from legislation. Finally, an analysis of the material constraints reveals how dependence on paper and printing types restricted Peruvian print production. Notwithstanding these confines, an increasing number of people learned how to read, regulations were not always fully enforced, materials were re-used, and tools were invented, allowing printed commodities to enter the colonial market.

As colonial subjects acquired Britishness, how did such newly acquired identities interact with their existing identities and identifications? This chapter explores the ramifications of colonial subjects acquiring Britishness by drawing from the experience of the Hong Kong-Portuguese (more commonly termed ‘Macanese’ now). Through education and participating in public services, Portuguese Eurasians in Hong Kong took both an active and passive role in acquiring Britishness. While on one hand institutional discrimination made it too obvious to them that state authorities never fully accepted their Britishness, on the other they became too British in the eyes of other Portuguese communities in the region. Using newspapers, family papers, and oral history, this chapter examines this acculturation process, and the tensions and backlash this process engendered for the community.

This chapter traces the transformation of the school from the site for instilling ideas about racial and class-based separate development during the colonial era into the key mechanism for ensuring African political and economic development today. Formal schooling introduced during the colonial era contributed to racial and economic divisions by promoting the idea of separate development and segregation. Missionary and colonial education institutionalized the assumptions about racial difference embedded in the development episteme. Colonial educators faced a conundrum; they sought to “civilize” Africans in Western academic traditions and at the same time to reinforce ideologies of racial difference that undergirded colonialism and the development episteme. This conflict was complicated further as schools became a place for challenging these ideas and generating African nationalist ideas of development. Some postcolonial reforms recentered African epistemologies in the schools. Today institutions and scholars of the global north still claim to be the experts in technology, science, and medicine, the sciences necessary for solving development “problems.” Nonetheless, African institutions and scholars are at the forefront of development innovations designed for their own communities including in the expansion of innovative university practices.

This chapter focuses on the various encounters of people, objects, texts and stories relating to the (thirteenth–fifteenth century) Majapahit site in East Java, during the long nineteenth century. What makes this site distinct from others discussed in this book is that in the twentieth century it transformed into a central heritage site of the post-colonial Indonesian state. The chapter focuses, however, on an understudied early phase in the politics, local heritage practices, and knowledge exchange at Majapahit as a material site and spiritual symbol. It shows how, despite early efforts at site appropriation and heritage control, war, modernising infrastructural interventions, and the epistemic violence of archaeological and philological ‘pushes’ at the end of the nineteenth century, the Majapahit site remained relatively open for many different memories, stories, engagements, and forms of knowledge seeking.