This chapter argues that naturalization, the process of transforming aliens into subjects through law, was a crucial process in eighteenth-century law and literature. The attempted passage of several naturalization bills across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generated conflicting accounts about whether nationality could be a fictional process. Samuel Richardson and Maria Edgeworth take up these conflicting accounts in their novels. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Richardson upholds the traditional view, which considered naturalization to be part of a return to an original common human nature expressed in natural law. In Harrington (1817), by contrast, Maria Edgeworth endorses a newer, Lockean, contractual and voluntarist approach: the idea that naturalization could be achieved through a Parliamentary statute without the necessity of natural law. These case studies reveal how novelists responded and contributed to naturalization’s transformation from a supposedly natural process to an explicitly fictional process.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

1. How can conflict be solved when the participants’ stories are coloured by turbulence and uncertainty? 2. Can a researcher contribute to change ongoing stories? If yes, in what way? 3. In the end of this story, we do not see any solutions for the participants in the study. How can we deal with situations like this, as researchers or practitioners of social work?

The Wu family’s experiences illustrate in clear and human terms how institutions change over time. Far from lapsing into an ornamental or parasitic existence after the horrific purges of the Hongwu and Yongle reigns, merit nobles remained integral to the Ming dynasty. Reviewing the careers of the Wu men across the generations, we see their role change from field commanders, to a mix of field command and senior administration, and finally to exclusively capital administration. Rather than a caricatured image of corrupt irrelevance, merit nobles, properly considered, serve as a salutary reminder that military institutions, like other institutions, adapted to new circumstances. Examination of the Wu family yields a sharper understanding of who actually administered the dynasty’s core military institutions, what functions they served, and how they interacted with civil officials, palace eunuchs, officers, and the throne. Civil officials came and went, eunuchs held posts for longer, and military officers led campaigns, but merit nobles provided much of the continuity in personnel so essential for the operation of the Capital Training Divisions and Chief Military Commissions, pillars of the dynastic military.

Chapter 1 traces the experiences of Batu-Temür, his wife, their sons, and some 5,000 followers, who in 1405 migrated from the Mongolian steppe to the northwestern corner of the still-new Ming dynasty. In recognition of the military contributions of Batu-Temür and his sons, and their steadfast loyalty on refusing to join a local Mongolian insurrection, the Ming emperor granted the family a series of high-level military posts, gifts, honorary titles, a Chinese surname (Wu), and eventually investiture of Batu-Temür as Earl of Gongshun, a title that his descendants would hold until the mid seventeenth century. The Wu family’s experiences show both the Ming dynasty and recently arrived immigrants actively attempting to advance their interests in a time of rapid geopolitical change.

The last Marquis of Gongshun, Wu Weihua, not only survived but thrived during the traumatic transition from the fallen Ming dynasty to the newly founded Qing dynasty. His elder brother died in an epidemic of unprecedented scale in the capital, leaving vacant the title of marquis. His nephew was murdered in a rebel occupation of Beijing without parallel in the dynasty. His sovereign perished at his own hand (another unique event during the Ming period), and the Ming ruling house crumpled before his eyes. Wu Weihua then hurled himself across the dynastic divide, offering his services to the new Manchu regime in exchange for the title his family had held without interruption since the early fifteenth century. In addition to dogged pursuit of that title, he worked tirelessly to secure the survival – even prosperity – of his family in a new age, winning posts for his brothers and brokering at least one marriage alliance with the new Manchu elite.

The Introduction lays out the book’s arguments, organization, and significance. The basic arguments are: (1) there was more to the military than war; (2) there was more to government than civil officials; and (3) there was more to China than the Han majority. The story of the Wu family is told at three levels: (1) the professional and family lives of each generation of the men to hold the title Marquis of Gongshun, (2) broader events and trends occurring in Ming politics, society, economics, religion, and ethnic relations, and (3) periodic consideration of the big picture, that is, thinking about the Ming dynasty in its Eurasian context. Nearly all polities confront issues of ability and difference as they secure people of ability through means such as hereditary status, meritocratic evaluations, and patronage. Simultaneously, polities like the Ming dynasty developed institutional means to acknowledge and whenever possible leverage differences such as ethnicity, gender, professional training, and relation to the throne.

Latinx children’s and young adult literature offers Latinx children opportunities to step into another world and also see themselves represented in what they read. By giving Latinx child readers, in particular, worlds unlike and like their own, authors like Lilliam Rivera, Edwidge Danticat, and Marcia Argueta Mickelson also challenge dominant national narratives about Latinx experiences in the United States. In the stories these writers tell, young protagonists are confronted by various symptoms of US imperialism, such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. The protagonists’ journey often includes learning more about the oppressions that plague them and their communities and finding ways to dismantle said oppressions. Recognizing the role that the United States had in the forced (im)migration of many people of Latin American descent allows for a narrative shift away from the “immigration story” to a story of US imperialism and its consequences. Examining race and empire in Latinx children’s literature creates possibilities for alternative ways of knowing and existing where Latinx children can step in and out of worlds unlike and like their own.

This chapter attends to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as an exemplary text in the burgeoning corpus of Latinx solidarity narratives in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter focuses on the narrative innovations that Luiselli orients toward the task of envisioning new terms for pan-ethnic solidarity. The chapter shows how, at a time of renewed Latinx literary attention to the experiences of Central Americans fleeing violence in the isthmus, Lost Children Archive stylizes a narrative of pan-ethnic solidarity through strategies of scrupulous narratorial self-awareness and an ethical refusal to represent the experiences of ethnic others. In spite of these innovations, however, the chapter also demonstrates how the novel reiterates and amplifies certain essentializing expressions of unity that characterize Sanctuary Movement–era narratives from the 1980s and 1990s.

When Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955, baseball writers, Black and white, hailed him as the next great Black outfielder. When the Afro–Puerto Rican died on the last day of 1972, they remembered him as a Latin legend. Chapter 2 shows how – before the Immigration Act of 1965, before the addition of the “Spanish/Hispanic origin” question to the census form – Major League Baseball institutionalized a Black/brown color line. Management set Black and Latino teammates against one another, and Afro-Latinos found themselves, in Clemente’s words, “between the wall.”

This chapter considers questions of immigration institutional design in light of lessons learned from how Caribbean home-care aides currently work and travel. The growth in paid home care has been largely staffed by migrant labor – with some care workers operating outside of the scope of their visas. While these workers may technically be noncompliant, the author argues that most of these workers are in fact “good types,” who would have been favorably screened ex-ante for elder-care visas. The chapter proposes that we urgently devise a system that permits temporary entry of elder-care workers. If migrant care workers are permitted long-term temporary visas in which they can work in the US for a few months per year over several years, they have every incentive to comply.