This chapter analyzes discourses on universal economic and social human rights and social democracy in connection with intellectuals discussing the American and British war aims of World War II. It was an age of major societal transformations: the socialization of work due to industrial capitalism; experiences of authoritarian ideologies emerging out of, inter alia, extreme inequality; and nascent uproars against racism and imperialism. Human rights were part of moral discourses on equality and social justice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter details how Ralph Bunche and George Herbert Wells championed a vision of social democracy and human rights. Bunche and Wells intervened in wartime when many intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum would write of human rights. Key intellectual actors increasingly referred to a new political “space” of “the world,” and some were redefining “democracy” as a “world” and a “social” democracy. Revisiting their thinking allows for a more detailed reconstruction of their argumentation, including on how, specifically, they defended economic and social human rights.

The introduction engages scholarly debates around the topics of Tanzanian nationalism, African identity, pan-Africanism, and global intellectual history to indicate its contributions to those fields. It introduces the main question: How did an African identity come to have any personal or political purchase in East Africa in the twentieth century? The main case study focuses on the African Association (AA), a politically minded pan-African group with ideational connections to several streams of black thought. The members who chose this group, which promoted an African identity, usually did so for two reasons. They were either inspired by the redemptive pan-Africanism of some of its visionary leaders who engaged with the ideas of Ethiopianism surrounding Africa’s future and past and/or they were drawn to the strand of practical pan-Africanism cultivated by the leadership of the AA who sought to build African unity and open chapters all throughout the continent and even the globe.

An intellectual history approach to the exploration of African identity in mid twentieth-century East Africa provides several insights into unresolved tensions in African political history. Building the African Nation argues that the failure of the Pan-African Movement to politically unify the continent in the heady days of the end of empire in the late 1950s and early 1960s should be partly attributed to the fact that competing nationalisms were at play. African and territorial nationalisms were vying for the loyalty of the people of the continent. Even though the relationship between the two proved to be beneficial to the aims of some territorial nationalists in solving specific problems – coordination of anti-colonial tactics, sharing of information valuable to decolonization projects, etc. – in the end, there were two separate identities aiming for ultimate allegiance. In hindsight, we can see that trying to build two nations simultaneously was bound to create tension or conflict and is one reason African political unity has proven so elusive. When we recognize that much pan-African thinking in the continent was born out of the idea that all Africans were one and should therefore prioritize a continental fealty, it becomes easier to understand how this made pan-Africanism at odds with territorial nationalists’ projects.

In the last few years, the issue of mobilisation for war has, in Australia at any rate, shifted from the arcane to the highly pertinent. Concerns publicly manifested in the government’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which asserted that the long-held notion of up to 10 years’ warning for a possible conventional attack on Australia had – as 10-year rules tend to eventually do – evaporated. Moreover, it alluded to what was thought to be a remote, but nevertheless alarming, possibility of a ‘high-intensity conflict’ in Australia’s region. Suddenly, generating combat power, perhaps more than what was readily to hand, has taken on some urgency.

This chapter is an introduction to the Enlightenment mock arts, set out in three historical hypotheses. First, early-modern writers became increasingly interested in the cognitive (rather than simply material) value in the work of skilled technicians. The mock-arts were models for the intuitions involved in skilled manufacture, related to certain ineffable components of literary production. Second, the literary framing for those investigations was invariably satirical (or oblique and critical in other ways). As specialists in literary wit, authors of mock arts put themselves forward as experts in curiosity, invention and communication. Third, writers became more subtle in their assumptions about the print trade and the suitability of books as tools that might contribute to the communication of personal knowledge. Since convention defined that sort of knowledge by the impossibility of pinning it down in books, this opened another field for irony and indirection.

This chapter asks whether there is an Ottoman intellectual history and, if so, what makes it distinct from other forms of intellectual and cultural history. We argue that the answer resides in the methods and questions that Ottoman intellectual historians have asked their sources based on a long intellectual, philological, and philosophical tradition generated by the Ottomans. To do so, we discuss major methods, sources, and challenges of Ottoman intellectual history and how historians have engaged with them. Embracing a flexible and encompassing definition of intellectual history, we aim to highlight the undeniable and necessary place of intellectual history within Ottoman studies in the context of new developments in the field. Last, we discuss current methodological developments in intellectual history and their possible implications for the discipline’s future. With this short contribution, we hope to start a conversation about what is next in Ottoman intellectual history.

The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This chapter distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations – and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.