The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

Chapter 2 continues to focus on self-help public speech and cultural authority but turns to the work of Paul Beatty, in particular his early novel, Tuff (2000), and later work, The Sellout, published in 2015, the same year Beatty also gave a commencement address. I explore Beatty’s ambivalent engagement with multiple discourses of self-help, from his burlesques of assimilationist ‘racial uplift’ leadership to his depictions of Black women’s empowerment cultures and descriptions of African-American social psychology frameworks. I argue that while Beatty satirizes the booming voices of self-help speakers, the reductiveness of self-help mottos, and the individualizing effects of ‘self esteem’ culture, he also finds aesthetically and ethically generative possibilities in grassroots self-help praxis and the clash of lived, communitarian forms of wisdom.

On the afternoon of May 9, eighty-five skirmishers of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry were subjected to an “ironing parade”: In front of their comrades, they were stripped of their uniforms, placed in shackles, and marched off to jail. On the next day the revolt began. According to an official report, the spark for the violence was the haranguing of the remainder of the regiment on the previous night by local prostitutes (so-called frail ones) of the sadr bazaar, who challenged the soldiers’ manhood for not defying the British and freeing their brothers in arms. This chapter examines how the gender-inversion taunts of the prostitutes became a staple of “Mutiny historiography” and gradually found its way into the immensely popular “Mutiny fiction” of Flora Annie Steel, only to ricochet back into modern historical scholarship. The chapter also considers an important, competing set of depositions by sadr bazaar “Cashmerians” (high-status concubine-prostitutes), collected by the police superintendent for the North-Western Provinces, indicating that news of an impending revolt was circulating mere hours before the onset of violence.

In the summer of 1787, the young American republic was in a moment of crisis. After eight years of wars to gain independence from the British, the American experiment, despite its high-minded goals, was close to failing. The United States’ first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, had left the thirteen states largely to manage their own affairs as quasi-independent states. The dispersion of power among the states had led to a variety of issues, including dueling foreign policies between the states; each state having its own currency, which made trade between the states and with foreign nations nearly impossible; an inability of the central government to impose taxes to pay off war debts; a reliance on state militias rather than a professionalized military controlled by the central government; and a lack of executive leadership in the central government.

The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

The final and concluding chapter reflects on diasporic state-building, drawing out the implications for how this transforms our understanding of state-building under military intervention. It critiques the limitations of diasporic state-building when approached through Western military and developmental interventions and their Euro-centric positionality. The chapter discusses how the optic of diasporic state-building allows us to witness transformations in how we conceive the nation-state and transnational civil society, since diasporas are constitutive actors transforming homelands states and societies in significant and contradictory ways, which can simultaneously bolster and undermine the state. Diasporic state-building also sheds light on transformations in our understanding of concepts such as citizenship, belonging, and nationhood in a globalised world when the nation-state is unshackled from state boundaries and occupies a transnational space. Finally, the chapter ends with the significance of diasporic state-building, when we consider the persistence of conflicts and migrations and the emergence of new diasporas. It offers probing questions for future research for exploring diasporic state-building of other global diasporas in other non-Western contexts.