The chapter provides a detailed overview of the Court’s history. In so doing, it serves three functions. Firstly, it explains how the Court was fiscally significant, providing the Crown with between 3 and 9 percent of its annual revenues. Under Charles I (r. 1625–49), it was the third and then the second most important source of revenue. Secondly, it explains how although the Court was tremendously unpopular, a political corpus existed for its continued operation. The Crown obviously sought to retain the Court, but the nobility, the royal ‘Court’, and members of the central administration (not mutually exclusive groups) also sought to retain wardship as they were able to purchase wards to their enormous profit. Herein lies the third function of this chapter: wardship was a tremendously inefficient means of raising revenues.

The first part of the book focuses on the historical origins of linear borders. Chapter 2 begins this task by elaborating on how scholars typically assume that sovereignty is definitive for the modern territorial order, and by arguing that the concept of ‘territorial sovereignty’, which is often seen as fundamental to any attempt to explain the modern international order, is a confused and misleading one. The confusion centres around what, if anything, ‘territorial’ adds to ‘sovereignty’ which is not already contained in the latter. I explain why we should instead see linear borders, in terms of practices of delimitation (describing a line using technical language or cartography) and demarcation (marking a line in a landscape), as the basis of the modern territorial order. With this as a frame of reference I give a brief overview of the global history of linear borders.

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

This chapter focuses on the Democrat Party’s final years in power (1958–60), which followed a debt restructuring agreement with creditors. During these years, Democrat Party leaders attempted to implement unpopular economic policies while still holding on to power. Their main tactic was to create the “Homeland Front,” a mass political organization. Though many people joined willingly, the Democrat-led government relied on high-pressure tactics and propaganda to ensure participation. It also increased pressure on its opposition through both legislation and extralegal actions such as mobilizing mobs to attack opposition leaders. These methods were, I argue, part of a more general shift toward illiberal, less democratic norms of governance among American Cold War allies in the late 1950s. By 1960, however, the Democrat Party’s authoritarian actions had alienated important domestic groups, including academics, bureaucrats, and military officers, which led to its removal from power. Rather than explaining the origins of the May 1960 coup, this chapter reveals how hollowed out the democratic political order had become by the time military officers finally launched their operation.

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.

Newspapers were essential to African engagements with the problem of colonial modernity in South Africa. This chapter focuses on Tiyo Soga’s writings in Indaba and how they inflected the discourse of the nation with an assemblage of African experiences. Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s praise poems in Umteleli are also considered for the way they combined publicness with an emphasis on the ethical bonds tying the (female) poet to the utterance of truth. The chapter highlights the connections between print, gender and the preservation of the conscience and memory of the people.

This chapter puts world literature and African print cultures into conversation by exploring a widely circulating tale of desire, deception and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The Palm-Wine Drinkard brought the folktale known as the ‘complete gentleman’ story to an international audience in 1952, but the scale of this narrative phenomenon was already massive. Since 1860, more than 450 versions have been printed in over a hundred languages across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The story also inspired dozens of adaptations across a variety of media, including many by renowned creative writers. This chapter explores what this traveling tale can teach the study of world literatures and African print cultures. It includes an overview of the phenomenon, a discussion of methodology, and an analysis of adaptations by Amos Tutuọla, Efua Sutherland and Ousmane Socé.

This chapter discusses hitherto neglected Swahili pocket literature that reflects the joint efforts of East African welfare associations, mosques, publishers and authors. In the children’s booklet Muallimu wa watoto, in Swahili typed in Arabic script, and the multilingual prayer booklet Namaz, published in late ’30s Pakistan, we can see the entangled history of the expansion of the British colonial economy and Swahili print culture, and how the latter evolved under the influence of the former. The presence of Urdu alongside Swahili in the Namaz sheds light on the two-way character of Asian-East African transregionalim. From the 1940’s onwards, however, Swahili print culture sees the shift from a transregional to a vernacularised phase. The creative poetic admonition of the Wasia wa dini, embedded within the prose text of the Dini ya Islam, or the different renditions of Kisa cha Miraji, aptly show the editors’ and authors’ own creative book projects and spiritual agendas in adapting and making Islam not merely portable, but also genuinely comprehensible to the masses through a simplified vernacular and/or transliterated mediality.

Print creates frames and slots in which equivalences between genres, texts and languages become visible or imaginable. The iterative and segmented character of newspapers, in particular, lends itself to the perception of equivalences. In 1920s Lagos, the public culture of the literate elites was bilingual, and it was in the weekly bilingual newspapers that the interface between Yoruba and English was most consciously signalled and creatively explored. Contributors in both langauges deliberately enriched their texts by working across the linguistic interface — quoting, recycling, translating and answering back. The Yoruba-language writers were especially inventive. Taking as an example Yoruba obituaries and ‘In Memoriam’ pieces, this chapter shows how they fluidly combined elements of traditional orature, translations of sentimental Victorian verse, and local popular nicknames and anecdotes. In the formal print sphere this moment of creative intertwining has long passed, but today, comparable experiments can be seen in popular song genres

This chapter covers the period between the Democrat Party’s 1955 political crisis and its greatest financial crisis (a devaluation and bailout in 1958). During this period, Prime Minister Menderes and his allies sought to sustain their economic policies while also retaining political power. Achieving these goals required illiberal tactics while seeking aid from the United States and other allies with increasing desperation. Democrat Party leaders marginalized intraparty critics and silenced the media, academics, and opposition. Unlike in previous chapters, however, we see Democrat Party leaders’ gambits either failing outright or achieving less than satisfactory results. In this period, US and European creditors took a harder line with the government; radical political movements gained popularity in neighboring states such as Syria and Iraq; and turnout in the 1957 elections fell such that the Democrat Party won with only a plurality of the vote. By the summer of 1958, a currency devaluation and bailout were no longer avoidable. Only the uncertainty caused by a revolution in Iraq enabled the Democrat-led government to secure comparatively favorable terms in negations.

This chapter weaves together the biographies of the Democrat Party’s four founders up until early 1946, when they established the party. Each of these founders (Mahmut Celal Bayar, Bekir Refik Koraltan, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, and Ali Adnan Menderes) played an important role in Turkey’s politics long before their break with the single-party regime. While accounts of the Democrat Party typically note that these men had once been members of the regime, few accounts give more than thumbnail sketches. By contrast, this chapter emphasizes the extent of their involvement in the politics of both the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey, crafting economic, educational, and legal institutions.

Wardship could affect surviving families in a myriad of ways; one family’s experience could be very different from another’s. For the lucky, the child and their estate would be returned at a reasonable price. For the unlucky, the child and their lands would be sold on to a third party who might exploit both without scruple. To try and capture some of the social and familial costs wardship imposed – inadequately captured from a purely economic perspective – the eighth chapter traces out the different stages of wardship and some of the surviving testimony and anecdotes from those unfortunate to enter wardship.

This chapter frames African print and printing in a diasporic context, since most major African cities are or were home to a rich array of printing traditions. In coastal cities in southern and East Africa, one was likely to encounter Muslim printers from Bombay; Africans tutored at Protestant evangelical presses; Indians (and Britons) trained in mission, state-run or commercial printing concerns in South Asia; British printers as well as print workers from diasporic locales. This chapter investigates these presses and the literary forms associated with them. The chapter discusses three literary texts connected with three printing presses (or printing traditions) in Durban. Thereafter the focus widens to consider the characteristics of a range of diasporic printing presses. The conclusion returns to the three literary texts and speculates on how placing them in proximity to the print shop shifts our understandings of African literary genealogies.

This chapter covers 1946–50, when the Democrat Party challenged the ruling Republican People’s Party, looking at some of the young activists whose efforts helped the party achieve victory. These include Samet Ağaoğlu, a well-connected bureaucrat and intellectual, who played a key role in promoting the Democrat Party as a “liberal” party seeking to limit the role of the state. The chapter also looks beyond campaigns in Istanbul and Ankara to consider the ways in which the party took shape in the provinces, specifically Balıkesir and Malatya. The first was a province on the west coast with a majority Sunni/Turkish population; the second was an eastern province with a sizeable Kurdish/Alevi population. In both cases, we see that political parties were closely allied with wealthy landowners, and the difference in affiliation tended to depend on which local faction had established a closer relationship with the state c. 1946. In other words, while intellectuals such as Ağaoğlu promoted the DP as an anti-statist party, in tune with postwar liberalism, we see from early on that, at the provincial level, supporters were more concerned with who controlled the state.