Focusing on the proliferation of independent African-owned presses in eastern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter discusses the popular pamphlets known as Onitsha market literature. The chapter asks how the upsurge in local publishing shaped readers’ ideas about literary languages and contributed to authors’ social prestige as intellectuals. The chapter describes the practicalities of pamphlet production, as well as the ways pamphleteers offered fresh conceptualisations of literary inspiration outside dominant western frameworks for works of the imagination.

After his visa extension was denied, the mission’s leader, Cline Paden, made unsuccessful attempts to return to Italy. He moved to Denmark for a few years before eventually settling back in Texas, where he established a missionary school in Abilene – the Sunset International Bible Institute (SIBI) – and became a prominent figure in the Churches of Christ. Meanwhile, the Italian mission continued its precarious existence, never achieving the status of a major religious player as it had hoped and attracting only a few hundred members. One of the defining features of its story was the stark contrast between the mission’s limited success and the disproportionate political and diplomatic attention its activities garnered. Yet, thanks to their “Americanness” and the ability to leverage the United States’ unique power and influence over its junior Italian ally, the Texans played a significant role in advancing religious pluralism and freedom in Italy – a fact acknowledged even by other long-established Protestant churches such as the Waldensians that had little or no political or theological sympathy for the Church of Christ.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.

The conclusion returns to the book’s central argument – that wardship, the arbitrary burdens it imposed on those unfortunates ensnared, the wider economic costs ensuing, all while producing so little benefit to the Crown, was representative of the wider Stuart state. It is easy to envisage how a nascent industrial revolution might have been smothered by the Stuart fiscal state, perhaps via monopolies being awarded to undeserving favourites, or contracts and property rights being re-drawn to suit the perceived interests of the Crown. Ultimately, the conclusion will make the case that the industrial revolution could not have started in England during the eighteenth century, were it not for the constitutional changes of the seventeenth century.

The ninth chapter expands the analysis to Scotland and Ireland; in both kingdoms, wardship was instrumental in the disintegration of royal power. In Scotland, Charles I’s efforts to re-write the land law and extend his rights to wardships via an Act of Revocation (1633) was considered to be ‘the ground stone of all the mischeiffe that folloued after’ (sic), an arch reference to the rebellion that began in Scotland in 1638. In Ireland, wardship and the entire land law were deployed as a means of religious conversion. Wardship was thus an integral component of the bitter religious conflict that erupted in 1641. It was these rebellions which ultimately precipitated the English Civil War, that offered Parliament the opportunity to finally abolish the feudal tenures in 1646, an abolition confirmed at the Restoration of the Crown in 1660.

African popular intellectuals in colonial Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced public writing in which they lamented the danger of reading ‘like a European’, or quick and mechanical reading practices, which they argued led to the degeneration of the ‘African mind’. This chapter’s case study of Orishatukeh Faduma’s 1919 Sierra Leone Weekly News column, ‘How to Cultivate a Love For Reading,’ reveals how contributors in Freetown reimagined transatlantic public anxieties about race, nationhood, and madness to encourage local readers to ‘read like an African’, which meant slowly, selectively, and critically. Through public writing, Faduma and other popular intellectuals turned globally popular understandings of racial madness on their head to generate the ‘right’ kind of African reader. They used the press to produce a distinctly African literary culture in between the local and the global, and thus used literacy as a social vehicle of colonial self-making.

Chapter 7 concludes by considering some of the book’s implications for the more recent history, and future, of linear borders. First, the way in which boundary studies has developed since the early twentieth century may help explain why boundaries have been so rarely altered or created since then. Having been further purified of its politics, boundary studies is left unable to produce reasons to change boundaries, and has become focused instead on maintenance work on existing boundaries. Second, the chapter returns to the question of natural and artificial boundaries, arguing that some ways of speaking of ‘artificial’ boundaries are more accurate than others, and that the history of linear boundaries can help us make sense of what it means to call boundaries ‘artificial’.

In colonial West Africa, where the level of literacy, in European language, was low, movies served as an accessible means to convey attitudes, ideas or stories. This chapter addresses the dialogue between movies and the written text (posters, advertisements, etc) to explore the ways in which African film spectators made sense of foreign images brought to them on screens. Urban movie goers read newspapers to look for schedules or film reviews, and the general public depended on posters displayed in front of movie theaters and also on word of mouth for information about movies. Sometimes posters were printed locally but most of them came with the movies, conveying foreign cultural messages which passers-by had to decipher according to their own cultures and cinematographic knowledge.

The periodical The Nigerian Teacher conceived to provide African and European colonial teachers with useful information and a forum in which to exchange views. However, as a result of colonial educational policies prevalent in the 1930s and the editor’s will to cultural and institutional power, the notion of equitative knowledge exchange in The Nigerian Teacher and its successor, Nigeria magazine, was bound to be a mirage. This chapter argues that their imitation of colonial models of ethnography notwithstanding, the magazine’s African contributors were cognisant of these problems, but still saw the magazine as a medium through which to impress European members of the Education Department favourably. African contributions to the magazine thus cannot be taken at face value, but as a self-impelled and dynamic engagement with colonial culture.

When Magema M. Fuze published his seminal book Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona in 1922, he could not have anticipated that one hundred years later, he would be an iconic writer; a representative of nineteenth-century black letters; a Kholwa intellectual and a remnant of the bygone era of mission stations and mission schools. This chapter will re-visit Magema Fuze’s readers and readings in light of this centenary and re-evaluate the extent to which his contribution to the study of African print cultures has enriched our understanding of the role played by the arrival of the printing press in Southern Africa. His pioneering work of history, ethnography and oral lore will be re-examined from the perspective of his journalistic texts and newspaper columns. The objective will be to show how a century of readers and readings have accrued to create a legacy; and, how such a legacy continues to challenge and be challenged by ever more increasing archiving practices and textual analysis.

Before the twentieth century, to be literate in the Western Sahel meant to be literate in Arabic—or in other African languages written with the Arabic script. Yet works by West African Muslim scholars, composed largely in Arabic, are often overlooked in discussions of West African literature. This chapter highlights this gap by reconstructing the history of the region’s ‘Islamic literature’ and its relationship to print. Focusing on the literary production of two of the region’s major Sufi orders, the Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, it shows that printed works of Islamic erudition became increasingly important elements of public life across the twentieth century and continued to serve as one of the most frequent and readily available means of experiencing ‘literature’, even alongside the expansion of colonial and postcolonial educational institutions that employed European languages of instruction. Comprising some of the most common forms of reading material in West Africa today, they are the fruit of an encounter between a well-established Sufi literary tradition and newfound access to the affordances of print.