In many parts of Africa, the mass production of printed texts began with Christian missions. Missionaries’ descriptions of African languages and their compilation of dictionaries were essential for the emergence of print cultures. However, missionary linguistics mirrored missionary politics. Two Protestant missionaries in Central Africa, one in Congo and the other in Malawi, differed in their views on both African languages and the European presence in Africa. Where Walter Henry Stapleton’s dictionary took an interest in colonial rule, David Clement Scott advanced dialogue in a radical vision for race relations. Both worked with widely spoken language forms, but the missionaries were driven by disparate motivations. Between them, the two dictionaries indicate considerable variation in the nineteenth-century missionary contributions to African print cultures. They, and the missionaries who compiled them, convey sharply divergent visions for African languages as contributions to human knowledge and imagination.

This chapter considers the history of the introduction of printing presses in northern Nigeria and demonstrates how changes in technology facilitated change both within the world of manuscript culture and within roman script book culture in Hausa. Developments in the reproduction of one form of written expression, roman script, had a radical effect upon the other, ajami (Hausa written in the Arabic script). The move from letterpress to photo-offset printing opened up a new field of reproduction for handwritten ajami and Arabic language manuscripts. The chapter traces the establishment from 1910 of the earliest letterpress in northern Nigeria, a Christian mission press. The education department of the colonial government made use of the mission press until the establishment of the Gaskiya Corporation in Zaria, intended as a training and collaborative enterprise for the production of roman script Hausa literature, along with literature in other languages of northern Nigeria.

This conclusion reflects on the legacy of the Democrat Party in the aftermath of the 1960 coup. I argue that the removal of Turkey’s elected government by military officers did not mark the end of democratic politics in Turkey. Rather, it was part of a larger process of de-democratization in which Turkish leaders (first the Democrats, then the military and its allies) restricted the various institutions that enabled meaningful political contestation. Democracy was effectively rolled back during the 1950s because the achievements of Turkey’s “transition to democracy” were of a limited sort; they included independently verified elections, a narrow range of permitted political parties, and a relatively circumscribed press. If the DP failed to consistently defend and expand the institutions that bolster democracy, then perhaps its greatest legacy is the way in which it positioned Turkey in relation to other states. The DP presented the country as an essential part of the American order, willing to fight and, thus, deserving of significant financial support.

Chapter 6 uses the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 as a vantage point for demonstrating the consequences for international politics of the new, largely colonial boundary expertise of the late nineteenth century. While existing accounts of the Conference emphasize interactions between Wilsonian ideas and power-political realities, focusing on boundary experts illuminates a set of concerns separate from both. Modern polities rely on experts to construct and maintain boundaries, and thus such experts can at least potentially exert various types of influence in territorial politics, through mechanisms of persuasion, delegation, and instrumentalization. The chapter shows how each of these mechanisms was at work as boundary experts pushed the Paris Peace Conference towards mountain boundaries, particularly in the case of Czechoslovakia’s boundaries, the Austro-Yugoslav boundary, and Italy’s boundaries with Austria and Yugoslavia.

The second part of the book moves from the origins of linear borders to their consequences for international politics. Because linear borders are distinguished from other kinds of frontiers by certain technical practices, it is the expertise involved in these practices which forms a central part of how the linearization of borders makes a difference. Chapter 5 charts the emergence of modern boundary studies, focusing in particular on the writings of colonial surveyor Thomas Holdich, academic geographer Ellen Semple, and Viceroy of India Lord Curzon. This subfield grew partly out of a meeting between political geography and the practice of colonial surveying in the late nineteenth century. I show how boundary studies was able to give new life, for a few crucial decades, to the otherwise questionable and politicized idea of ‘natural boundaries’ as a respectable scientific concept, and argue that colonial knowledge was key to its emergence.

After a successful fundraising campaign, the Church of Christ mission was able to purchase two buildings, in Milan and Rome, and expand its operations to Italy’s two main cities as well as other parts of the country. The decision to open a prayer hall in the heart of Rome, in the Prati neighborhood near the prominent Sacro Cuore di Cristo Re parish and just a few minutes from Vatican City, was particularly bold and controversial. The Catholic Church, along with its numerous allies in the Italian government and parliament, reacted harshly, condemning the move as another intolerable provocation. In September 1952, the Ministry of the Interior launched a crackdown on the mission’s activities as well as those of other Protestant groups. Several of the mission’s churches were shut down, and police were dispatched to prevent access to them. As in the “stoning” crisis of 1950, many members of Congress in the United States responded forcefully, viewing and portraying the crackdown as an unacceptable infringement on the fundamental right to religious freedom and a violation of both the 1948 US–Italian bilateral treaty and the Italian constitution.