This chapter takes forward the exploration of marriage as difference through an examination of what are locally perceived as ‘mixed’ marriages in Penang. Difference can be calibrated in many registers – including age, wealth, class, familial background, religion, language, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The cultural and ethnic diversity of Penang offers unusual scope for marrying outside familiar boundaries. But which sorts of difference are most salient, and which boundaries are more permeable and more easy to bridge? ‘Malayness’ and Islam have a historically privileged legal status in Malaysia, and marrying a Muslim legally requires a non-Muslim spouse to convert. The bodily, culinary, religious and legal concomitants of this conversion are likely to impact close family members of a non-Muslim partner. At the extreme end of a range of possibilities, ‘mixed’ couples encountering or expecting opposition from their families sometimes elope to marry. But, after marriage, a long process of accommodation and absorption is likely to occur. Experiences of ‘mixed’ marriage and the negotiation of difference, which is part of marriage everywhere, offer a perspective on other changes in Malaysia over several decades. But more broadly, it provides a way to understand how intimate worlds may generate wider social transformation.

This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extra-literary sources – James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane (1764), Maria Edgeworth’s short story ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1802), and judicial testimonies of enslaved rebels – to examine how disenfranchised Africans conducted politics in the revolutionary Atlantic. Taking the controversy over the Registry Bill as a pivotal moment between the founding of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) and emancipation (1838), it investigates how enslaved people aspired for what Steven Hahn has termed ‘socially meaningful power’. The term ‘people’ in current work on political democracy is largely synonymous with the inhabitants of the nation-state. As members of the diaspora, exiled from their native lands, enslaved Caribbeans were stateless people who lived in the extraterritorial space of the colony. Yet they waged struggles for meaningful control over their lives and labour, not to mention for their subjecthood.

Nigeria’s diverse history and ethnic diversity have shaped the country’s current understanding of bias and fairness, including issues relating to employment. This chapter focuses on employment testing bias and fairness in Nigeria. When making employment decisions, it is a common occurrence, albeit not a legally permissible one, to have factors such as age, sex, political beliefs, religion, ethnicity, and disability taken into account. Nigeria’s discrimination laws cover all employers, third parties, and licensure. However, Nigerian discrimination adjudication has a narrow purview. For instance, there are no clear standards for validity evidence, no rules for demonstrating disparate impact, no shifting of the burden of proof, and no recognition of disproportionate impact. The limited use of professionally designed selection processes also means that bias-related concerns receive little attention. Information about the impact of the legal environment on industrial and organizational psychology is similarly lacking. Nonetheless, there are initiatives aimed at professionalizing psychology in the nation, which should increase the reliability and validity of selection procedures.

Examines gender and race/ethnicity related to conversation memory.

This chapter explores the ways folksong research in the Czech lands emerged both within and alongside race and ethnicity studies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have thoughtfully examined interrelationships between folksong research and German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions, and yet these same interrelationships in Czech music studies have only recently begun to emerge. Anthropologists, too, have brought into focus the political roles of ethnographic studies in defining the Czech and Slovak nations, but the specific role of folksong research within this remains unstudied. Examining the ways music research in the Czech lands participated alongside and sometimes overlapped with German nationalist race and ethnicity research, however, illuminates early Czech folk-music studies as an instrument of ethnonationalism; a tool not merely descriptive of a repertoire, but also delineative of who belonged and who did not.

The minority claims made by the various minority movements that emerged in the 1950s coalesced in separate state movements. Separate states claims were made by minority communities in all three major regions and these claims were championed by their political elites who strategically occupied seats in the regional houses of assembly, starting in 1953. Niger Delta elites formed provisional alliance, supressing local disputes and differences, in order to keep their claim for a separate Mid-West state alive in the constitutional reform process. Their efforts succeeded in halting the final constitutional conference, which was to be held in London in 1957. The push for separate states was strong enough to threaten the decolonization process altogether, and the British government decided to establish a Minorities Commission to address and resolve these claims prior to formal independence.

In the wake of the boycott, the British govenment strengthened the warrant chief system, gathered intelligence on these communities to reorganize them into discrete, governable units. Reorganization was carried out in the context of interwar colonial development policy, which sought to increase the efficiency and productivity of the colonies. The British government coerced Africans across their colonies to engage in waged labor, in order to pay taxes and contribute to local development initiatives. In the Niger Delta, ethnic competition was used as a mechanism by which colonial development was distributed. Paramount chieftaincy increased a community’s ability to access colonial resources, contributing to a proliferation of new chieftaincy titles in competition for these resources. The case of the Olu title among the Itsekiri people is exemplary of these developments.

Issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion when gathering demographic data are discussed. Students are coached through creating an online survey using Google Forms based on surveys of their own choosing. Additionally, methods of direct data entry into SPSS and R, reading and saving files, as well as file nomenclature are reviewed.

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

The upbringing and professional career of Wu Jian (1462–1506) and his uncle, Wu Cong, shed light on two key issues. First is the gradual transformation of merit nobles within the Ming polity, particularly their role in dynastic defenses. Second is the dynasty’s continued efforts to secure military ability through instituting new practices, including the education and training of young merit nobles and entrusting capable civil officials with substantial military responsibilities. Before turning to Wu Jian’s career, however, we first consider the experiences of his mother and other women, whose abilities both in managing large, complex households and negotiating with the dynastic state, were essential to the fortunes of all merit noble families.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Using Wu Jin’s tenure as Marquis of Gongshun from 1449 to 1461, this chapter explores issues of ability and difference in a time of upheaval at the Ming court. It traces the Wu family as it shifted from immigrant family at the empire’s western edge to members of the capital elite. The chapter also explores the divergent experiences of other Mongolians and merit noble families within the Ming polity.