This chapter asks how Mexicans remembered the histories of slavery, abolition, and Afro-descendants once independence was achieved, slavery abolished, and calidad classifications prohibited by law. Through an examination of the Mexican press between 1821 and 1860, this work traces the creation of historical narratives that downplayed the importance of slavery for Mexican history, while at the same time used the figure of Afro-Mexicans to cement different political projects. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to document that these subjects remained being part of Mexican public life through the press. More than restoring these questions’ visibility in Mexican history, the relevance of an analysis such as this rests on exposing the political uses and rhetorical power these themes had during that period. Slavery, abolition, and Afro-Mexicans’ presence in the country were points of reference in the creation of national identities and historical narratives that still bear weight in modern Mexican society.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

While much has been written about race, colonization, and anticolonialism in fin-de-siècle Irish gothic works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this chapter focuses particular attention on Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction’s engagements with empire and the imperialized world. Written in the context of an increasingly expansive, globalized literary marketplace, the works assessed here – including Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), the anonymous Amasina; or the American Foundling (1804), and Henrietta Rouvière Mosse’s Arrivals from India (1812) – provide an instructive example of Irish writers’ deft manipulation of systems of global economy to debate and contest questions of empire, relative civilization/barbarity, and ethnographies of race. They also point to the formal evolution of Irish gothic encouraged and enabled by writers’ responses to the economic and material realities of empire. Keenly aware of their global readership and their novels’ status as commodities, these writers invoke and reshape the gothic to think about the nature of authorship itself. Their works thus invite a reconsideration of the accepted makeup and characteristics of Romantic gothic, at the same time as they insist on an expansion of traditional canons of gothic and Irish gothic literature.

This chapter traces the roots of racial capitalism in early modern England. It shows how ideologies of class and race were grounded in the logic of both nationalism and overseas trade and colonialism. It does so by tracing the evolution of the story of Dick Whittington, a fantasy about a poor boy that acquired the status of a fairy tale in English culture. This evolution illustrates how dreams of class mobility at home were shaped by the promises of international wealth; how these promises in turn molded the ideology of nationalism whereby the nobility and the mercantile classes came together despite the tensions between them; how existing geographic differences were rewritten to present European superiority; and finally, how peoples from different parts of the world were represented as both necessary and dangerous to the advancement of the European self.

The epilogue returns to the major themes discussed throughout the book. In addition, it examines the contemporaneous nature of Ghana–Russian relations, particularly through the lens of anti-Black violence and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2021. It also looks at the continued contestation between Ghanaians abroad and the embassy in Russia and Ghanaians’ use of protest domestically to seek better rights and economic benefits. The epilogue demonstrates that while Nkrumah and the explicit debates and discourses on socialism that consumed Ghana in the 1960s have almost vanished, that their ghosts continue to shape Ghanaian society.

Culture can be a source of identity, including topics such as nationality, religion, race, and personal background. Culture can be an artistic inspiration, which can encompass many dimensions. Artists can want to share and teach, to process controversial social issues, and to engage in self-discovery. In this chapter, artists share how their culture shapes their creative output. For some, art enables them to address difficult topics that might not otherwise see the light of day.

The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.

Chapter 3 argues that the virulent racism Ghanaians – students, diplomats, and workers – faced in the United States, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, and Ghana were vital in creating and shaping a global Ghanaian national consciousness. These were, what I argue, “Racial Citizenship Moments.” Calls for protection to the Ghanaian state against racism in many walks of life were central to articulating ideas of citizenship and (re-)framing the state’s duty to its people. This bottom-up pressure, bottom-up nationalism, and social diplomacy shaped the functions of the Ghanaian state apparatus, both domestically and internationally. In addition, the chapter also seeks to dispel the myth that racism functioned ‘differently’ in the Eastern bloc. It moves past the idea of Soviet and Eastern European exceptionalism, particularly its estrangement from the processes and movement of white supremacist ideas. The spread of people and ideas – a truism in life – meant that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not inoculated from white supremacist ideas. While the Communist Bloc’s foreign policy statements and private diplomatic cables expressed racial equality and solidarity, through the trope of “Black Peril,” I show how anti-Black racism in the Eastern Bloc looked uncannily familiar to other parts of the globe and how its reproduction in the Eastern Bloc was devastating to Black subjects.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

This chapter emphasizes the importance of studying race and empire as dynamic, interactive processes, where race and empire are formed in relation to each other. Through a relational history approach, scholars historicize the complex nature of racialization within various imperial and colonial contexts. The chapter further explores how scholars engage with relational histories by examining intellectual and disciplinary genealogies, engaging in deep contextualization through critical archival research, and incorporating diverse sources like oral histories and local colonial records into their historical narrative. Additionally, the chapter discusses the ethical considerations and historiographical challenges inherent in researching race and empire, encouraging scholars to acknowledge their positionality and the implications of their findings. By employing relational history, the chapter concludes that scholars can offer deeper insights into how race and empire have co-constituted each other in the past and augment our contemporary understandings of power and resistance.

This chapter addresses the principle of non-discrimination within international administrative law. It examines how international administrative tribunals distinguish between types of discrimination—direct, indirect, positive, and negative—and outlines the allocation of the burden of proof in these cases. The chapter reviews grounds of discrimination, such as race, gender, nationality and place of residence, age, and disability. The jurisprudence spans a variety of contexts, including recruitment, salaries and financial entitlements, career progression, pension rights, and contract termination. The chapter also analyses the principle of equal pay for equal work, a cornerstone of the prohibition of discrimination, discussing its scope and limits. While many rulings reflect a high standard of scrutiny, some structural forms of discrimination persist within employer organisations, particularly concerning gender. The chapter concludes that, despite advancements, international administrative tribunals continue to play a crucial role in addressing and reducing discrimination through judicial oversight.

Historians of US foreign relations have much to gain by incorporating some of the methodological interventions made by scholars of race and Ethnic Studies. Drawing on research on US–Caribbean and US–Central American relations, this chapter tackles the following questions: What does it mean to study race as a central component, and not just a byproduct of US foreign relations? How does race appear in and outside of government archives? And what are some assumptions that require reassessment to ensure that US foreign relations scholars are not using –race– as a mere descriptor of –other–? A core component of the chapter is its combined use of field-specific observations and personal reflections amassed over the course of twenty years of research and writing. It does not propose one unified meaning of “race,” nor one specific method for examining race as an idea and practice. Instead, it maps out how the fields of African Diaspora Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies have expanded our understandings of racialization and racial formation, provides examples of effective approaches that draw from specific events and published works, outlines questions to ask before, during, and after conducting research, and invites researchers to recognize how archives function as racialized spaces.

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.