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.

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.

The slavery debates at Cambridge did not end with the emancipation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and India in 1843. In fact, undergraduates, fellows, and professors increasingly turned their attention to enslavement in the United States of America. Cambridge-educated abolitionists, such as Edward Strutt Abdy and Alexander Crummell, sought to mobilise opinion in both America and Britain against the persistent power of the enslaver class in the Southern United States. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–1865) inspired growing sympathy amongst educated British elites, including those at Cambridge, towards the Confederate cause, with many comparing American enslavers to landed British gentry in order to build camaraderie between British and American elites. The Confederacy, in turn, sought to lobby university men and mobilise student opinion in their favour to further the cause of Confederate diplomatic recognition in Britain.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

Examines gender and race/ethnicity related to conversation memory.

Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of new actors in the Kuroshio frontier over the decades after the shogunate’s retreat from the Bonin Islands. It observes that pirates, state officials, and scientists formed a triangle of frontier actors. The pirate Benjamin Pease vied for state approval of his local rule in the Bonins, but eventually it was individuals like the official-botanist Tanaka Yoshio or the Bonin settler Thomas Webb who helped showcase the colonial flagship project of the young Meiji empire. The relationship of state and commercial agents, as much as the swift reconfiguration of settler identities on the ground, reflected the physical fluidity and political instability of the contested ocean frontier. Taming this frontier was a project of ideological significance for Japan. Clarifying the state’s relationship with its new subjects by testing new forms of subjecthood was central to this process. The flagship colony in the Bonin Islands became the site of state-funded agrarian experiments centered on exotic fruits and medical plants. Showcased at agricultural exhibitions, these experiments underpinned the “enlightened” character of Japanese colonialism.

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.

Medieval European travel writing reveals the particular ways that race-making and world-making are bound together. This literature combines ethnography and historiography, usually providing details about the culture and history of the peoples encountered by the traveler, as well as descriptions of the geography and landscapes traversed. Travelers consistently blurred the lines between fantasy and reality, but their writings nonetheless became common source material for encyclopedic texts and romance literature, thereby fueling European knowledge production and popular culture. As this literature developed a fantastical perspective about the world and its diverse inhabitants, it forged a crucible for making up people. It was a mode of writing particularly suited for race-making. This chapter examines race in medieval European travel literature that looked beyond the Levant and into Asia in order to demonstrate how histories of contact in the global Middle Ages shaped the development of racial ideologies in the period. It takes the ‘global’ not as an empirical concept, but as, to use Sanjay Krishnan’s argument, ‘a mode of thematization or a way of bringing the world into view’.

This chapter examines the role of Christology in the subfield of political theology. Political theologies examine the structure and logic of worldly power, assessing its relation to religious and theological dimensions of community formation, the cultivation of the citizen (often in contrast to the non-citizen or the enemy), expectations of messianic emergence and progress, and the potential for enacting meaningful political resistance. Christology is a major focus within the field of political theology both because of the historical role played by Christianity in the political development of Europe and Europe’s imperial and colonial footprint and because Christology is deeply invested in these very questions of power. This chapter focuses on key texts from the twentieth century that remain touchstones for the growing discipline of political theology as it exists today.