This urban ethnography of violence in intimate relationships in Sierra Leone reveals its multifaceted nature, gender dynamics, and the complex interplay of domestic, community, and state interventions. It challenges victim–perpetrator narratives by highlighting relationship violence’s complexities, such as its use for expressing love or punishment. The study contextualises violence within Sierra Leone’s historical and geopolitical framework, emphasising the interaction of structural violence with local contexts. It examines women’s agency in relation to violence and the co-existence of love and violence in the society’s moral economy. Gendered aspects of violence show differences in how men and women perceive and enact violence. The study analyses community and family mediations of violence and discusses how especially men face barriers towards state reporting. State laws greatly impact sexual relationships involving minors, shaping young people’s lives, household formation, education, and social relations. In challenging conventional perspectives, the book provides valuable insights for policy-makers and scholars.

Exploring the trope of the ‘insider-outsider’ which recurs across three centuries of black and Asian British writing, this chapter considers nineteenth-century travellers of African and Asian descent as they made their way in and through Britain. In 1857, following her arrival in Britain after working as a nurse in the Crimea, Mary Seacole published her Wonderful Adventures … in Many Lands. This autobiographical account of her travels casts her quest for economic stability as a series of travel ‘adventures’, revealing the gendered and racialized landscapes she navigated as she sought a livelihood both at home and abroad. Behramji Malabari’s account of his travels to Britain in 1893, The Indian Eye on English Life, offers a different perspective on the pathway through empire. Whilst Seacole expresses a patriotism, which is conflicted by her racial position, Malabari (Parsi journalist and writer from Bombay), is a more disappointed citizen of empire, preoccupied by the sordid and parochial London he encounters. Taken together, their writings serve as ‘traveling provocations’, reminding us of the complex and often contradictory visions hailed by movement across the metropole-colony divide.