The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.

The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

Chapter 4 describes Heyang as a migrant sending community, built upon and even sustained by migrants’ homesickness. These migration patterns are deeply entangled with the local duck farming industry, and ’duck tales’ told by locals who have personally engaged in the industry at various stages of their lives are highlighted. Informants’ reflections on the significance of duck breeding reinforces the importance of cyclical migration through different stages of a rapidly transforming China. However, four recent ’returnees’ explain how this industry was proving to be unsustainable because of local, national, and global processes of change by the mid-2010s. They each returned to Heyang to work in the ‘Xiangchou Tourism’ industry as tour guides and security guards. Their stories provide insight into the complex emotions that underscore their respective returns to the hometown, ranging from comfort and familiarity to perpetual feelings of precarity due to lingering debts, unstable livelihoods, and uncertain futures.

This chapter traces early migration from Europe during the Gold Rush and the change from multiculturalism to monoculturalism with the advent of the White Australia policy. However, it focuses primarily on first-generation migrant writers from Europe following World War II. The chapter argues that migration should be viewed through the lens of heterogeneity, shaped by geographic, cultural, linguistic and class disparities. The chapter discusses how first-generation migrants existed as ethnic minorities who often experienced hostility and were directed towards manual employment. It examines the emergence of ethnically specific periodicals, following by literary journals, literary and cultural associations, poetry collections, and anthologies. The chapter identifies a predominant theme of nostalgia, with related elements of loss and hope. Another identified theme is social justice, including empathy for the impact of displacement felt by Aboriginal peoples and a support of Aboriginal sovereignty.

This chapter examines literature that emerged from the fraught historical juncture after the Second World War as Britain collectively reimagined itself as a national people. It takes up texts by two prominent groupings of writers who did not feel included within the expanding parameters of Britishness: the era’s youthful up-and-coming English writers Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and John Osborne, sometimes referred to as ‘Angry Young Men’; and the migrant West Indian writers E. R. Braithwaite, Beryl Gilroy, Joyce Gladwell, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon, who are commonly thought of as belonging to the ‘Windrush generation’. Tracing how both sets of writers negotiated this tense cultural and political space, the chapter illustrates how these texts register structurally similar contradictions between formal and informal belonging along markedly different axes of, respectively, class and race, ultimately suggesting that the era’s literature both reveals restrictive forms of British identity and proposes models of redress.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

Immigration is one of the most politically charged aspects of human rights law. This chapter examines the application of Article 8 ECHR in cases where migrants face deportation and where family members seek entry to the Contracting State. In practice few applicants succeed in using Article 8 ECHR to resist deportation even in cases where they were born or lived almost their entire life in the State. This has led to the criticism that the ECtHR prioritises State sovereignty, above migrants, rendering the rights virtually meaningless and legitimising States’ practices. An opposing perspective is that the process of having to justify deportation to an international human rights court is an incursion into State sovereignty that exceeds the limits of the ECtHR’s role. The case law on family reunification is equally contested by both those that believe the ECtHR is exceeding its legitimate function and those that believe the ECtHR is averting its eyes to the hardship and suffering of migrants. The final part of this chapter examines the ways in which Article 8 ECHR has been shaped by domestic immigration law and the driving forces behind the interpretation and application of rights.

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.

Chapter 6 discusses the colonization of the Bonin Islands under the Tokugawa shogunate in 1862–1863. It shows how the steamboat Kanrin-maru’s venture to the Pacific archipelago offered an opportunity to develop and display national symbols of sovereignty, progress, and power vis-à-vis the islanders, just nine years after the arrival of Perry’s black ships. The subsequent occupation of territory under the hinomaru flag and the mapping and labeling of landmarks with Japanese toponyms was an attempt at harmonizing early modern conceptions of climate, subjecthood, and benevolent governance with the exigencies of administrative control over a stateless immigrant community in a colonial competition against Western empires. The chapter argues that the Bonin Islands figured as an experimental colony through which shogunal scholars and officials encountered foreign plants, technologies, and bodies of knowledge at a formative time of Japan’s imperial reinvention. Though upended prematurely in the summer of 1863, this colonial experiment offers a rare window on the possibilities of an imperial modernity under the Tokugawa that never materialized.