This chapter discusses the resilience of caravans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by suggesting a move from competition and technologies-focused narratives to more comprehensive histories of mobility. The aim is not to deny the transformative effects of steam and, later, automobiles. It rather promotes a synergy approach in which speed was not systematically the decisive factor and the experience of mobility and the ‘channelling’ (V. Huber) was not yet an unescapable feature. Geography, season, markets’ specific features provided economic rationality to slow, incremental and yet efficient type of mobility. As suggested by the intertwined histories of the chapter, this did not influence economic calculations only. The persistence of caravan trade and its connection to a widening array of means of mobility also had an influence on the very working of inland territories from urban settlements along caravan routes to the cities’ daily connections with the steppe and desert.

As Chapter 4 has already made clear, this chapter is not another caravan-to-car story. Nor is it another case study of threatening mobility vs. governmentality. It is rather a continuation of Chapter 4 on the transformations of economic and political geography that put caravans to the test. Building on Chapter 4 and contrary to developmentalist notions of modernisation, this chapter argues that the end of caravans was a cumulative process, just like its persistence until the interwar period. New kinds of territorialisation (automobility and what I define as the ‘evening of mobility’ were part of it, indeed) fostered gradual disintegration and divergence across the caravan regional market. This would gradually erode the caravans’ raison d’être and deepen their transition to shorter routes while camels and traders would find new employments.

This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

Dinah Craik’s 1851 novella The Half-Caste tells the story of how a half-Indian heiress, Zillah Le Poer, faces manipulative attempts by the greedy British side of her family to control her fortune, which she thwarts by marrying her older Scottish guardian. This reading of Craik’s novel examines the production of race at a period when dominant British imperialism was believed to depend largely on hierarchies of race allegedly constructed by heredity. Walters argues that Craik describes how new racial identities can be produced by the ‘affective capacity of brown, Eurasian, female bodies to feel connection with, and dependence on, white women’, with resulting implications for racial hierarchies, and for Empire itself. The chapter examines the idea of race in part as a function of feeling and reveals a ‘slippage between affective and racially scientific methods of assessing difference’.

Chapter 6 charts Pisani’s construction of a second house as a waystation on the route between Venice and Montagnana. It analyzes this building in relation to concepts of mobility and the residential system and compares Pisani’s living situation to that of other Palladio patrons.

Chapter 6 reads Horace’s Odes as thoroughly place-based lyric poetry. The chapter begins by differentiating its approach from landscape and symbolic readings of place. It organizes an account of the Odes around the concepts of place and place attachment, familiar from the Eclogues. Horace represents dynamic experiences of specific localities, constituted by human and nonhuman beings. He anchors his poetry to particular locations, while also making those locations real-and-textual sites of Horatian poetry. In addition, Horace represents place as helping to produce and shape his poetry through tropes of lyric ecology and poetic reciprocity. The second half of the chapter complicates this place-based reading of Horace by attending to the pervasive theme of mobility in the Odes. It argues that Horace models a translocal poetics, in which locality is continually fashioned and refashioned through forms of translation and transport. Whereas forced movement in the Eclogues means the end of local dwelling and local song alike, for Horace mobility helps create both his local place attachments and a form of lyric that is place-based but not place-bound.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

In response to some critics of contemporary Irish culture who have lamented the loss of Irish cultural distinctiveness, particularly in language use, this chapter draws on research in the sociolinguistics of globalization to argue for an alternative method of reading language in fiction. Rather than focusing exclusively on fixed language identities, it suggests a method of reading for the modes and values of expression that are produced by linguistic mobility, neoliberalism, and technology. The chapter considers this changing status of language as it appears in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, including the ways in which economic globalization has prioritized language as a skill and a commodity while reinventing its function through technology. The chapter argues that Rooney’s and Dolan’s novels dramatize the shift from a fixed language identity to a global one based on the idea of linguistic resources in a way that leaves their characters in ambivalent relationships to Irishness, the English language, and globalization.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.