In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

This Introduction lays out the gap in Africa–China scholarship regarding the humanities and world literature particularly. The need for humanistic scholarship on Africa–China relations pinpoints how these exchanges are more than just economic or political; they are also linguistic and cultural. I also articulate how the book intervenes into African literary history. I detail my method of interpreting these texts according to frameworks that include the Cold War, Third Worldism, the Indian Ocean, and the Global South. These approaches enable how I read African literature beyond its conventional relationship with the former European colonizer and the West in general. One main goal is to rework our understanding of postcolonial literature’s “worldliness” by configuring it according to African literary imaginaries of China.

In the Conclusion, Forming Afro-Chinese Worlds, I deepen my discussion of aesthetics by focusing explicitly on the literary forms that writers use to imagine Afro-Chinese worlds. I make one last conceptual intervention by theorizing alluvial form (how a narrative texturizes the matrix of space and time through water and sediment, reconfiguring “worldliness”) with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019). This novel approaches the topic of Africa–China relations by fictionalizing the real-life story of a Kenyan woman found to have Chinese DNA. Through short, proleptic bursts that mimic waves rolling into shore, the novel reanimates the Indian Ocean as the primary site of exchange between the Swahili coast and southern China. The text counters the dehumanizing discourse surrounding Africa–China relations, using literary form anchored in the sociocultural histories of East Africa and so representing China in and on its own terms. I end by considering the fractal form of history, or the underlying process of creolization that I have teased out of how each chapter conceptualizes the alluvial.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

This chapter explores the existence and persistence of religious offences in the case of artistic expressions that are considered to be blasphemous, offensive, defamatory, irreverent and otherwise transgressive. Drawing on the jurisprudence of human rights bodies, it examines the international legal framework applicable to blasphemous arts and the human rights principles pertinent to controversies over creative freedom involving incitement to religious hatred. Moreover, drawing on the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the European Court of Human Rights, it discusses the application of general principles of human rights law (such as the element of intention to stir religious hatred, or the impact of particular expression on religious minorities) on artists and artworks. Last but not least, the chapter discusses the international politics of blasphemy drawing on controversies of global scale such as Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo, and incidents related to the rise of Islamic extremism. In this respect the author emphasizes the need to avoid undermining the value of free speech in the human rights edifice, while also emphasizing the need for a better, cross-cultural understanding of both religious and artistic traditions.

This chapter considers the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction engages with globalization, a process that intensified in the 1990s and which became a central theme in his fiction from The Moor’s Last Sigh onwards. This is especially pressing in Rushdie’s work in considerations of the global circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural productions, most pertinently explored in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. Focusing both on the aesthetics of these novels and their wider cultural contexts, I argue that Rushdie’s post-fatwa novels showcase a shift in his view of the transglobal world, which can be traced on three levels: the portrayal of space, the role attributed to creativity, and the emotional response globalization elicits.

This chapter investigates a little considered aspect of Rushdie’s work in the context of soundscapes and the auditory imagination. While ekphrasis and the way in which Rushdie works with images has been widely explored, his novels are fully realized through sound, whether it is trains, filmic soundtracks, songs, or the sounds of street life in cities such as Bombay, London, and New York. The chapter focuses particularly on music across Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre, paying closest attention to The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Hear Feet. It argues that a change is perceptible in the way that music is figured across these two novels, which in turn reflects a wider shift in the author’s politics, especially with relation to Islam.

The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.

In Chapter 4, we continue our explanation of tradeoffs between expenditure categories by focusing on how domestic and international contextual factors can constrain or facilitate government budgetary behavior. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. For each of these contextual factors, we develop a set of expectations about the spending tradeoffs between policy areas if left and right governments remain ideologically consistent to their preferences versus if context overwhelms those ideological concerns. Our results and conclusions are mixed across the domestic contexts. We find almost no tradeoffs and none that are consistent with either type of expectations for election timing. For an increasing unemployment, we find a mixture of ideological and strategic tradeoff decisions, while, for positive economic growth, we find substantial evidence that governments take advantage of the circumstances to go beyond their ideological priorities. Results for international contexts are also mixed with government spending allocations lacking ideological differences in the face of increased globalization. But, for increased conflict, right and left governments reallocate expenditures in similar ways – highlighting how contexts can overwhelm governments.

Whether domestic and international contexts affect governments’ abilities to alter total expenditures, revenues, deficits, and budgetary volatility is our focus in Chapter 6. We develop expectations about the influence of government ideology and majority status together with contextual factors and other budgetary components on each of our four budgetary components. For the domestic contexts, we consider election timing, unemployment, and economic growth. In the international realm, we focus on globalization and conflict involvement. Building on the results from the panel vector autoregressive (pVAR) model from Chapter 5, we specify separate reduced-form models for each of our budget component variables to test our theoretical expectations. Across the results we present in this chapter, we find very few statistically significant effects, especially in terms of long-run effects, on the four budgetary components. The strongest results are for the influence of contextual factors on budgetary volatility, specifically when increasing unemployment and economic openness. When unemployment or economic openness increases, we find that budgetary volatility increases under majority left governments in both the short- and long-runs. This evidence indicates that right and left governments differ in how much they respond to both domestic and international contexts.

In Chapter 2, we begin with a discussion of the vast literature on political budgeting. We identify three main types of approaches in the extant literature – studies focusing on single budgetary categories, studies of budgetary changes, and studies of aggregate budgetary components. While each of these approaches has provided helpful insights into the relationships between politics and budgeting, they have ignored or greatly simplified the complex tradeoffs and interworkings of budgetary components. Our theoretical argument of political budgeting engages with both the compositional tradeoffs that occur across expenditure categories and the simultaneous interplay between expenditures, revenues, budgetary volatility, and deficit components of budgets. We argue that government ideology and the priorities of core supporters of governments drive their general budgetary priorities; however, domestic and international contexts can make it easier or harder for governments to implement these priorities. Focusing on the contexts of government power, electoral timing, economic conditions, globalization, and conflict affect governments’ budgetary abilities, we put forth a theoretical argument that governments may be unable to fulfil their ideological preferences when external contexts constrain their behavior.

Global domination – including imperial oppression and commercial exploitation across borders and, especially, across continents – was a key concern for many modern thinkers, and among its roots and its remedies were often thought to be the various forms of antagonism and resistance that fundamentally characterize humans’ social practices and interactions. Unsocially sociable individuals, in this view, are characterized by a seemingly contradictory array of impulses that both draw them together in a spirit of humane association and yet pull them apart, as they seek to resist others either to forestall being dominated themselves or to indulge their prideful and hierarchical sense of superiority. Among the many treatments of what one could call "cosmopolitan unsocial sociability" are the incisive – and complementary – theoretical writings of the 1780s and 1790s respectively by the Afro-British political thinker Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant and Cugoano together exemplify an intriguing and complex strand of Enlightenment thought that viewed global connections as both corrosive to our shared humanity and yet essential for resisting the domination that afflicted both European and non-European peoples.