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.

Institutions of transnational industrial democracy are emerging, as demonstrated in the book. However, the relationship between these transnational structures and national systems has often been overlooked. Chapter 7 thus focuses on the relationship between transnational industrial democracy and national institutions in Bangladesh: the relationship between the Bangladesh Accord, on the one hand, and national actors from the industry association and government of Bangladesh, on the other. For national actors, the imposition of private labour governance through the Accord undermined local democratic institutions, and thus became highly contentious. This highlights the trade-off between effectiveness and inclusiveness of private governance. While collective action from over 200 signatory companies has been vital in driving factory owners to remediate urgent safety issues, it also created quasi-authority to regulate and close sites of production by withdrawing orders from unsafe or non-cooperative factories. Overall, Chapter 7 raises challenging questions about democratic governance and the intersection of transnational and national spheres.

This chapter provides important background on legal reform and social change in Vietnam since the economic reform of đổi mới. It examines various accounts of the role of law in shaping state and society relationships in Vietnam, covering issues such as constitutional amendments, economic governance, dispute resolution, and rights mobilization. It also draws upon some important and useful insights relating to the operations of law in daily life from the anthropology literature. It can be seen from existing literature that law has had a limited role and legitimacy in the regulation of social life, which is predominantly shaped by informal practices and morality.

Black resistance movements are among the most surveilled social movements in American history. From slave insurrections to Jim Crow and Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the government and its accomplices have long worked to monitor and control these movements. This chapter explores the history of Black surveillance and control, elaborating on the impact new technologies and shifting demographics have had on Black resistance movements and their strategies to counter this surveillance and control.

Chapter 5 recounts the story of Giorgio Amendola from his birth in 1907 through the complexities of his family life and politics until his father’s death. His father’s murder and his combative personality ensured that he dismissed liberal Anti-Fascism as hopelessly feeble and, in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). He soon left for Paris and for his education as a party chief in the making, notably from the Machiavellian Palmiro Togliatti, his ‘second father’. Giorgio loved Paris, City of the Revolution; he did not visit Leningrad or Moscow until after 1945. A young working-class woman called Germaine Lecocq, almost the embodiment of Paris, came suddenly into his life in a story of love at first sight. Unlike his parents’ marriage, it remained that way. The couple’s marriage and first full sexual encounter occurred on the prison island of Ponza. Not long afterwards, a daughter was born with some difficulty in Rome; Germaine’s mother arrived and thereafter remained part of their family. Eventually they moved back to Paris, and, after a brief time in Tunisia, they stayed in France until Giorgio crossed the Italian border to become a fighting partisan in April 1943.

This chapter completes the story of Giorgio Amendola (and his wife Germaine) and his communist brothers: the independent Antonio (who died young in 1953) and the orthodox Pietro. After an account of Giorgio as a fighting partisan, or an organiser of fighting partisans, we move on to his history in the renamed Italian Communist Party after 1945. We examine his role in the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946–7 and the concentration Togliatti then expected from him on the South. The PCI’s slow detachment from Stalinism is also reviewed. Until his death, Giorgio could never bring himself to prefer American civilisation to Soviet. Nonetheless, he actively favoured the PCI policy of a national ‘Italian road to socialism’. The automatic succession of Luigi Longo to party leadership in 1964 dashed Giorgio’s hopes in that regard. By the 1970s, he had become a (massive) party elder, with time to write his deeply humane memoirs. He died on 5 June 1980, Germaine following him to the grave within hours; she had become a well-regarded painter and the two were always thought to be engaged in their deeply romantic love story. They were given public and family burial in the Campo Verano.

This chapter depicts France on the eve of Liberation as various factions jockeyed for legitimacy and rightful claim to lead France once Paris was free again. It reveals a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military intelligence, right-leaning French sources, including familiar military, intelligence, political and industrial figures, bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. Thus France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals, as well as the far reaches of the French empire, seeking to influence US policy.

This chapter argues that people in what became the French colonial territory of Mauritania marshalled l’ḥjāb in their opposition to colonization and how French perceptions of l’ḥjāb shaped their response to that opposition. It covers the first half of the colonial period from c.1900 when the French formally declared Mauritania a colonial military territory into the 1930s when France considered itself in military and administrative control of the colony. The chapter focuses on this period when colonizers first deployed a strategy of collaboration with certain religious leaders and then rapidly shifted to a strategy that restricted the physical movements of the men they called marabouts. These new restrictions on the movement and activity of purveyors of Islamic learning and its sciences targeted l’ḥjāb as a Mauritania-specific factor in broader colonial anxiety over Islam. It is during this period from 1900–1935 that the French established the policies that would directly shape their engagement with l’ḥjāb and, via socioeconomic changes that resulted from those policies, indirectly shape how people of Mauritania relied on l’ḥjāb and its practitioners.

One key feature of the Constitution – the concept of federalism – was unclear when it was introduced, and threatened the Constitution’s ratification by those who feared the new government would undermine state sovereignty. In their famous essays in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison defended the Constitution and argued that state legislatures would sound the alarm if the national government exceeded its authority. They argued that through interposition state legislatures would effectively check the national government by mobilizing resistance should the government try to overreach. Resolutions passed by legislators could legitimately be considered an expression of the people that could then be shared with the state’s congressional delegation and other state legislatures. Hamilton’s and Madison’s advocacy for state legislatures as monitors of the equilibrium of the two levels of government under the Constitution was a rhetorical argument designed to address the objections of Anti-Federalists. At the time of the ratification debates, both men were deeply distrustful of state legislatures, yet needed to explain how the national government would not overwhelm the states.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

In this introduction, we establish a framework for resistance studies as it relates to the ancient Mediterranean world, and especially to Rome as an imperial power. The first section explores the changing scope of resistance studies over the past century and how the three principal twentieth-century discussions of resistance by Classicists have been framed by Nazi Germany, the French colonial experience in Africa seen from the viewpoint of early postcolonialism, and the activities of McCarthyite America in the Cold War. It also sets out the range of theoretical and methodological approaches to resistance that recur throughout the volume. The second sections consists of discussion and summaries of the contributions. The third section offers Augustine as a case study of reading resistance at the level of an individual’s identity formation. The fourth section discusses the question of imperial Greek existence under Rome and ends with a case study of Pausanias.

This chapter argues that Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe is exceptional among the extant novels for its ideological entanglement with Rome, a status in no small part a result of the author’s opening proclamation to be from the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, a ciuitas libera and perennially loyal pet of the Roman emperors. The first section of this chapter suggests that the novel’s fictional status affords it a degree of licence to ‘speak truth to power’, evidence of which can often be found in details that do not quite make sense (‘glitches in the matrix’). The second section mobilises a range of theoretical models from resistance studies to argue that one such detail, the presence of ‘Phrygian pirates’, represents a sideswipe at Roman military and imperial pretensions. The third section presses the interpretative potential of Chariton’s claim to be from Aphrodisias and argues that, although a strongly local text, it is irredeemably enmeshed in the politics of the Mediterranean world. The fourth section explores how the public use of Phrygian iconography in Aphrodisias as a strategy of ‘kinship diplomacy’ with Rome contrasts with the negative connotations of ‘Phrygian’ in Chariton’s novel, which indicates that even a city as openly pro-Roman as Aphrodisias was capable of expressing dissent.

The use of local languages is sometimes considered a marker of resistance to Roman power or culture. However, we show that continued use of local languages cannot necessarily be equated with resistance, nor is it easy to identify the use of language or script in particular inscriptions as driven by a desire to express resistance. This chapter discusses how (and whether) it is possible to know when resistance is involved in language use in the Roman Empire and examines case studies of inscriptional evidence pertaining to the use of Faliscan, Oscan, Paelignian, Venetic, Celtiberian, and Hebrew. We propose that many of them were written to present a ‘non-Roman’ rather than an ‘anti-Roman’ identity, and that ‘non-Roman’ identity could stand alongside both acceptance of Rome and violence resistance to its political hegemony.

In this epilogue, we consider first the language of resistance and how its rhetoric encodes a complex and competing set of positionalities: it is hard, we argue, to distinguish between cultural resistance and cultural difference. This process is especially complex in the Roman Empire, where cultural conflict between Roman and Greek, for example, has to negotiate the surprising dynamics of cultural authority where the colonisers privilege the culture of the conquered, and where Christianity is a major vector in the changing nature of resistance over time. This opening discussion leads to six ways in which the case of the Roman Empire offers a particularly productive and challenging model for contemporary resistance studies, which shows a way forward from this volume: first, resistance from marginalised groups and the possibility of institutional rejection of dominant culture; second, resistance from within the elite; third, resistance as a multidirectional process which is testimony to the fragility of imperial self-assertion; fourth, the resistance between classes, and especially slaves to masters; fifth, how the imaginary of resistance – its narratives and tropes – functions; sixth, how resistance has its own historical account which shifts from public acts of resistance to models of inwardness.

This chapter compares the post-extraction dynamics of two mining regions in the Fennoscandinavian Arctic: the Pite valley, Sweden, and Kolari, Finland. In 1946 the Swedish mining company Boliden closed a mine in Laver, which became a ghost town. Decades later, state authorities tried to turn Laver into a cultural heritage site. Boliden joined the effort to support its plan to re-start mining at Laver, a project that has, however, become highly controversial. The Finnish case deals with a similar controversy. Hannukainen mining company wants to re-open an iron ore mine that was in operation 1975-1990. As part of their strategy to gain acceptance for re-opening, the company and supporters of the project have mobilized the history of the mining sites and argues mining is a core element of the heritage of the Kolar municipality. Both cases have generated tension regarding the type of history and heritage of these regions: those of reindeer herding by Sámi and other local communities, or that of extractive industries? The cases show that heritage making can be useful, but it can also be a source of conflict, further underscoring the importance of the long-term view of extraction.