Two of the most influential concepts of the long nineteenth century developed in a complex and entangled relationship that cannot be reduced to a mere dichotomy. At first sight, however, liberalism has often been interpreted “as both logically and morally incompatible with nationalism.”1 This incompatibility has been derived from the perspective of the early twentieth century when from the early 1920s onwards liberalism seemed to come under increasing pressure from both Bolshevism and fascism. Whether in its Italian version of fascism or in German National Socialism, European fascisms as the culmination of radical nationalism seemed to rely on the ultimate negation of those values and institutions which had been identified with the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, such as personal liberty, free trade, or a constitutional order. Hence the search for the early origins of the apparently obvious dichotomy between liberalism and nationalism followed the logic of retrospective teleology.

Gambling in its modern form was invented in the nineteenth century. The resort casino, built in an environmentally or politically desirable location, attracted a wide range of people from around the world to an atmosphere of luxury, leisure, and cultural cultivation. Visitors to European casinos in the nineteenth century traveled there by steamship or by locomotive; they stayed in hotels and ate meticulously prepared foods; they listened to music performed by artists on tour; and caught up on global and regional affairs by reading newspapers from around the world. And they lost money in the gambling rooms. Built upon an existing network of health-conscious spa towns in the Rhineland, and then relocating to the Riviera in the 1860s, nineteenth-century casino life gave expression to bourgeois demands for leisure, luxury, and levity.

Returning to David Walker’s Appeal, with an exclusive focus on its 1848 publication, this chapter traces the connections between the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions in Europe, the Mexican American War, and an emerging vision of Black resistance to American Empire. This chapter reads Walker together with the works of Henry Highland Garnet and decisively demonstrates how African American literature articulated the principles and priorities of a transnational 1848.