Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

As soon as World War I broke out, American citizens established an important wartime relief organization that was effective in providing refuge to child war victims from France’s northern and eastern regions. The Committee Franco-American for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier (CFAPCF), the first Franco-American response aimed at ensuring the protection of France’s children, provided financial and material assistance to rescue, shelter, heal, and educate displaced, injured, ill, and orphaned children. It collaborated with groups of nuns who ran some of the colonies, with teachers in charge of schooling and with American health experts overseeing provisions of sanitary conditions and hygiene. American women traveled to France and worked in the Franco-American colonies. In addition to caring for the children, they taught them about their friendly nation whose people were helping to ensure their survival. Running a network of colonies across France required considerable human and material resources, and the CFAPCF drew on social networks of wealthy French citizens and American expatriates eager to shield France’s children from hunger, destitution, and death. Shipments of clothing, garments, books, toys, and other gifts from the United States signaled the Americans’ mobilization to save France’s orphans.

This chapter brings readers’ attention to the fact that throughout United States history, government has been an active and necessary part of building the country. In the colonial period, for example, laws regulating taverns and other businesses proliferated. After the Founding, under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton and the federalists, the central government was seen as the necessary force needed to support an economy that then enabled the country to participate on the world economic stage. The anti-federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, aceded to the need for the government to support the economy in the ways proposed by the Federalists.

Irish poets wrote as much about love and beauty, memory, God and grief as their French, or English, or Dutch counterparts, but viewed in the round Irish literature, in Irish and English, is indelibly stamped by the cultural and political experience of colonisation. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bards’ and chroniclers’ literary record of a distressed Gaelic civilisation and of the depredations of foreign heretics, to the nineteenth-century novelists wrestling with the concept of ‘national character’ as destiny in the age of union, Ireland’s British Question could not, it seems, be avoided.

Chapter 5 turns to the economic sphere, with special attention to the emergence of the modern economic corporation, as a competitor par excellence. I examine its origins in medieval antecedents, how post-revolutionary US was the ideal environment for its initial cultivation and elaboration, and its subsequent development in Europe and beyond. The economic firm is in many ways the ‘ideal type’ of the modern corporate actor, but I am concerned to show in the next two chapters that new corporate actors in the political and ideological/cultural spheres are also crucial to the general domestication of competition in liberal societies.

The conclusion argues that U.S. analysis on France reveals the complex relationship between intelligence and the formulation of American foreign policy in the early Cold War. It contends that a transnational and at times transimperial web of French factions and informants was largely responsible for shaping these views through their frequent informal and formal exchanges with American diplomats and intelligence officials, and they did so with their own political agendas and interests in mind. Through their U.S. contacts, they directly contested images of France, demonstrated legitimacy and outmaneuvered rivals, and played a fundamental role in shaping American perceptions and policy. This chapter also shows that the narrative of French weakness and communist intrigue began to unravel under the scrutiny of analysts who understood its provenance and questioned its basis. In fact, there were a myriad of other explanations for seemingly nefarious communist activity in France, ones for which emotionally driven and depleted observers failed to account.

This final chapter uses the shift metaphor to suggest that change might be limited if not explicitly anti-racist. In the absence of this consciousness, a shift can be sidewards rather than forwards. I argue that empirical studies in EU law can only take a shift forwards when the principle and practice of decolonialism is embedded in it. This requires recognition of Europe's colonial past as well as racism in the present. The assumption that all Europeans are White, and all Blacks are migrants has to be debunked – Black European scholars need to be encouraged to take their place in the field and given access to resources to ensure that empirical research in EU law also focuses on experiences important to their lives.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine. It was also a period of urbanization and modernization cut for a while by the outbreak of the war. The war caused famine, expulsion by the Turkish governor but also brought hope for a different future under the new rulers. These hopes were shattered when the British gave the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. Such clear support gave a new focus to the already existing Palestinian national movement.

This introductory chapter examines the archive of Thomas Hodgkin and its value for understanding British humanitarianism and activism on behalf of indigenous peoples, and particularly the activities of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. It considers the history and historiography of humanitarianism and indigenous protection. It also explores scholarship on settler colonialism, imperial networks, critical indigenous studies and new imperial histories, before presenting the book’s argument.

This chapter investigates two episodes in which humanitarian objectives clashed with liberal economic orthodoxy. The British India Society broke away from the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1839. It linked ‘Justice to India’ with ‘Prosperity to England’ and ‘Freedom’ to American slaves, but its supporters were divided over the first Opium War and its campaign was derailed by the decision to prioritize Corn Law repeal over Indian reform. The relationship between ‘free trade’ and ‘free labour’ was also a focus of the campaign waged by the West India Association, in which Dr Thomas Hodgkin was prominent, to maintain tariff protection for British West Indian sugar against that produced by slaves in Brazil and Cuba. The Association prioritized free colonial labour over free trade, even though a more ethical British stance would come at the expense of British workers. The chapter reveals tensions between London and the British provinces, and within liberal imperial policy, as well as contradictions within humanitarian circles.

North America was a key nineteenth-century battleground for indigenous rights. The Aborigines’ Protection Society followed US developments keenly; derided and despaired of the rule of the monopolistic Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert’s Land; and hoped that the Canadian colonies could lead the way in recognizing indigenous rights. This chapter considers the society’s championing of indigenous rights in British North America at a time of imperial withdrawal. It explores the emphasis placed by the Aborigines’ Protection Society on ‘civilization’, and how this was shaped by Thomas Hodgkin’s encounters with four indigenous activists from British North America. The Ojibwa chief and missionary, the Reverend Peter Jones and his niece, Nahnebahwequa, protested the theft of their land and advocated for indigenous education, representation and legal rights. Alexander Isbister and his uncle, William Kennedy, spearheaded the campaign in Britain against the Hudson’s Bay Company. The chapter explores how indigenous interlocutors’ engaged with British humanitarians; how their authority translated to the metropolitan context; and how this translation jeopardized standing at home.

The parlous situation of indigenous peoples in Southern Africa and New Zealand deteriorated even further in the 1850s and 1860s. The Aborigines’ Protection Society tried to promote indigenous rights in these regions to increasingly hostile and independent settler polities and to persuade the imperial government and metropolitan Britons of their continuing responsibilities to indigenous subjects. Ever more conscious of the gap between its programme of securing indigenous land and autonomy and colonial policies of (coercive) ‘amalgamation’, the society made little headway. Dr Thomas Hodgkin tried to mediate between indigenous leaders, missionaries and activists, settlers, and colonial and imperial governments during conflicts in Lesotho and New Zealand, focusing his efforts particularly on the powerful architect of ‘humane governance’, Governor Sir George Grey. These years, however, revealed the society as at odds with both metropolitan and colonial power brokers, patronizing towards its indigenous and missionary allies and impractical in its plans.

Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the status and position of enslaved women during the eighteenth century. The daily and seasonal work of enslaved women determined the boundaries within which women had to resist their bondage and their opportunities to do so. This chapter provides a broad understanding of enslaved women’s labor in the Southern and Northern colonies as a basis from which to further examine enslaved women’s fugitivity in subsequent chapters. This chapter demonstrates the diversity in enslaved women’s experiences during the eighteenth century and the gendered resistance strategies they pursued to contest their bondage. Despite the limitations placed on enslaved women’s resistance, they were able to contest their bondage through the liminal spaces of slavery. This contestation had significant consequences for their mobility and the actions that they pursued as slavery became entrenched during the eighteenth century.

The era of the American Revolution was as critical for African American women as it was for Black men and for White Americans who gained their independence from Great Britain. Black women’s various efforts to escape bondage have been viewed as ancillary in the letters and diaries, biographical accounts, and legal proceedings historians often used to support arguments based on analysis of enslaved men or on factors that prevented women from fleeing slavery. Black women’s freedom was intertwined with the movement for American independence, and African American women influenced the military conflict and were powerfully influenced by its outcome.

Although enslaved Black women were marginalized and faced many obstacles to freedom during the Revolutionary era, they asserted their claims to freedom through fugitivity as they invoked the same philosophical arguments of liberty that White revolutionaries made in their own fierce struggle against oppression. At stake in this discussion of fugitive women is demonstrating that Black women’s resistance in the form of truancy and escape were central components of abolitionism during the Revolutionary Era. Thousands of women of diverse circumstances escaped bondage despite their status as mothers and wives. In fact, motherhood, freedom, love and family propelled Black women to escape bondage during the Revolutionary Era; a time when the chaos of war made women’s flight possible due to the breakdown of oversight and colonial authority.

This chapter is the first of four chapters focused on the penteteric or Great Panathenaia, which took place every four years. It looks at how individuals participated in the procession, which conveyed the sacrificial animals, the peplos and other offerings to the Akropolis, and the sacrifices to Athena. The procession and attendant rituals included a multitude of different roles for various individuals and groups: Athenians, both male and female, were certainly represented, but so were other inhabitants, the metics and their daughters and delegations from the colonies and, in the later fifth century BC, the allies. Together, they made up the community of ‘all the Athenians’, who were celebrating the goddess and her deed against the Giants. These rituals repeated the festival’s stories and themes, which unified the rituals and linked them to the games.

This chapter focuses on the identities created for other residents (Athenian women and girls, male metics and their daughters and Athenian boys, beardless youths and ephebes) and non-residents (especially colonies and allies). In comparison to those of the male Athenians, the identities of other residents and non-residents of the city were not nearly as complex, in part because these other groups had limited opportunities for participation in the celebration. While the identities of Athenian boys, beardless youths and ephebes focused on their position as citizens-to-be or as the newest citizens who were prepared to fight for the city, the identities for the other groups focused on their service to the goddess. The participation of both non-residents and residents also marked them as members of the community of “all the Athenians” and allowed them to create identities as members of this group. International visitors had a significant role to play as excluded non-members who contrasted with members of the community. Thus, how one took part in the Great Panathenaia was instrumental in determining what it meant to be a member of “all the Athenians” who were celebrating the Great Panathenaia.