The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This chapter distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations – and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

This chapter explores how enslaved people developed legal know-how about Castilian laws of slavery and freedom, and shared and exchanged such information with others. In particular, the chapter focuses on the history of enslaved Black people’s determination to raise capital or credit to purchase their liberty from their enslavers. The chapter explores how enslaved Black men and women often plotted their paths to liberty through economic decisions by focusing on the lives of enslaved Black people who resided in the towns along the Camino Real in New Spain between Veracruz and Mexico City during a time of economic boom in the late sixteenth century. Notarial records that cataloged the self-purchase and liberation of enslaved people in port towns of the Spanish Atlantic often reveal how enslaved Black people developed social ties and capital among kin, friends, and charitable residents, and consorted with people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who lived or passed through the places where they resided. These records index a history of conversations about strategies to obtain liberty among enslaved Black people and relationships across different socioeconomic spheres that allowed for some enslaved people to access precious credit to pay for their liberty.

This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter explores how free-born and liberated Black people in the Spanish Americas invested significant resources to defend and expand the meanings of Black freedom and political belonging in the Spanish empire. In particular, when facing repressive policies introduced by local or municipal authorities or disturbances of their freedom enacted by private individuals, free born and liberated people often deftly negotiated various legal jurisdictions and expended social and political capital to carefully craft petitions for royal justice and grace. The chapter traces the development of infrastructures of Black political knowledge, and how people and communities learned about events and political discourses in faraway places and exchanged ideas and news in their daily lives that they later might deploy in their own petitions. With a focus on the cities of Sevilla and Mexico City, the chapter traces a history of infrastructures of Black political knowledge through the activities of Black religious confraternities, and the significance of Black petitioning to speculate about the possible moments of fellowship and exchange between Black petitioners from different cities in the Spanish empire, and the impact of any such exchanges on Black political ideas about freedom in this period.

This chapter traces how formerly enslaved Black men and women partook in a legal culture of freedom papers in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire. After enduring lifetimes of enslavement and precarious and lengthy routes to obtain their precious liberty, formerly enslaved Black people often took careful measures to document and protect their hard-won freedom by engaging in the paper-based bureaucracy that underpinned the central tenets of power and justice in the Spanish empire. This often involved investing in the services of notaries to duplicate freedom papers or requesting that various royal and ecclesiastical authorities issue confirmatory paperwork to document their freedom. Their participation in this legal culture of freedom papers reveals how people from the lowest socioeconomic echelons of colonial society measured and valued paperwork – even if they could not read or write – and invested resources to produce and safeguard an array of legal documents to protect their status.

Ephemeral conversations between enslaved people about the laws of slavery and freedom constituted an exchange of precious knowledge and legal know-how that shaped Black life and thought in the early Atlantic world. This chapter explores enslaved people's petitions to the crown for freedom on the basis that their enslavement was illegitimate to write a history of ideas among enslaved Black people about the illegitimacy of certain types of enslavements in the Spanish empire. These petitions are indicative of a rich landscape of ideas about freedom and slavery among free and enslaved Black people in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and their engagement with Castilian rules of law of slavery and freedom. They argued that they were legally free and that their freedom had been stolen from them. Pedro de Carmona, for example, protested in his petition in 1547 about the “great injury and disturbances (agravios y turbación) that have been done to my liberty.” The chapter traces how enslaved Black litigants accrued this know-how through their discussions with other enslaved and free Black people during their desperate pursuits to reclaim the freedom that had been stolen from them.

Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.