The Northwest Europeans were latecomers to Atlantic slavery and had to make do with second-best trading locations. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economic growth of the English and Dutch that allowed them to break into the Iberian Atlantic system rather than the two countries needing the slave trade to stimulate their economic development. Northwest Europeans never broached the Portuguese strongholds of Guinea-Bissau and Angola as slave-supply centers and were able to use Brazilian gold to hold their own in the Bight of Benin. And the British and the Dutch sold many of the slaves that they did buy to the Spanish Americas. The British made repeated unsuccessful attempts to break into the Brazilian market. The traffic was widely supported in most European countries, given that preparation for a successful voyage absorbed a large labor force and many thousands of investors.

This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

The introduction establishes seventeenth-century English ideas about the tropics, showing that they conceptualized the tropical or “torrid zone” as a coherent and distinct entity. The English thought of that region as both more abundant in resources and more deadly than the more temperate zones. This tropical zone was the focus of early English overseas expansion. The Atlantic World perspective may be too limiting as a geographical framework for understanding the rise of the English empire. Scholars should explore English colonization models across the tropics in the eastern and western hemisphere in a comparative perspective to better appreciate both the development of the early empire and the origins and rise of slavery within that empire. The introduction also argues that the distinctiveness of the variant of slavery that emerged in the English empire can best be understood through the broader framework of the global tropics, linking the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Citizenship and taxation are closely related. While only two countries tax on the basis of citizenship, residency as it is implicated in abode and domicile, determines taxation obligations, criteria, and rates. Countries tax on the basis of residency, applying a 183- day presence rule together with other tests that cluster around definitions of ‘the home’ to establish abode and/or domicile which are invoked to classify taxpayers and their payments. Since 1984, a number of countries have been offering Citizenship by Investment (CBI) and Residence by Investment (RBI) programmes as incentives to encourage High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) to migrate and settle within their jurisdictions. Competition for CBI and RBI has intensified since the turn of the twenty-first century. These programmes allow both states and their HNWI clients to negotiate abode, domicile, and home to reduce tax obligations. While anthropologists have long since abandoned assumptions that fix culture to specific places, tax authorities struggle to accommodate the mobile livelihoods that are instantiated in CBI and RBI programmes. While the majority of citizens continue to pay tax in place, HNWIs, with multiple homes in multiple places, treat citizenship as a commodity to reduce, and even entirely escape taxation.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

As other chapters in this volume show, the EU remedies system is difficult to employ when it comes to EU fundamental right violations. When discussing (im)possibilities of procedural rules and how these encourage or discourage litigation, socio-legal scholars have referred to the concept of legal opportunity structures. In relation to this concept, the EU is a system with closed procedural legal opportunities: rules on directly accessing the CJEU severely limit the possibilities to pursue strategic litigation. At the same time, the EU has opened up legal opportunities as well, by bringing litigants a new catalogue of rights to invoke. In the context of fundamental rights accountability, strategic litigation is used extensively. This begs the question: how are actors (NGOs, lawyers, individuals) making use of the (partially) closed EU system and what lessons can be drawn therefrom? This chapter delves into several cases of mobilisation of the EU remedies system and describes the way in which the actors involved worked with or around EU legal opportunity structures, both inside and outside the context of formal legal procedures. The lessons drawn from these actions can inform future action in this field.

This chapter introduces Review Bodies as accountability mechanisms for fundamental rights violations by the EU executive. As an umbrella concept, Review Bodies includes all actors except courts that, upon individual petition, independently review potential fundamental rights violations by EU actors. For the EU, these Review Bodies are the European Ombudsman, Boards of Appeal, and Fundamental Rights Officers. Albeit vested with weaker authority than courts, Review Bodies offer two crucial elements for comprehensive access to justice. First, Review Bodies are complementary to courts, meaning that they are often more accessible and more specialized. Second, Review Bodies focus less on individual issues of legality but on structural problems that produce repeated fundamental rights violations. In principle, this would place Review Bodies in a prime position to advance executive accountability in the EU. However, too often, Review Bodies are underfunded and lack the ‘teeth’ to discipline EU executive actors. Therefore, to improve access to justice and remedy structural problems engrained into the Union’s burgeoning executive power, authority and funding of Review Bodies should expand and other actors, especially courts, should team up with Review Bodies to effectuate their structure-focused expertise through the ‘teeth’ of judicial authority and public pressure.

Chapter 2 discusses prostitution in Chinese history and provides the context surrounding prostitution in contemporary China. Sex work has presented the state with regulatory challenges throughout most of Chinese history. In Imperial China (361 BC–1912 CE), prostitution policy varied based on the status of the men and women involved. In Republican China (1912–1949), the regulation of sex work was formulated primarily at the local level. Some local governments sought to abolish it, but they were more likely to license and tax it, or to establish state-run brothels. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it moved swiftly to prohibit prostitution nationwide, and in the first few decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), prostitution was less prevalent and more hidden. Yet the scarcity of prostitution during the Mao era is best viewed as a brief historical anomaly. Sex work reemerged in the early 1980s, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening, and it has been integral to many of the country’s major political, economic, and social developments since 1979.

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.

Overseas Pakistanis continue to grow in number, expanding the national community abroad. The three main challenges that exist for the Pakistani government in protecting its citizens abroad are interconnected and have to do with maintaining remittances, increasing educational opportunities, and potentially loosening visa restrictions that hamper the ability of Pakistanis to travel and interact with other countries economically. While the world has focused on security, mainly evaluating Pakistan from an Afghanistan-focused lens as US and NATO forces remained in the country till August 2021, Pakistanis have been busy seizing opportunities for themselves and their families, indicating a high level of agency. The Pakistani government is motivated by its diaspora’s agency and self-identity needs, and welcomes engagement. This movement has now resulted in remittances becoming Pakistan’s largest source of national foreign exchange. In order to maintain remittances, the Pakistani government’s activities are likely to intensify over time. As the Pakistani government engages with its citizens abroad, one of the most interesting revelations about this research is the lack of direct military involvement.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.