The marginalization of Black Americans due to White supremacy and the oppression of Indians under British colonialism featured inescapable similarities. At the turn of the twentieth century, these parallels led Indian and Black nationalists, intellectuals, and activists to share their experiences and engage in dialogues toward improving the social status of their people. Specifically, Black internationalists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Paul Robeson studied the Indian independence movement and came to regard India as a template in the fight against White supremacy in the United States (US). Ultimately, they came together in their desire to overthrow the structures that subjugated them. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some Indians and Americans exchanged ideas about race, caste, and class, creating lasting cultural connections.

In this book, I explore the foundational cultural and political connections between India and the US between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries by focusing on a small select group of Indians and Americans and their ideas on race, caste, and class. Several key figures of the time, on both sides, attempted to assess whether the Black experience in the US mirrored caste, colonialism, or racial discrimination in India. Both Indians and Americans studied race, caste, and class dynamics outside their own countries in order to learn what they could apply to their own struggles. This study spans from the start of the twentieth century when W. E. B. Du Bois notably declared at the first Pan African Conference in 1900 that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” until the immediate aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

In a June 2021 seminar, historian Dwaipayan Sen noted that although alliances between oppressed groups are interesting and worthy of discussion, he queried whether any meaningful social change can be accomplished by race and caste solidarities between Americans and Indians. Sen argued that since Black American and Dalit struggles are local issues that exist within separate nation states, it is doubtful that that Black and Dalit alliances possess a transnational impact.

Henri Lefebvre's ideas concerning the production of space have been the subject of nuanced debates since the 1970s. These debates primarily focused on the relationship between physical space, capitalist flows and conscious human actions. This book has combined Lefebvre's notion of the capitalist production of space with the idea of space produced by transnational mobility. The Bengali diasporas and their transnational community in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei during the colonial and postcolonial periods form the central theme of this book, which has attempted to demonstrate the temporal and spatial dimensions of Bengali mobility, filling a significant gap in the historical migration literature on Asia.

This book has countered the impression that most South Asians in the Malay world were ‘Indians’, of whom the Tamils constituted a significant portion. The size of the Bengali community was remarkable. However, they were underestimated because many who settled in Malaysia and Singapore adopted Malay identities, forming a highly conspicuous and essential section of the middle classes. Their established ‘networks’ may promote present-day migration from Bangladesh, especially to Singapore and Malaysia. All these discussions have been categorised into two broad areas. Chapters 1–3 explored the background and processes of the emergence of the Bengali diasporic community in the Malay world and the masking of their identity within the generic term ‘Indian’. The second set of aspects, spanning Chapters 4–8, offers a detailed understanding of facets of Bengali space-making in British Malaya, dealing with the professional world, the domain of petty traders and the spaces of politics and civil society.

Historical migrations of diverse ethnic groups from South Asia, as seen today, were generally described as ‘Indian’ in the historical literature. In recent years, the dominant ‘Pan-Indian identity’ has been dissected as heterogeneous, with a focus on ethnic and linguistic aspects. In the context of recent trends in the studies of South Asian migration and diasporic communities within Asia, this book has explored the Bengali transnational community through multiple temporal and spatial contexts. Trans-regional connectivity between the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Sea has a historical pedigree. The British colonial authority introduced rules and regulations to govern the flow of human mobility.

In October 2014, Simon & Schuster released the print edition of Anna Todd’s first novel. That novel had already been read over a billion times. Appearing as over a hundred serialised chapters on online storytelling platform Wattpad between Spring 2013 and Spring 2014, After began as fan fiction, but unlike Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight, it achieved incredible prominence in its original, digital form, making Todd, and Wattpad, the subjects of extensive media attention long before the print book became available in shops.

In Pakistan today, people look forward. Cars and motorbikes on the roads of Karachi and Hyderabad hurtle full speed ahead. Sideview mirrors are systematically removed from motorbikes, leaving no way to look back. Museums run empty. On most days, the National Museum in Karachi has more feline visitors than human. In schools, the past is taught by rote. It is transferred verbatim from textbooks into examination booklets. To score the highest marks, students must not change even a word of the text. The individual, the student, the reader, the present are set apart from history. Even if people present are confronted with the past, it is a vision they do not much like.

This book has shown that this has not always been the case. In the early modern, the past was not contained in chronicles alone. Nor was it rehearsed only in schools. It was immanent in buildings and books, and engaged with considerable enthusiasm. This past did not singularly signify collective histories of the political, religious, kinship, or corporate variety. Rather, it foregrounded individuals. Individuals crafted themselves in close engagement with the past. They remembered and responded to individuals past in the hope of a similar reception for themselves in the future. The past was not inert or over; it was responsive and pliable, yielding ever-new opportunities for individuals in changing times.

I have described this as leaving legacies. It denotes early modern people's concern for enduring beyond their own lives. People ensured self-extension not only through wealth and children but also by leaving material traces of themselves in monuments and books. These did not showcase individuality through a display of interiority or through a narrativization of the particular events and circumstances of a person's life history but rather by paying homage to other individuals or engaging in similar selfless actions. It is in this very gesture of selflessness that the named individual often appeared: humble, abased, and self-effacing. To take the acts of self-effacement in these legacies at face value is to continue to misread South Asia's past. By acting on behalf of another, praising another, helping another, legacies taught ethical lessons to their audience to do the same for the individual responsible as well.

Of the fifteen lines of Flavius Agricola’s epitaph, seven grant a subbiography of his wife of thirty years, Flavia Primitiva, and her son, Aurelius Primitivus. This chapter considers Flavia’s characterization, particularly as a chaste worshipper of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and weighs the potential appeal of this cult.

Rais Amrohvi's emancipatory vision of post-Partition Karachi as a “new mold” for the creation of Muslim civilization highlights a tendency found in many settler narratives: the negation of that which existed before their arrival (Rolph-Trouillot 1995). The role of Muslim nationalism in shaping this tendency is illustrated by another poem entitled “Karachawi,” in which Karachi, a city whose name harkens to the pre-colonial history of Sindh, is recast by Amrohvi as a crucible of political unity under Islam:

What was the role that mass migration and nation building played in (re) shaping the trajectory of postcolonial urbanization in Karachi? A good place to begin is with the exodus of Karachi's native, non-Muslim population following independence. Chapter 2 considered how, like many pre-Partition cities in western Pakistan, Karachi possessed a non-Muslim majority until the outbreak of communal violence (much of it perpetrated by incoming refugees seeking shelter and revenge) prompted an exodus. By 1951, Karachi's non- Muslim population had been “more than replaced by the vast stream of incoming Muslims who … classed themselves as Muhajir” (Census of Pakistan 1951: 131). The effects of this demographic transformation on Karachi's economic, ethnic, and political landscape were sudden and far-reaching. The exodus of the non-Muslim majority created a “new ratio” (see Chapter 2), leaving the city without an existing dominant ethnic or religious group whose language, public norms, and forms of urban territoriality would have to be negotiated by incoming migrants.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

A new data set shows the evolution of capital ratios for the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany. The chapter questions the accuracy of capital/assets ratios and argues that cross-country comparisons of capital ratios are of little explanatory value without a historical narrative. Firstly, the capital/assets ratios used by the academic literature usually consider paid-up capital and disclosed reserves only. However, the total liability of shareholders can go beyond the paid-up capital (double or unlimited liability), which influences the level of capital/assets ratios. Secondly, accounting standards allowed the extensive build-up of hidden reserves in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The chapter shows that the capital strength of banks, considering hidden reserves and shareholder liabilities, is underestimated. Existing publications comparing capital/assets ratios on an international level neglect such issues. Additionally, the chapter analyses structural changes in the assets of British, Swiss, and US banks using the Basel I framework of 1988 for a historical simulation.

This book has explored the emergence of new forms of gender identity in India, emphasizing how ideas about modernity and economic liberalization come together to shape emerging trans women identities in Bangalore. I have traced how recent social changes connected to economic liberalization in India have enabled some feminine-presenting GNC people to live “independent” of hijras. These changes are understood as empowering for younger GNC people who can access resources previously available only through hijra groups.

When we put these changes in the context of increased global media coverage of transgender issues, the emergence of trans women is not that surprising. What is intriguing is how trans women are being framed in contrast to hijras. Unlike in countries of the Global North, where there is a pervasive idea that gender nonconformity is somehow new,1 gender nonconformity has been recognizable (if not exactly intelligible) for centuries2 (and possibly millennia) in India. This means Indian trans identities have emerged in a context where gender nonconformity is recognized through the historical presence of hijras (and some other GNC categories). These understandings about hijras shape how transgender people, and especially trans women, are understood.

Due to social change that promises greater inclusion, some trans women have gained newfound freedoms. This has meant that many of these trans women can envision themselves as “new” (and respectably middle-class) women. Like their cisgender women counterparts from the past, these trans women distance and differentiate themselves from their “other,” the disreputable hijra. In their quest to be recognized as respectable women, the trans women in this book valorize this newly available pathway to respectability while simultaneously devaluing other pathways available to GNC people, especially those associated with hijras.

It might be tempting to assume that GNC identities inherently challenge the gender binary, given that these identities are explicitly “nonconforming.” It would therefore make sense to think of GNC identities as encouraging less conformity to dominant ideas about gender. However, the actions of the trans women in this book bring such assumptions into question, since these trans women consciously position themselves within the gender binary as they strive for upward mobility.

The conclusion looks at early nineteenth-century invocations of John Gay’s Trivia as a way of marking the past from the present, before looking in more detail at one work that draws on Gay’s poem in this way. Metropolitan Improvements; or London in the Nineteenth Century celebrates the development and improvements that were reshaping the West End, drawing a distinction between the London described by Gay and Hogarth and the city of “our improved days”. As it surveys the new buildings, streets, canals, and parks that were transforming the cityscape, James Elmes confidently asserts that London in the nineteenth century will be the admiration of foreigners and the text seemingly resolves many of the tensions highlighted in previous chapters between an ideal of the city and its commercial character.