Chapter 4 develops a core claim about “war powers of necessity”: When national self-preservation becomes paramount, the constitutional focus shifts from whether to make war to how far each branch may go in adopting – and later unwinding – extraordinary measures. The chapter shows how Civil War strategy and constitutional argument became mutually reinforcing. Lincoln’s early actions – mobilization, blockade, and detention – highlight the problem of unilateral executive initiative when Congress is absent, while Congress’s later ratification and responsive legislation demonstrate how legislative approval can legalize, channel, or defer resolution of the deepest separation-of-powers questions. The chapter then broadens from emergency action to the constitutional mechanics of sustaining mass war. It shows how “military necessity” operated less as a law-free exception than as a mode of legal reasoning that expanded the scope of both Article I and Article II powers, as the war’s means—including conscription and economic mobilization—merged with its ends, above all preservation of the Union and emancipation. Courts appear not as consistent referees but as sites of competing constitutional models. The chapter concludes by examining war termination, showing how the Civil War blurred the boundary between war and peace and made unwinding extraordinary authority a constitutional problem in its own right.

Phillis’s brief life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American – indeed world – history, spanning the years between the accession of George III and the establishment of the United States. She survived the Middle Passage. The vessel that brought her from Africa to America became her namesake when John and Susanna Wheatley purchased her. Phillis arrived in Boston at the beginning of the reign of George III and during the transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening. Susanna Wheatley felt obligated her to enable Phillis to read the Bible and to become an evangelist herself. Colonial demands during the American Revolution for liberty from tyranny, based on natural rights, were often expressed as calls for freedom from political enslavement. Challenges to metaphorical enslavement inevitably led to questions about whether colonial enslavers could justify the actual chattel enslavement of people of African descent.

Phillis demonstrated an extraordinary degree of agency in the creation and distribution of her writings. Her letter to Whitefield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, reflects her under-appreciated skill as a rhetorician in prose. She had written enough poems by early 1772 to propose publishing a book, which appeared in London in 1773 as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Phillis spent six weeks in London to help promote the upcoming publication of her Poems. There she met Benjamin Franklin, among other socially and politically prominent men and women. The elaborate format of her Poems would have been remarkable even for a well-known author. The nature of the “critical examination” Phillis supposedly underwent remains disputed. Poems demonstrates Phillis’s skills in a variety of poetic forms. The year 1773 was pivotal in Phillis’s professional and personal lives. Her future looked promising.

This chapter examines Simón Bolívar’s political legacy through the lens of Romantic aesthetics, arguing that the myths surrounding “the Liberator” ultimately obscure the true nature of revolutionary change. By situating Bolívar within the cultural currents of his time, it traces how his life and actions were framed in a messianic light, portraying him as a redeemer. This process of mythmaking, it contends, conceals the popular agency that was the essential force driving struggles for freedom. Drawing on a critical tradition that challenges the cult of Bolívar, the chapter concludes that ritual devotion to his messianic figure generates a powerful yet hollow symbol, one that embodies the central contradictions of modern politics and the unfinished business of the Romantic-era revolutions in the Americas.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

Between World War II and independence, roughly 1945 to 1960, anticolonial activists successfully elucidated a link between the spread of Europhone education and freedom from colonial rule. This chapter frames African decolonization as also a Black Atlantic emancipation to reveal why educational aspirations were so central to mid twentieth-century anticolonial imaginings.

The Introduction defines the paradigm of anticolonial development, acquaints the reader with the scope of the book, and situates its main contributions in the literatures on education, decolonization, race, and development in Africa. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. The second part of the Introduction details the book’s unique methodological approach of comparison in global perspective. Such comparison allows for dialogue across two different colonial and postcolonial histories (Ghana/British empire and Côte d’Ivoire/French empire), in the process offering a regional history of the global spread of public schooling during the twentieth century.

This chapter considers modernity from the perspective of the self-fashioning subject, stressing both the centrality of Jews to European modernity and their precarity. It pairs two contexts of change: the central-European crucible of Jewish modernity from the 1880s to 1920s; and the influence of psychoanalysis and Freudian-related thought. Torn between assimilation and collective identification against discrimination and antisemitism, many exchanged rural Judaism for emancipated intellectuality and leftwing political action. By the 1920s, a transnationally scaled antagonism pitted cosmopolitanism and this mobile intellectual culture of the highly educated against exclusivist ideas of national belonging. Freud’s life and career exemplified those histories. As a “scientific” approach to the study of mind, consciousness, and emotions, Freudianism reached far beyond the professional therapeutics of psychoanalysis itself. It joined far wider thinking about personhood and the unconscious, including other psychologies, spiritualism, esoteric knowledge, and the occult. It appealed to anyone seeking enlightenment by means of a self-consciously crafted modern self.

This chapter examines the renewal of British–Miskitu relations in the 1830s and the actions of Belizean Superintendent Alexander MacDonald and his aide (later, Consul) Patrick Walker that entangled the British imperial government in the affairs of the Mosquito Kingdom, particularly in relation to its Central American neighbors and in the context of a growing interest in the Nicaragua Canal that prompted the British government to reestablish its official presence over the Mosquito Coast.

After Union forces captured New Orleans in spring 1862, they determined to fight their way upriver through the Felicianas to a showdown in Vicksburg. The battle at Port Hudson, known as the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, is remembered as the first time Black men fought as Union soldiers. There they battled bravely but suffered dearly in a victory they hoped would make a new world. The available evidence suggests my ancestor Virgil Harrell did not enlist. But after the war he and other Feliciana freedpersons claimed themselves. In the presence of their enemies, freedpersons named themselves, married, created homes, abandoned homes, voted, and recreated themselves and their communities on land drenched in generations of their blood. They would have to draw on the lessons of slavery to create something like freedom.

By the time of his death, Lincoln had earned substantial recognition as a great president, even admiration as a statesman of outstanding quality. His assassination heightened the sense of loss and mourning Americans and others felt, in tributes, eulogies and sermons.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Abraham Lincoln was conscious that the constitution gave him no authority to emancipate slaves under peacetime circumstances. Hence, his first movement toward emancipation was a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation of the slaves of the loyal border states. But even this plan was opposed by those states. So, in mid-1862, Lincoln turned to the powers he believed the constitution conferred on him as commander-in-chief to liberate the confederacy's slaves as a military measure for winning the war. He issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation in September, 1862, attempting to make it palatable beforehand by extracting promises of colonization abroad by the freed slaves. He then proceeded to issue a final proclamation on January 1, 1863. The colonization plan came to nothing. But Lincoln remained anxious about the constitutionality of his proclamation, and in January, 1865, obtained from congress a 13th amendment entirely abolishing slavery.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

What were rights in seventeenth-century France, within the kingdom and its possessions? The French word ‘droits’ (rights) was rarely used. Jurists and claimants talked about liberties, privileges, exemptions, franchises. Liberties were understood in terms of entitlements, which were collective rather than personal. Subjects were granted different privileges depending on the order or estate to which they belonged. The clergy and the nobility enjoyed privileges denied to the common people (they did not, for example, pay taxes) because of the specific social roles they performed. People also enjoyed additional privileges and exemptions to the ones attached to their orders. They belonged to other groups, whether they were provinces, cities, communities, corporations, that granted specific privileges which the sovereign had to respect.