The postscript shifts to the end of sugar and the rise of oil in today’s Guyana. In 2018, Guyana became – according to paternalistic international news coverage – the “unlikely setting for the world’s next big oil boom.” This drastic change took place against the backdrop of two significant national developments: (1) the demise of the sugar industry, from which thousands of jobs were lost; and (2) a significant increase in ethnic polarization between the leading political parties and in the country more broadly, some of which led to fatal violence. As Guyana moves from the margins of global circuits of capital, racial tensions in the country have limited the possibility of a robust movement to either ensure that “oil money” benefits the entire country, or take the path less traveled, a more sustainable route that will benefit everyone – globally. The stakes indeed are high. Building on Caribbean feminist epistemologies, this section theorizes a solidarity that gains power from recognizing and understanding difference. I argue that just as racial capitalism remakes itself, solidarity must always be remade, and that history can help us imagine different futures.

What does it mean to move to a country, by force or willingly, and then have to navigate a new system, a hundred new systems that make up your new life? Or what might it mean to be born in Aotearoa New Zealand or for your family to have been here for multiple generations and yet to be made to feel forever that you do not belong? Do systems have a place in promoting wellbeing and belonging? What might it mean to work in health care or social services with people and communities that are culturally different from your own? This chapter invites you to go beyond thinking about skills and competencies for working with difference or about models of diversity and to instead zoom out and think about how bigger social and political contexts impact on care. How does the media, your family, politicians and others shape how you treat others? The concept of cultural safety invites practitioners to engage in critical and reflective processes to understand these contexts and histories. It is more likely that if we do so, we might transform the unequal societal power relations that impact on the life chances and health outcomes of others.

The Introduction discusses why and how the Imperial Arsenal was central to the Ottoman reform efforts, highlighting its distinctive characteristics for analyzing the relationality of reform policies with modern capitalism. I offer a conceptual discussion of Ottoman Reform, understanding it as integral to the making of modernity in the global context of state formation and industrialization, and discussions on capitalism and modernity in dialogue with Ottoman and global historiographies of the long nineteenth century. It shows how class, migration, and coercion can be used as conceptual tools to bring new questions and insights into Ottoman modernization processes. It evaluates studies on modernity and Ottoman modernization, social and labor history, migration, (im)mobilities, and the history of the Ottoman navy and shipbuilding. The Introduction concludes with a methodological discussion on adopting the perspective of production relations and on the possibilities and challenges of studying the microhistory of a state worksite and elucidates how the book approached official documents and policies while investigating the working-class agency in the history of Ottoman Reform.

The premise of this volume is that borders are shifting, and that as borders shift, rights and democratic legitimacy ought to shift with them. For good reasons, the focus of this discussion is on sovereign states and their borders. However, sovereign borders do not exhaust the types of boundaries that shape and circumscribe human freedom. In this chapter, the focus is on the private geographies that shape our lives. These private geographies – and here special economic zones are discussed – are both embedded in the sovereign states system and also help to consolidate its structure. Private geographies, which are characterized by private sources of capital and property-ownership, rely on public actors and institutions to thrive. Private economic enclaves also help funnel capital and trade rights around restrictive sovereign borders. These private geographies are of special interest because they reveal how states and capital cooperate in monopolizing land and carving up the earth, acting in ways that consolidate each other’s power. Therefore, private borders and public properties call into question the public–private divide and reveal how power over land is determined in the global age, often in ways that evade democratic control.

This chapter offers concluding reflections, taking readers through three intersecting vectors that run through the book. The first establishes how the segmented labour markets of the region are embedded within global structures and processes, which in turn shape domestic and regional structures and the frames through which social relations and regulations unfold. The second vector suggests three historical junctures as especially important in shaping labour trajectories in the region: (1) the partial incorporation of Omani labour and transnational Asian labouring classes into global capitalism through colonial development; (2) the wider integration of Gulf economies and labour markets into global capitalism through the expansion of the oil industry; and (3) the increasing embeddedness of the region in neoliberal capitalism. Finally, the third vector explains the liberalising and nationalising dialectic in labour governance The heterodox approach of the book offers a direction for future scholarship on the GPE of labour, demonstrating both how empirically-grounded national and regional case studies can highlight and explain global patterns, as well as how the present and future of work in local spaces are entangled within the trajectories of global capitalist development.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

Already during the period between the two Opium Wars, China and its vast potential market had become a key site for legal and administrative innovations by Western diplomats, missionaries, and traders. The Qing conception of guoti 國體 or “state form/stateliness,” in particular, was creatively redeployed in an effort to articulate a diplomatic compromise during key meetings at Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing between 1858 and 1860, when a new multilateral international law regime for China was crafted by the invading Western powers.

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state.That was their great miscalculation.The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations.As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s.At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation.Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.

Chapter 8 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of early-modern global mercantile capitalism. It shows how imperial states and merchants employed various “spatial fixes” based in cities and their growing plantation hinterlands to overcome obstacles to the growing project of seizing the world’s wealth through land conquests, the enslavement of American and African laborers, and the militarization of trade in the Indian Ocean. Global finance, built upon rich silver mining cities in Spanish America, Chinese imperial tax policies, urban ports, banks, stock markets, joint stock companies, insurance, and the increasing value of urban real estate allowed states and merchants to pool the capital needed for trade across World Oceanic distances. A truly planetary Urban Planet came into being as these new city-enabled circuits of commerce enveloped the Pacific Ocean for the first time after the inauguration of the Acapulco–Manila galleon trade in 1571.

The front matter to “Cities of the World Ocean,” the second of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Plane, recounts the founding of Villa Navidad (“Christmas City”), the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Taino people, using wooden planks salvaged from the shipwrecked Santa Maria. The story serves to introduce the importance of humanity’s use of solar energy delivered by the winds and currents of the World Ocean to dramatically expand and merge all of Earth’s urban worlds into Earthopolis, a truly planetary Urban Planet for the first time. This development, a hinge between pre-modern and modern eras, rested on state violence delivered worldwide against city walls by gunpowder cannon; on the theft of massive amounts of land, labor, and wealth involved in the birth of global capitalism; and on the globalization of religious and secular knowledges and consumer culture that had impacts on the natural environment worldwide, including the World Ocean itself.

In the epoch of global capitalism, writers must be hypervigilant to the usage of their medium of choice –the written, printed word – readily aware of the proliferation of the grapheme and the saturation of visual signage in the media environment. Product advertisements that once depended on the enlarged-type appeal of slogans invariably stating the brand name have given way to an iconic Esperanto, equally legible to anyone around the globe. As a literary author, Don DeLillo recognizes that the image in our visual culture has become the dominant medium of our time. Despite this displacement of the writer from a central position in mass culture, DeLillo’s novels, such as White Noise, Mao II, and Underworld offer considerations as to how the post-war author might evade absorption by visual media and global capitalism, and whether it is possible to maintain a resistant, if marginalized, position in society.