This Introduction provides a condensed telling of five hundred years of Romani history within an Atlantic context. It illustrates that Romani people have been part of the modern Atlantic world and that the Atlantic world has shaped the Romani diaspora and Romani people’s sense of who they are. Stories of Atlantic circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges show how Romani people and ideas held about them, transcended empires, nations and borders. The Introduction specifically contextualizes three moments of visibility. During the early modern era, Romani people experienced (often forced) population movements as part of imperial expansions and prompted the translation of European antigypsyism in the context of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, Indigenous genocides and emerging racial thought. At the turn of the twentieth century, nationalistic immigration controls provoked a heightened recognition of Romani people that impacted their experiences, forms of sociability and strategies of mobility. After World War II, as transnational migrants and refugees, they garnered new attention and built diasporic communities in the face of novel and changing international circumstances. Adding Romani people to Atlantic history allows us to think differently about the Atlantic world and transforms our understanding of Romani lived experiences.

For a group of Spanish Gitano families, who now refer to themselves as American Gitanos, the reproduction of a cosmopolitan habitus has a social and historical basis. Transnational mobility is a key aspect of identity, whereby cosmopolitanism is the translation of internationality as an emic discourse. The migration of this network of families in the late 1950s provides the starting point for an analysis of the cultural mechanisms of this new cultural style and self-identification. The interface of cosmopolitanism, transnational migration and social mobility is shown through the protagonists’ narratives about migratory trajectories and their implantation in America.

This chapter presents relationships between processes of both internal and international migration as a signature feature of Los Angeles literature. Through works by Facundo Bernal, Carlos Bulosan, Laila Lalami, and Nayomi Munaweera, Manizza Roszak reflects upon LA’s status a node of global migration. In the works of John Fante, Walter Mosley, Michele Serros, Charles Yu, Percival Everett, and Tommy Pico, meanwhile, questions of transnationality still surface, but are recontextualized by processes intranational migration both historical and contemporary – reflecting LA’s longstanding image as a destination of promise and opportunity. When racial or ethnic marginality inflects experience of the city, however, hopes for renewal and self-remaking rapidly turn to disappointment and frustration. Nevertheless, inter-diasporic solidarities remain.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

This chapter provides a snapshot of Rwanda’s evolving political settlement and economic development trajectory. The chapter begins by highlighting significant structural vulnerabilities that shaped Rwanda’s domestic politics historically, including ethnicity-based inequalities and political contestation, historical divisions associated with the royal family and aristocracy, refugee issues, inadequate employment opportunities and regional inequalities. It then highlights the rapid growth that took place in Rwanda over the last three decades, which has also been accompanied by significant export diversification. It then provides a brief political settlement analysis of present-day Rwanda, highlighting how development is being contested transnationally, pointing to the key vulnerabilities characterising its hub-based strategy. In particular, it describes how increased elite vulnerability has meant that the government has been reluctant to support domestic capital. As a result, the Rwandan government has failed to develop effective state–business relations aimed at achieving structural transformation.

This chapter maps aesthetic modernism across Europe as a whole, showing its key generational clusters in their multiple transnational circuits of influence and exchange. It focuses on the major literary modernists and the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. It finds coherence in a range of shared thematics: outsiderliness; journeying; formal innovation; abandonment of narrative causality and linear time; estrangement and alienation; subjectivity and the unconscious; assertive and experimental sexualities. The gendered dynamics of insistent masculinity and women’s effacement again reappears. The collective generational esprit of the aesthetic modernists is carefully demonstrated via the various regional circuits: Scandinavian; northwest European; Balkan; Soviet-centered; German-speaking central-European. Cinematic modernism was a particular instance, emanating from Moscow across Berlin to Paris. Using Piscator and Brecht within a larger argument about Weimar Berlin, the chapter concludes by identifying a distinctive left modernism.

This chapter explores organizational configuration—how work is structured through task division, coordination, authority, and hierarchy. It introduces four configurations: Simple (centralized, small firms), Functional (grouped by specialization, efficient but less adaptive), Divisional (semi-independent units by product or region, flexible but may duplicate efforts), and Matrix (combines functional and divisional, supports adaptability but complex to manage). Firms may also use contract-based or digital configurations to enhance responsiveness. The Law of Requisite Variety suggests that organizational complexity must match environmental complexity. Misfits between configuration and external demands can cause inefficiencies, poor coordination, and performance loss. Aligning structure with strategy and environment is essential for long-term success

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter explores the ‘forgetting’ of the region as a unique form of public amnesia and the implications of this for conflict transformation. While conflict is often understood on multiple levels, including its regional dimension, peacebuilding and memory work are rarely put in conversation at this level. The chapter explores regional dimensions of memory and argues that these open up a novel and analytically productive lens on the nature and legacy of cross-border conflict and can bolster peacebuilding approaches. Taking the key case study of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and specifically the regionalising dimensions of the Rwandan genocide, the chapter investigates the impact of two very different regional dimensions of memory on social cohesion. First, it considers the more intuitive ways in which grievances that extend across borders and fractured regional memories continue to fuel conflict. Second, and pushing beyond this, it considers the ways in which the returning diaspora deploys memory born in the wider region in attempts at nation-building. The chapter thus deploys a dynamic approach to memory, exploring mobile memories and the ways in which regional experiences are carried and deployed back in a national context. Overall, it urges us to extend the regional lens beyond the study of the roots of conflict and operational action to the study of post-conflict peacebuilding and commemoration.

In this chapter, the book is introduced by interrogating how a political community is constructed and with what membership boundaries, especially when it lies across borders, or at another level than the nation-state. I argue that the political belonging found at the local level and based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ – whereby the individual is bound to a particular community and has access to a bundle of rights by virtue of the ‘first-comer’ or ‘early-comer rule’– informs and contributes to the making of other types of political belonging at different levels.

The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.