This chapter introduces the volume by offering a reflection on the notion of transition within and across Latin American literary production from 1492 to 1800. This period is defined by a series of transitions as, motivated by personal ambitions or brought by force, Europeans and later Africans and Asians crossed oceans to inhabit the already inhabited lands of the Indies. Native societies and the emergent European colonial societies were transformed by these interactions and the processes that underlay them. This introductory essay explores the broad historical context for this period of transition as it was registered on local and global scales. The book is organized around six thematic areas, which in turn are introduced.

In Chapter 4, the book turns to the involvement of foreign bankers and financiers in Chinese railway development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the chapter focusses on the loan negotiations for the financing of the railway connecting Tianjin in northern China and Pukou in China’s south between 1898 and 1910. These loan negotiations were mainly undertaken by representatives of German and British financial groups in China and Chinese officials. By exploring the interaction between these foreign and Chinese negotiators, the chapter highlights the important role the ’contact zone’ and transnational networks played on the Chinese frontier in the foreign financing of Chinese railways. The chapter also shows how Chinese negotiators exhibited substantial agency within such transnational networks and were able to win very favourable loan terms. More generally, the chapter shows how these transnational financial networks reflected the development of financial globalization during the early twentieth century, connecting local officials in China with markets and individual investors in Europe.

Establishing a framework for this book, the introduction examines the themes of encounters, space and contact zones during the First World War. Arguing that colonial experience cannot be understood without attention to spaces beyond the battlefield, I introduce the reader to the contact zones expored in the chapters. I reflect on the conceptsand methodology adopted, including the importance of intimacy.

Chapter 13 simultaneously rehabilitates and provincialises British imperialism. Rehabilitating the dark side of empire counters the Eurocentric conception of the ‘benign British civilizing mission’ while provincializing empire counters Eurofetishism's and Indian nationalism’s reification of European hyper-agency and power and their side-lining of Indian and Asian agency. Overall, it focusses on the combination of Western and non-Western agency in the making of the modern capitalist second global economy (SGE). It begins by problematizing the Eurofetishist/Indian nationalist thesis concerning the imperial de-industrialization of India's (as well as China's) cotton industry, arguing that Indian and Chinese peasants retained considerable agency and maintained the handicraft sector throughout the nineteenth- and well into the twentieth-century. The second and third sections highlight the ‘multicultural contact zone’ wherein the entangled agencies of Europeans and Asians converged to produce the SGE after about 1850. I highlight the agential roles of the Parsis, Kachchhis, Gujaratis, Omanis and Chinese and, albeit more briefly, the Nattukottai Chettiars, Sindworkies, Vāniyās, Multānīs and Shīkārpūris, as they interacted either relatively autonomously or with the British. The final section focuses on the symbiotic convergence of the Asian transcontinental bazaar with the European capitalist world-economy in the making of the SGE.

The number of pupils for whom English is an additional language (EAL) has grown steadily over the past twenty years, increasing by around 300 per cent in England since 1997 (Department for Education, 2018a; NALDIC, 2018a). This linear progression, however, masks wide disparities between groups of pupils and their experiences of education. The large majority are second- or third-generation British citizens born into multilingual homes (Strand and Demie, 2006; Strand, Malmberg and Hall, 2015). English is often their strongest language, so while officially classed as ‘EAL’, it may be more helpful to describe them as ‘multiliterate’ (New London Group, 1996; Datta, 2007) or ‘advanced bilingual learners’ (Conteh, 2012, pp. 12–14), as their different languages play distinct roles in their lives. Others will be new to the United Kingdom, perhaps also new to English and even to formal schooling, but with a set of contextually specific ‘negotiation strategies and a repertoire of codes’ (García, 2007, p. xiii) developed in different settings over time. These learners may have migrated with the intention of settling in the United Kingdom; they may be ‘sojourners’ whose parents are working or studying here for a period of time; or they may ‘transmigrate’, meaning that this is part of a longer migration or that they are regularly resident in a number of countries. Many ‘EAL pupils’ are therefore highly mobile, and such mobile learners are the focus of this chapter.