More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

The conclusion surveys the core interventions of the book: its conceptual and methodological work to open new pathways in African intellectual history beyond decolonisation through postcolonial civil wars to the present, among working-class migrants and war-displaced people, within the multiple discursive worlds (at home, in Sudan, and globally) accessible to them. This chapter challenges atheoretical interpretations of southern and South Sudanese politics, reasserting the place of political imagination in this history and demanding close engagement with everyday conversations over political ethnicity, wealth, class, and power. The chapter ends with a reflection based on conversations over 2015–23 with many of the same activists, teachers, and writers in South Sudan, on opportunities lost, and on continuing projects of political creativity today. As a history in the aftermath, the project was built during a time of a loss of optimism and political freedom, and is currently a history of possibilities lost.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

The final published debate in which Neurath participated was with Horace Kallen, founding member of the New School in New York. This discussion with manifold cultural dimensions was a fitting swansong for Neurath, summarizing key themes of his thought and highlighting essential issues of his complex and contentious legacy. Kallen suspected Neurath’s drive for ‘Unity of Science’ as harbouring the danger of totalitarianism, but Neurath defended the pluralism of his approach while accepting Kallen’s proposed term of ‘orchestration’ instead of ‘unity’ for the sciences. Neurath felt rather neglected for his scholarly achievements at the end of his life, but these now become increasingly more relevant.

“Militant Neoclassicism” argues that W. E. B. Du Bois marshaled post-Kantian aesthetics against the anthropological categories posited by Enlightenment theorists. The chapter departs from the traditional interpretation of Du Bois as a champion of integration, which relies heavily on The Souls of Black Folk at the expense of Du Bois’s later Marxism. This interpretation downplays his controversial advocacy for the self-segregation of African-American communities, which sought to capitalize on intra-group solidarity in order to rectify class conflict. The chapter argues that these collectives, spheres of free action carved out from predominately white social structures, evince the aesthetic autonomy theorized by Friedrich Schiller, whom Du Bois admired and quotes in Souls. Attending to aesthetic autonomy also reveals new connections between Du Bois and cultural anthropology, especially the work of Ruth Benedict, who advanced aesthetic arguments about anthropological communities that distinguished themselves from a dominant social milieu.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.

Chapter 2 explores the figure of the white mercenary in the context of decolonization by analysing the outcome of the Luanda trial and the response of the UK government to the indictment of its nationals in Angola. This is essential to highlight the fundamental distinction between these foreign fighters and the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War: fighting for personal profit as opposed to fighting for a noble cause, respectively. However, Western soldiers of fortune seem to be moved by certain political ideals: namely, to avoid a communist takeover of the African continent. The figure of the adventurer encountered in the interwar period reappears here, illustrating the ambivalent passions underlying attempts to ban or endorse mercenarism. The chapter ends with an analysis of the travaux of Art. 47 of API which frames the eventual exclusion of mercenaries from prisoner of war status in international armed conflicts.

This chapter contrasts the approach to nature taken by Alexander von Humboldt and Hegel. In particular, it focuses upon the notion of Naturphilosophie and how it is developed in the work of both thinkers. It gives details from the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling in order to provide historical context to the discussion. To clarify some of the contrasts between Humboldt’s and Hegel’s approaches to nature, the chapter focuses upon their approaches to the landscape and people of America. The fate of natural beauty in the work of both thinkers is highlighted. It argues, by reference to Adorno’s critique of Hegel, that while Humboldt gives natural beauty autonomy by not limiting it to what the subject contributes to it, Hegel’s view of nature is as repressed natural beauty, eclipsing it with human reason and human subjectivity. Ultimately, Humboldt’s more empirical approach, balanced with a recognition of the role of freedom, allows nature to come into clearer focus than it does in Hegel’s work. Hegel’s more abstract, speculative approach keeps nature too far from the empirical realm. In the case of our understanding of nature, Hegel’s clean hands become a problem, resulting in a Naturphilosophie that does not bring us close enough to nature or its beauties.

The main question this chapter asks and attempts to answer is: What is the principal difference between animal life and human spirit, as Hegel construes it at the end of his Philosophy of Nature? More specifically, in what way are non-human animal organisms “inadequate” or “imperfect” and in what way, correspondingly, are human beings the “perfect” animal? Answering this question requires getting clear on the different ways in which non-human and human animals bear their respective natures, the connection between reproduction and the manner in which non-human animals relate to their genus, and the role of biological death within that process of reproduction. To the extent that Hegel commentators have dealt with the relation between animal life and human spirit, they have been predominantly concerned in recent years with Hegel’s Anthropology. The end of the Philosophy of Nature has, by contrast, been relatively neglected. On the occasions when it has been discussed, the latter text has tended to be the object of passing paraphrase rather than the focus of an attempt at philosophical comprehension. This chapter contributes to remedying this scholarly situation.

This chapter explores how enslaved people developed legal know-how about Castilian laws of slavery and freedom, and shared and exchanged such information with others. In particular, the chapter focuses on the history of enslaved Black people’s determination to raise capital or credit to purchase their liberty from their enslavers. The chapter explores how enslaved Black men and women often plotted their paths to liberty through economic decisions by focusing on the lives of enslaved Black people who resided in the towns along the Camino Real in New Spain between Veracruz and Mexico City during a time of economic boom in the late sixteenth century. Notarial records that cataloged the self-purchase and liberation of enslaved people in port towns of the Spanish Atlantic often reveal how enslaved Black people developed social ties and capital among kin, friends, and charitable residents, and consorted with people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who lived or passed through the places where they resided. These records index a history of conversations about strategies to obtain liberty among enslaved Black people and relationships across different socioeconomic spheres that allowed for some enslaved people to access precious credit to pay for their liberty.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Felipa de la Cruz penned two letters to her freed husband who had moved from Sevilla to Veracruz in New Spain. These letters reveal extended discussions of Cruz’s commitment to securing liberty for herself and their children, as she reminded her husband not to forget her desire for freedom. Felipa de la Cruz’s letters hold immense historical value as they are among the earliest known letters penned by an enslaved Black woman in the Atlantic world that have survived in a historical archive. Reading the private correspondence between Felipa de la Cruz and her absent husband also reveals the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in an urban environment. The Coda presents these two letters transcribed in Spanish as well as in English translation. The Coda also includes a map of the social ties of a generation of free and liberated Black Sevillians who were Cruz’s contemporaries in the late sixteenth century (approximately 1569–1626). The map and extended key allow readers to trace some of Felipa de la Cruz’s Black neighbors who also had ties with the Spanish Americas, and their respective socioeconomic ties across the city.

Let us start with Sartre, whose creative appropriation of Being and Time’s phenomenology of death came to prominence first – in 1946’s Being and Nothingness – and probably remains the most widely known in its own right. If Sartre’s vision of existential death is rarely recognized as his alternative to Heidegger’s account, that is both because what Being and Time means by death is not widely understood and because Sartre’s alternative represents the furthest departure from Heidegger’s own view. In general, Sartre’s adoption of a subject/object dualism leads him to pervasively re-Cartesianize Being and Time, as if he were completely oblivious to Heidegger’s overarching efforts to undermine Cartesian dualism. (This obliviousness is already clear from Sartre’s oft-quoted but nonetheless false claim that the “existentialism” he shares with Heidegger can be defined by their shared insistence “that subjectivity must be the starting point.”) Sartre’s phenomenology of the objectifying “look of the other” transforms Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death so dramatically that Sartre can easily appear to be describing a different phenomenon altogether. Read carefully, however, it becomes clear that Sartre’s account of the “the look” allows him to articulate his own version of an existential phenomenon in which I experience “the death of my possibilities” – even though “I am my possibilities” – and yet I live through that experience to tell the tale phenomenologically.

In this penultimate chapter, we take up the philosophical question of whether immortality is truly desirable, seeking to establish an important difference between existing for a finite and for an infinite stretch of time by introducing the following important consideration. If it remains possible for an event to occur, then even an extremely unlikely event is certain to occur, given infinite time. I shall suggest that this consideration leads to insuperable problems with the most popular scenarios currently being envisioned for achieving immortality by techno-scientific means. These problems, moreover, motivate us to think more deeply about death and thereby rethink the requirements of a genuinely meaningful human life. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and other existential thinkers, I suggest that human beings’ most abiding sources of meaningfulness come not from endlessly repeating certain profound experiences (which sometimes does wear out their appeal) but, instead, from our struggle to stay true to and so continue to creatively and responsibly disclose what such momentous events, often rare and singular, only partly reveal to us in the first place, as we often come to realize only in retrospect – much as Heidegger came only retrospectively to recognize and then spend his life creatively disclosing the seemingly inexhaustible ontological riches of that ambiguous “nothing” Being and Time first glimpsed in the momentous experience of existential death, but in a way that Heidegger only partly understood at that time.

Liberated and free-born people understood that generating paperwork to record commercial transactions could protect and assure their freedom in the Spanish empire. The chapter explores this know-how through the life of Ana Gómez, a free Black woman who accumulated significant capital over the course of her lifetime and who documented her economic ties as a means of practicing and protecting her freedom. Gómez carefully documented her various economic ties across the Atlantic through paperwork, and astutely measured her trust and social capital with associates when determining whether to record a commercial transaction in writing, or whether to rely on verbal agreements, which she usually only allowed for her credit lines to Black neighbors. The chapter studies how Black women in the late sixteenth-century Caribbean practiced freedom through their economic decisions and protected their freedom through their engagement in legal cultures of paperwork to document their extensive economic, commercial, and social ties.