The Conclusion, The Ghosts of the Present, bucks the trend of earlier chapters by focusing on only one theoretical framework – historical memory. It positions the exploration of the connected history of China and the Philippines as a means to dispel the ghosts of the present.

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

During Guatemala’s internal armed conflict (1960–1996), most local leaders in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, San Marcos, were “disappeared.” When, between 1995 and 1998, the church-led Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REHMI) was collecting testimonies from victims of the armed conflict, no one agreed to speak up. It is only since 2014, in the midst of growing local opposition to large-scale mining, that relatives of the “disappeared” have begun to narrate their experiences as victims of violence. In this chapter, I will examine how the recent “recovery” of historical memories of the brutal repression of local activism did not defeat but instead revitalized radical hope for a “just Guatemala” and in the process produced new conceptualizations of victimization and perpetration. How has public truth-telling contributed to this peculiar form of engagement? Despite a brutally crushed revolution, a failed democratic transition, and growing state-level corruption, anti-mining activists in San Miguel maintain faith in regaining the control of their lands and lives through their involvement in testimonial practices, formal politics, and legal action.

In this chapter we argue that a predominant concern in many contemporary European crime novels is the consolidation of a democratic culture that protects the rights of citizens and upholds the rule of law. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts from across the continent, we analyse this overall ambition via three of its major manifestations: democratization as seen most clearly in post-dictatorial transitional societies, the treatment of immigrants as an indicator of inclusiveness and social equality and the honest discussion of the national past as the foundation for a healthy democratic culture. What these three themes have in common is that they embody our greatest social aspirations while at the same time being vulnerable to horrific criminal aberrations, which is why crime fiction is a particularly apt medium for analysing and understanding them. This duality forms the basis of one of the master narratives of European crime fiction: the story of how the unsettling and often dangerous process of uncovering crime is the precondition for a more perfect democratic society.

In this essay, I chart a new origin story to counter popular understandings of the triumphalist, celebratory, northern- and abolitionist-centered origins of American animal welfare by providing underexplored historical context for the proslavery as well as antislavery origins of humane sentiment. I argue that humane carceral logics, or the rationale that surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration to protect animals through the legal system justified as well as pacified the means, ultimately produced coercive and discriminatory tools that naturalized white reformers’ heightened scrutiny of communities of color. I explore how white supremacy contributed to the formation of humane carceral logics by providing a historical study of carceral trends and the ways in which humane sentiment produced racial knowledge.

Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America alongside Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy reveals striking similarities and differences in how the two authors treat the entanglement of indigenous, black, and white histories from seventeenth-century America to the present. Both texts use vivid literary imagery to make concrete some of the intersectional dilemmas of race and gender. In Tocqueville’s case, the purpose is to instruct; in Morrison’s, however, it is to reinhabit the lives of those previously overlooked. Notwithstanding the similarity of their subject matter, the two texts are strikingly different insofar as Tocqueville’s presentation gives no room for the voices and perspectives of the victims of injustice. Nor does his fatalistic narrative suggest the possibility of concrete alternatives to these histories. Taken together, these two works raise broader questions about the sufficiency of fiction as a way of identifying and resolving dilemmas of race and exclusion in American society. In contrast to the inadequacy of Tocqueville’s “new science of politics,” Morrison seeks to project through her fiction a new world that points her readers toward novel ways of conceiving of freedom.

This chapter breaks with the typical detachment of chroniclers of Russian politics from the social wavelengths that in so many ways defy conventional periodization. Stalin may have proclaimed a classless society, and inconvenient memories were “frozen” out of discourse, yet social distinctions continued to be cognitively programmed among future generations in families and in the realm of the professional, educational, and social institutions to which they were exposed. First, I discuss theorizing on historical memory. This helps us distinguish between articulated injunctions and situational staging on the one hand and unarticulated silences on the other, as expressed in choices, symbols, or artifacts. Next, I present survey results, which corroborate not only hypothesized covariance between educated estate ancestry and white-collar occupations but, intriguingly, awareness of the placement of respondents’ forbears in the imperial estate structure. In the remaining sections, I make sense of these patterns by discussing our protagonists’ journey of ancestral reconstruction; tapping into reminiscences of private spaces and public-oriented practices within them; exploring familial injunctions and artifacts that create mental cartographies and ties structuring exclusion and belonging; and, finally, discerning the descendants’ instrumentalizations of ancestry to actively delineate their place in post-communist Russian society.

This chapter explores the diverse ways in which coins serve as ‘monuments in miniature’, commemorating a wide variety of aspects of Roman public life.The first section uses two case studies to exemplify the different types of interactions of individuals, families, and the state seen through the coins.The first looks at the coinage produced over three generations by the Marcii Philippi; the second looks at the diversity of commemorative strategies used within the divisive years 56-55 BCE.The second section looks at how the Romans conceived of their empire as proof of divine favor.This type of ideology is evident in their foundation legends, how Rome is personified, the importance of priesthoods to individual and family status, and how military victories are themselves the subject of religious thanksgiving.

This chapter examines the construction and representation of borders in China under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). It considers the spatial dimensions of the Mongol empire, which was the Ming dynasty’s immediate predecessor. It examines the Ming court’s efforts to conquer or coopt Mongol power-holders and their territories, its plans to establish lasting control over those regions and their peoples, and its discursive and administrative strategies to describe and regulate issues of diversity and distance. The chapter reviews changes in the Ming dynasty’s geopolitical engagement in eastern Eurasia, tracing the dynasty’s loss of territory and influence along the northern and western borders and simultaneously a steady expansion of state institutions into the southwestern frontier. The essay concludes with developments during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including responses to early Western European agents of empire in East Asia and, more broadly, the expansion of Chinese interest into maritime Asia.

The conclusion illustrates the uneven and nonlinear nature of Guatemalan nation-state expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the important role played by Q’eqchi’ patriarchs, the legacies of colonialism, and the centrality of race and time to political struggles. The Conclusion also illustrates how the historical debris of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories shaped Guatemala’s post-1954 descent into civil war. It shows the longer historical genealogy of the Guatemalan military’s doctrine that Mayas were dangerous because they were “alien to modernity” and how the legacies of coerced labor and planter sovereignty reemerged with new meaning and contours during the scorched-earth campaign.

By the time that World War II reached full force, Altaverapacence anti-imperialist nationalisms found further expression in anti-fascism, helping to overthrow Ubico and inaugurate Guatemala’s famed “ten years of spring.” This final chapter illustrates how Guatemala’s entrance into World War II, the nationalization of German properties, and the internment of German citizens ruptured power relations both regionally and nationally, while also generating expectations for land redistribution among rural workers and peasants. Alta Verapaz thus reveals how Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform was shaped by the events of World War II. Struggles over Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform condensed nineteenth-century histories of landownership and use, violent dispossessions, coerced labor, and disinheritance into bureaucratic struggles over what counted as unproductive and productive land use.

This chapter sketches Jeddah’s transformation from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Old Jeddah transformed from a slowly expanding town centre to an urban slum. Only the registration as a World Heritage Site in 2014 reversed this trend. Today, trade and pilgrimage are still important for Jeddah’s economy. However, most of the trade passes through a large container port in Southern Jeddah, and pilgrims are ferried directly from a special terminal at Jeddah’s international airport to Mecca. They no longer pass through the city and have only recently been invited back as tourists. The renewed interest in the old city as a cultural heritage site has made it central to local and Saudi Arabian contests over identity. While ‘strangers’ no longer can integrate easily, the cosmopolitan heritage is celebrated. At the same time, inhabitants of former suburbs also lay claim to the urban history. The ongoing debate about the historical identity of old Jeddah thus reflects wider debates within Saudi Arabian society.

The Williams’ gang slaves illustrate the long history of wrongful convictions of defendants of color in US courtrooms as well as the compatibility of slavery with incarceration. Still, it was not until the demise of slavery as an institution that black and brown people became a majority of those incarcerated. That trend continues to the present. The latest innovation in the long history of racism and the carceral state is the emergence of private, for–profit prisons and the prison–industrial complex. Much like the domestic slave trade of another time, captives of color are redistributed to locations where their labor is in highest demand for the profits of others. But already by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical memory of the internal slave trade was growing dim, the rich history of slavery in the very capital of the United States forgotten.

Chapter Two explores how court officials tried to come to terms with Zhu Di’s deep engagement with the steppe and its leaders. Zhu Di’s five steppe campaigns were more than military conflicts. Zhu Di visited the sites – sometimes ruins – of former Yuan palaces and lodges. He offered commentary on the Yuan ruling house, which accentuated his status as successor to the Great Yuan and as a ruler uniquely qualified to pass judgment on fellow sovereigns. Zhu Di’s actions challenged civil officials in many ways. They had to praise a sovereign who openly flouted the founder’s precedents. They celebrated the emperor’s newest subjects, men who drank blood, consumed raw liver, and exulted in physical strength. Court ministers’ writings depicted a style of rulership obviously connected to men from afar in ways that simultaneously satisfied their sovereign’s demands and minimized dangers to the polity and to themselves.

Using the unusually rich historical sources generated by the Tumu crisis, Chapter Four offers a reconstruction of Ming rulership in east Eurasia in the mid-fifteenth century. Chapter Four demonstrated that the fifteenth century’s first half saw a multigenerational, multifaceted competition among Mongol, Oirat, and Ming ruling elites to turn the Chinggisid legacy to their advantage. Each developed a genealogy or pedigree of rulership, which it advertised to its neighbors. The best-documented example, that of the Ming dynastic house, trumpeted the superior attributes of the rulership of Zhu Yuanzhang and his descendants. Just as emphatically, the Ming throne denied the qualifications of rival lords such as Toqto’a-Buqa and Esen. The Ming ruling family and its close supporters tried to persuade several audiences, including Jurchen chieftains, the Choson throne, and Oirat and Mongol leaders, of its historical vision of the past and the present.

Chapter Three is a group biography of Mongols in the early Ming throne’s service. Zhu Di and his advisers depicted Esen-Tügel’s decision to join the Ming dynasty in 1423 as a submission, which proved Zhu Di’s superior attributes of rulership. The emperor’s martial prowess, munificence, and ability to recognize men of outstanding ability regardless of their origin won the allegiance and service of a proven Mongol warrior and leader. As was often the case, this dramatic moment – an oath of personal fealty – commanded chroniclers’ attention, but the bigger story had yet to unfold. Imperial patronage continued for much of the remainder of the fifteenth century. It took material form in housing, wages, and personal gifts. It also came in the guise of tax exemptions, prestigious titles and posts, opportunities for advancement, and the throne’s conspicuous protection. Successive emperors displayed their favor through material, financial, political, and honorific means. Such patronage extended to hundreds of Mongolian men, their families, and their descendants for decades and decades. Men from afar embraced this face of rulership. At the same time, it was a pattern of behavior that many civil officials rejected, in part because they felt that such generosity came at their expense.