This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter explores how free-born and liberated Black people in the Spanish Americas invested significant resources to defend and expand the meanings of Black freedom and political belonging in the Spanish empire. In particular, when facing repressive policies introduced by local or municipal authorities or disturbances of their freedom enacted by private individuals, free born and liberated people often deftly negotiated various legal jurisdictions and expended social and political capital to carefully craft petitions for royal justice and grace. The chapter traces the development of infrastructures of Black political knowledge, and how people and communities learned about events and political discourses in faraway places and exchanged ideas and news in their daily lives that they later might deploy in their own petitions. With a focus on the cities of Sevilla and Mexico City, the chapter traces a history of infrastructures of Black political knowledge through the activities of Black religious confraternities, and the significance of Black petitioning to speculate about the possible moments of fellowship and exchange between Black petitioners from different cities in the Spanish empire, and the impact of any such exchanges on Black political ideas about freedom in this period.

This chapter traces how formerly enslaved Black men and women partook in a legal culture of freedom papers in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire. After enduring lifetimes of enslavement and precarious and lengthy routes to obtain their precious liberty, formerly enslaved Black people often took careful measures to document and protect their hard-won freedom by engaging in the paper-based bureaucracy that underpinned the central tenets of power and justice in the Spanish empire. This often involved investing in the services of notaries to duplicate freedom papers or requesting that various royal and ecclesiastical authorities issue confirmatory paperwork to document their freedom. Their participation in this legal culture of freedom papers reveals how people from the lowest socioeconomic echelons of colonial society measured and valued paperwork – even if they could not read or write – and invested resources to produce and safeguard an array of legal documents to protect their status.

This chapter explores the connection between informality, migration, and precarity and how urban villages are formed in China. It discusses the contribution of the book and the fieldwork methods and introduces the readers to the structure of the book.

Clare Finburgh Delijani’s chapter accounts for a significant and growing strain of theatre that stages the central role played by migration and transnational, mobile identities not just in France but also across the world. Today around 30 per cent of France’s population comprises either migrants from its former colonies or their postmigrant descendants, demonstrating the key significance of migration to French society and culture. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘relation identity’, which expresses ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures’, Finburgh Delijani demonstrates how the exiles, immigrants and refugees featuring in the plays she examines represent the postcolonial diversity of the French nation. With close analysis of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Le Retour au desert (Return to the Desert, 1988), Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (Scorched, 2003) and Estelle Savasta’s Traversée (Going Through, 2019), Finburgh Delijani exposes how characters illustrate the uprooting of belonging, legitimacy and identity by the often violent severance of migration and exile. However, the trauma that characters suffer – which cannot be underestimated – is counterbalanced by the relational, transnational and cosmopolitan citizens they are able to become.

While Jacques Roumain’s classic novel Gouverneurs de la rosée foregrounds the possibility and necessity of return to Haiti, in many other literary versions of Haitian exile such a reconnection is never achieved. The returning wanderer can never just pick up where they left off, and the exile is definitive, unending. The chapter argues that exile for Haitian authors of the twentieth century is not merely a question of space or place; it has temporal dimensions that can compound the sense of separation or loss. Following a consideration of nineteenth-century exile-related poems, the chapter engages with some of the most prominent essayists, poets, and novelists whose works serve as chronicles of the multi-generational experiences of separation from Haiti before, during, and after the Duvalier dictatorships. As the examples show, experiences of exile vary widely and are determined by many factors, including personal circumstance, the place and conditions of exile, changing realities in the homeland, and evolving notions of exile itself, and of the ways in which it is written by successive generations of authors.

Chapter 4 focuses on labor migration from Central Asia to Russia as the first exclusionary migration cycle. Growing migration after 2000 made Russia one of the world’s major migrant-receiving states. The chapter explains why Putin retained a visa-free regime with the much poorer former Soviet states of CA, allowing millions of their citizens free entry to Russia, where most stayed and worked with undocumented status. As the numbers of the ethnically distant Muslim migrants rose, welfare nationalist grievances emerged in the cities and regions where migrants were concentrated. Citing public opinion surveys, speeches by mayors and governors, election and party platforms, and mass media, the chapter shows how politicians framed and used welfare nationalist discourses to placate citizens and scapegoat migrants for declines in popular welfare. It highlights the role of sub-national officials in mobilizing anti-immigrant politics and channeling pressures for exclusionary policies to Putin. These pressures produced legislative and normative changes that progressively excluded migrant families from social sectors and subjected workers to increasing abuses, including deportations and other forms of exclusion. A sub-set of migrants who contributed to Russia’s national security were treated as more deserving.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

Chapter 4 examines the post-Roman reconfiguration of national and political identities under the influence of barbarian “invaders” and probes how, if at all, the decline of the Western Roman Empire affected the idea of the nation. The chapter focusses on two post-Roman successor kingdoms, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy and the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. The first section takes a close look at the representation of national diversity in Cassiodorus’ Variae. The collection of letters bears testimony to the sophisticated rhetoric of state that was employed to legitimize Ostrogothic rule in Italy and documents the court’s sustained efforts to promote political unity precisely by accommodating the cultural and social distinctness of Goths and Romans. The bulk of the chapter then engages in an analysis of the seminal but today largely underrated work of Isidore of Seville, including his Etymologies and Chronicles. His writings demonstrate the continued conceptual distinction between nation and people and reveal a distinctly multinational vision for the Visigothic kingdom as he appropriates the imperial ideal for the Visigothic rulers.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

This chapter presents an overview of Multicultural London English (MLE), the urban contact vernacular that has emerged in London in recent years. It starts with a discussion of how similar varieties have been reported across other European cities and have become known as multiethnolects, meaning that they are not restricted to any particular ethnic group but are available to anyone, including speakers from non-immigrant backgrounds. The chapter then focuses on the specific social and historical circumstances that have led to the emergence of MLE, from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present day. After presenting the linguistic characteristics of MLE, a discussion follows of the ways in which MLE has been perceived in the media and by users and non-users of MLE, and how attitudes towards the variety may influence its trajectory in the future. While there is some suggestion that the variety (or some variation thereof) may not be restricted to London, it is not clear whether MLE will stabilise to an everyday vernacular spoken in inner-city neighbourhoods and beyond or whether it will divide along social and ethnic lines. The chapter concludes with a discussion of new research being undertaken to answer some of these issues.

Over c. 50 years, language education has been a significant site of ideological struggle over England’s position in the world, and the last two decades have seen intensification in the assertion of English nationalism in central government. Our analysis of this history starts with the development of multicultural language education in the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the factors that contributed to this: activist pressure from minority communities, educational philosophies valuing the ‘whole child’, educational decision-making embedded in local democratic structures, and a legislative strategy that promotied good community relations. This started to change in the 1990s, with the curriculum centralisation and the side-lining of LEAs initiated by the Thatcher government. Efforts to regulate increased population movement also made borders and immigration status more of a priority than multiculturalism, and after 2001, security, social cohesion and the suspicion of Muslims started to dominate public discourse. These developments are analysed in six areas of language education policy: standard English, English as an additional language for school students, English for adult speakers of other languages, modern languages, and community languages in mainstream and supplementary schools. Finally, we consider the role of universities in these processes.

The Chinese are one of the longest established and largest immigrant groups in Britain. There are a number of mutually unintelligible regional languages that are spoken amongst the Chinese. A complex pattern of multilingualism is emerging in the community. Intergenerational language maintenance and language shift are key sociolinguistic issues that the communites are collectively addressing. Contacts between the different languages have resulted in structural innovation and change that impact on all the languages concerned.

This chapter begins by surveying the linguistic history of Ireland. Although it is situated on the periphery of the British Isles, there is evidence of contact between the island, other regions of Britain and indeed other countries in western Europe for centuries. It explores early and later contacts between the indigenised Celts and more recent colonisers and immigrants, including the Normans, the English, the Scots and twentieth-century settlers from the European Union prior to Brexit. These contacts have created a set of contemporary Irish English varieties that are not only distinctive with respect to other world Englishes but are also differentiated diatopically, ethnically and socially. Two main topics are addressed. The degree to which Irish English from different time frames is structurally similar to other dialects spoken elsewhere is considered alongside evaluating the extent to which contemporary Irish Englishes vary internally and externally with respect to their lexis, phonology, morphosyntax and discourse pragmatics. Some space is also devoted to examining how the study of Irish English has developed and what directions research might take in the twenty-first century in response to new approaches to modelling linguistic contact as well as the availability of larger and more diverse digital datasets.

This chapter reviews the history, culture and politics of South Asian languages in the UK. South Asian migration to the UK dates back to the British colonial period. It expanded in the twentieth century, first with British Indian participation in the two World Wars and then with post-war British policies that initially encouraged South Asian immigration for low-skilled labour. South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. Overall, sustained migration, relatively large settlements, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrants has meant that South Asian speech communities have tended to maintain their languages, though with inroads by English in each successive generation. South Asian languages initially struggled to be included in school curricula and university provision. Some languages, such as Urdu and Arabic, have wider religious or cultural appeal and see much higher uptake through education than other South Asian languages, even languages with more native speakers. Almost no research has been conducted on structural change within South Asian heritage languages, a rich area for future research on language contact and generational change.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.