Focusing on the afterlife of the Freedom Edict of April 7, 1800, the chapter moves the story into the nineteenth century, a period of imperial crisis that saw the emergence of liberal trends in the empire as well as new stakeholders in the historical context of the island and, more generally, of the Spanish Atlantic world. Chapter 9 focuses on the problems that the emancipated cobreros faced in actualizing a corporate community model along the lines of colonial Indian law. It further compares El Cobre’s predicament in the new period with that of two other recognized Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguani, a situation that resonated elsewhere in the Spanish Atlantic in the postcolonial Latin American republics. Questions about native rights, race, and citizenship, about civil and political rights, about corporate and individual land rights emerged in this new political context, especially with the globalization of El Cobre. This globalization was linked to the arrival of French refugees and the development of a British mining industry in the region. These emerging trends led to the erasure of major aspects of the Freedom Edict of 1800 by the early 1840s.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

Follows the further decline of American trade in the Mediterranean and the physical decline and death of the three consuls, all of whom become somewhat disillusioned with the United States and the State Department while unsuccessfully trying to insure that their families can continue to prosper in the Mediterranean.

Based on discursive analysis, Chapter 3 focuses on the briefs produced in Madrid and the colony to mount the plaintiffs’ case for collective freedom. It examines the meanings of freedom in the Spanish Atlantic and the battery of legal tools, including the rarified one of prescription, deployed in the plaintiffs’ memorials to buttress their case of wrongful enslavement and collective freedom. The case entered unchartered terrain with the claim that belonging to a pueblo constituted a way of enacting and producing freedom collectively, an innovative claim based on notions of corporate belonging in the Spanish Atlantic world especially related to municipal bodies such as pueblos. The chapter parses a distinction between civil and political freedom made in some briefs. Civil freedom was understood in opposition to slavery as personal freedoms that free subjects could enjoy as royal vassals even in the context of colonialism and royal absolutism. Political freedom depended on municipal belonging, the space in which limited self-rule and citizenship could be locally enacted in an absolute monarchy. The chapter draws out the possible normative implications of this claim for Afro descendants at large who, at most, could only enjoy civil freedom rights in the empire.

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.

Examines Robert Montgomery’s early years as consul in Alicante, Spain focusing on his multiple identities as Irishman, American, and Spaniard. Discusses Alicante’s evolving commerce and the growth of American shipping networks despite the impact of the Barbary Wars.

Examines the growth of the early US consular system, why individuals became consuls, and how they were appointed.

Examines the dispersion of the Mediterranean community into Latin America and other areas and the reconfiguration of the consular service away from the former Mediterranean focus and toward a more professional organization.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) is a simple idea that captures a core democratic intuition: enfranchising the people who are governed. Yet democratic theorists have often shied away from the various conceptual challenges that explicating its meaning arises. This chapter therefore articulates a reformulation of the AAP that is (a) pluralistic, which means it is more flexible in terms of both the kind of effect it examines as triggering right for participation as well as the kind of influence and forms of participation that may be required and (b) refocuses the principle around social power rather than mere affectedness. The implications of this reformulation are briefly considered in the context of referenda as a tool for determining the boundaries of political communities and it is concluded that such referenda need to be institutionalized and built into democratic system, in the same way procedures for constitutional amendments allow for infrequent but crucial examination of the political communitys foundations.

The All-Affected Principle is of limited help in thinking about immigration. Immigration raises important normative questions about who should have access to citizenship, what is required for the full social and economic inclusion of immigrants, what legal rights immigrants admitted by a state should have, how migrants who enter and settle without permission should be treated, what criteria should be used in selecting and excluding immigrants, what states ought to do in dealing with refugees, and whether controlling immigration is really morally justifiable at all. The All-Affected Principle is directly relevant only to the first question of who should have access to citizenship, and even in that case, it needs to be supplemented. The other questions are not primarily about who should participate in democratic decision-making but about what justice requires and about the moral constraints on democratic discretion. So, using the All-Affected Principle to think about those questions would not help, and starting from that principle in thinking about immigration might lead us to miss the key normative issues.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

Looking at Stephen Crane’s Maggie and William Faulkner’s Light in August, this chapter suggests that racial in-betweenness may be one of the driving forces of American literature. At the turn of the twentieth century, the distinction between whiteness and blackness plagued not only literary authors, but also legal institutions. In a series of court cases, judges had to decide which immigrant groups counted as white and could hence be naturalized. This chapter proposes that at this juncture, law and literature are closely interconnected. At a time when the judiciary struggled to make sense of petitioners who were racially in-between, literary texts zoom in on figures who are either mixed race or racially indeterminate. Crane’s novella presents the idea that in the late nineteenth century, the Irish were seen as “whites on probation.” Faulkner’s novel focuses on a protagonist who is rumored to be a “mulatto”, but turns out to be half Mexican. Focusing on the “off-whiteness” of Irish and Mexican characters in American literature, this chapter argues that whiteness is ultimately a fiction, and that it is in the pages of literature that the construction of whiteness can best be observed.

Immigrant authors in the United States write under the shadow of hostile laws that challenge expectations of political equality and belonging. Tales of repudiation and resistance mark the uncertainties of transit and the dangers of arrival. This study of Asian American texts exposes how US immigration laws naturalize race and redefine identities and lineage. Immigration law transformed American narrative forms to create a global and intercultural literature in which Asian migrants refuse to be turned into perpetual outsiders.