Chapter 1 makes use of two empirical approaches. Its first part uses property law from 136 jurisdictions in an unsupervised machine-learning method (hierarchical clustering) that divide these jurisdictions into 10 legal families. Unlike the traditional wisdom that highlights the difference between common law and civil law, this chapter finds that, in terms of property doctrines, a trichotomy better describes the legal systems: one big group is jurisdictions affected by French property law; another big group is composed of jurisdictions that follow or resemble German property law; and the final group contains common-law jurisdictions, Nordic countries, and a number of socialist jurisdictions. The second part of Chapter 1 re-combines 156 jurisdictions into 149 countries, and computes the correlation coefficients among each country pair, to show dyadic similarities in property law.

The third chapter in the volume’s final thematic strand (Cultural Perspectives) concerns language and literacy in the age of William the Conqueror. Following an introduction explaining the languages and linguistic developments in the cross-Channel Anglo-Norman state, the chapter casts its view broadly across Britain and beyond, before offering some considerations of the important subjects of literacy, Latinity, and genre. Detailed attention is given to questions concerning the persistence of Old English and the advent of Anglo-Norman, as well as to book production.

The ‘North African novel in French’ is a difficult category to circumscribe and define. It immediately announces a tension, juxtaposing writing in the French language on the one hand with a ‘North African’ culture or identity on the other. This tension bears the trace, moreover, of the colonial past, of regimes established in the Maghrebian region which not only expropriated the land from local peoples and seized local resources but also attempted to impose the use of French language, culture, and ideology. Those novelists who wrote or continue to write in French necessarily record the heritage of France’s aggressive empire-building, even while, as ‘North Africans’, they also associate themselves with local, Arab or Berber cultures. The ‘North African novel in French’ is as a result a divided, alienated creature, disconsolately vilifying the culture in which it nonetheless on some level must participate. This chapter explores three key issues raised by these novels, those of ‘insurrection and revolt’, ‘history and fiction’, and ‘crossing borders’. These issues all reveal the multiple influences negotiated by the North African novel in French as well as signalling its unique contribution to the reinvention of the novel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This chapter provides a critical overview of how Sub-Saharan Francophone Africans have engaged with the form of the novel from the period of decolonization to the first decades of the new millennium. It is meant for readers new to the Sub-Saharan Francophone novel and for those needing an updated overview of the major periods and authors that have brought visibility and coherence to the field. It is organized chronologically to combine classic literary historiography and highlights for each period landmark publications, thematic continuities, and formal innovations. It also offers contextual insights underscoring the specificity of novelistic production in a variety of African postcolonial situations. In each case these developments follow the imperative to represent African realities within a language—and often literary models—imposed by a colonial power: France. The chapter offers an updated reassessment of previous literary historiographies, insisting not only on formal considerations, but also on the evolution of the cultural status of the African novel across periods and in various literary markets. It includes a final section on contemporary ‘turns’ which further expose some of the recent developments, both formal and sociological, that have contributed to the most spectacular refashionings of novelistic production in the twenty-first century.

This essay explores how authors, texts, and forms moved throughout the Caribbean in the period, transgressing boundaries of language and geography. Regional responses to the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean antislavery and anticolonial movements reveal the clear trans-Caribbean focus of many nineteenth-century Caribbean writers. Additionally, the growing sphere of newspapers provided a concrete means through which ideas circulated throughout the region. This chapter looks primarily to Haiti and Trinidad as early examples through which to consider literary anglophone–francophone connections and the formations of Caribbean identity that heavily influenced later Caribbean writers. I argue that the circulation of ideas and authors in the period ultimately generated complex negotiation of contested spaces, shifting boundaries, and complex identities that gave rise to conceptions of creoleness and exile that are foundational to Caribbean literature.

John Jacob Thomas’s mid-nineteenth-century career exemplifies the contradictions of the post-abolition period. A schoolteacher who authored Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869) and Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained (1888), he parsed, literally and symbolically, the grammar of freedom. What did it mean to be free in a world in which non-whiteness was synonymous with servitude, and in which blackness and intellect were considered to be oxymoronic? Thomas’s efforts to vindicate 'freedom’s children' – the successors of the generation of enslavement – shed light on conceptions of mimicry, respectability, and literary and political authority that continue to shadow our postcolonial moment.