Already during the period between the two Opium Wars, China and its vast potential market had become a key site for legal and administrative innovations by Western diplomats, missionaries, and traders. The Qing conception of guoti 國體 or “state form/stateliness,” in particular, was creatively redeployed in an effort to articulate a diplomatic compromise during key meetings at Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing between 1858 and 1860, when a new multilateral international law regime for China was crafted by the invading Western powers.

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state.That was their great miscalculation.The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations.As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s.At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation.Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.

Chapter 8 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of early-modern global mercantile capitalism. It shows how imperial states and merchants employed various “spatial fixes” based in cities and their growing plantation hinterlands to overcome obstacles to the growing project of seizing the world’s wealth through land conquests, the enslavement of American and African laborers, and the militarization of trade in the Indian Ocean. Global finance, built upon rich silver mining cities in Spanish America, Chinese imperial tax policies, urban ports, banks, stock markets, joint stock companies, insurance, and the increasing value of urban real estate allowed states and merchants to pool the capital needed for trade across World Oceanic distances. A truly planetary Urban Planet came into being as these new city-enabled circuits of commerce enveloped the Pacific Ocean for the first time after the inauguration of the Acapulco–Manila galleon trade in 1571.

The front matter to “Cities of the World Ocean,” the second of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Plane, recounts the founding of Villa Navidad (“Christmas City”), the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Taino people, using wooden planks salvaged from the shipwrecked Santa Maria. The story serves to introduce the importance of humanity’s use of solar energy delivered by the winds and currents of the World Ocean to dramatically expand and merge all of Earth’s urban worlds into Earthopolis, a truly planetary Urban Planet for the first time. This development, a hinge between pre-modern and modern eras, rested on state violence delivered worldwide against city walls by gunpowder cannon; on the theft of massive amounts of land, labor, and wealth involved in the birth of global capitalism; and on the globalization of religious and secular knowledges and consumer culture that had impacts on the natural environment worldwide, including the World Ocean itself.

In the epoch of global capitalism, writers must be hypervigilant to the usage of their medium of choice –the written, printed word – readily aware of the proliferation of the grapheme and the saturation of visual signage in the media environment. Product advertisements that once depended on the enlarged-type appeal of slogans invariably stating the brand name have given way to an iconic Esperanto, equally legible to anyone around the globe. As a literary author, Don DeLillo recognizes that the image in our visual culture has become the dominant medium of our time. Despite this displacement of the writer from a central position in mass culture, DeLillo’s novels, such as White Noise, Mao II, and Underworld offer considerations as to how the post-war author might evade absorption by visual media and global capitalism, and whether it is possible to maintain a resistant, if marginalized, position in society.

The search for an alternative and non-Western concept capable of challenging “Hispanic America” or “Latin America” did not culminate in the Indo-American project. APRA’s Indo-América was by the 1940s much more a product of north–south conciliations than of the anti-colonial vindication of Indigenous’ rights in once claimed to represent. Nevertheless, the work of trying to envision the rebirth of the Americas in new ways did contribute to nourishing the ethos of continental unity and Latin American solidarity as a catalyst for opposing oligarchic rule and foreign hegemony. Radical elements from APRA’s continental program passed on to subsequent generations in Latin America. These new generations borrowed from APRA’s anti-imperialism while adding their own visions of social utopias, just as Apristas had inherited from their predecessors dreams of better futures that nestled within the mystique of united geographies.

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.

If China’s far-reaching market reforms make it the world’s largest economy, then another momentous shift in global dynamics may be under way – a change in the very structure of global capitalism – making the system of global trade and investment more compatible with the Chinese model. How will China’s version of state capitalism affect its trading partners? And will other countries be likely to adopt and adapt some of China’s policy innovations, making its experience a source of new variations in global governance? In the West, officials criticize China as a free rider on the stability of the political order that it treats with skepticism and which it is now trying to change to fit its own interests. But they are complacent in their confidence that a nexus between open markets and open polities is a universal feature of economic prosperity. A larger concern also looms: going global may transform China into a hub within a larger system, and a giant hub at that, but one that is not centrally positioned to control all others. The complexity of the global economy far exceeds the capability of the Chinese Communist Party as a controlling mechanism.