This chapter explores further the material and imperial bases of popular sovereignty by tracking the entanglements between socialist and imperialist discourse. White labor activists in the Anglo world borrowed from imperial scripts to mark nonwhite migrants as a threat while demanding their own incorporation, which solidified settler projects. These demands depended on the continuous extreme exploitation of non-white workers at home and abroad and – while part of an imperial transnational imagination – resulted in the absorption of imperial labor control functions by national systems of migration control. The encounter between capitalists interested in accessing cheap labor by racialized subjects, elite projects invested in sheltering white settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition converged in founding moments of the people in the metropole. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice over labor solidarity created segregated labor spaces that fit with both capitalist goals of labor control and reinforced settler colonialism. The analysis recasts immigration as a central historical force that shaped and sustained racial capitalism and democratic politics in the core, making the case for its more serious theorization and incorporation into critical theory frameworks.

The emergence of a Mongol state in succession to the Kereyit khanate led to the creation of the largest land-based empire in history and a new people. The Mongols and their partners deployed and elaborated shared steppe political traditions that valued trade and customized the resources of both steppe and sedentary worlds. Under Chinggis Khan’s successor Ögödei, the mission of sacred world conquest and the ideology, governing mechanisms, and fiscal policies that enabled the attainment of this mission achieved sturdy articulation. Chinggisid priorities engendered massive demographic dislocation and transfers of peoples, and new patterns of commerce to support a robust imperial culture of consumption, patronage, and display. Early qa’ans’ ideological prerogatives and attempts to assert tighter control over resources inevitably clashed with their kinfolk’s customary claims. Tensions erupted into open civil war in 1260, but the new Chinggisid communicative space across Eurasia survived the breakup of the United Empire.

This study seeks to explain how the Mongol imperial space was created and administrated by the Mongols and conceived by the Mongols and their subjects mainly in Yuan China and Ilkhanid Iran. It stresses the interplay between the Mongols’ universal vision, their construction of a “Chinggisid space,” and the revival of “glocal” (i.e., local with global characteristic) spatial concepts in Mongol-ruled China and Iran. It starts by reviewing Mongol expansion, analyzing the reasons for its unprecedented success and the impact of its halt, and concludes in assessing the impact of the Mongol Empire on the shaping of the post-Mongol imperial space across Eurasia.