The Port and its Mo leaders have been portrayed within the context of Vietnamese historiography as the facilitators of the final round of Vietnam’s Southern Advance from its homeland in the Red River Valley. However, the Mo had other overlords, such as Cambodia and Siam, and enjoyed close ties to horizontal networks, including the Chinese and Austronesians. The Port’s ultimate incorporation into Vietnam was highly contingent. At the same time, The Port became a mediator and protector of the frontiers of the southern Vietnamese regime of Cochinchina, as well as its main source for the flow of Chinese influence.

The Mo never attempted to forge a state themselves but chose to utilize the territoriality of their realm to expand their economic interests. The Port became a transshipment point for goods and a provider of natural resources. It played a crucial role in the Chinese century in maritime East Asia by facilitating the offshoring of China’s economy. Its example demonstrates the convergence of similar trends and developments across the early modern world and highlights the importance of state-building and institutions in the rise and ultimate triumph of European maritime power.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

Port cities on the island of Singapore from the fourteenth century onwards have produced a dichotomy in literary representation. On the one hand, the city is monumental, its expanding physical infrastructure subsumed within solid historical developmental narratives in which dystopian and utopian visions of governance co-exist. On the other, the port offers the possibility of fluidity, an opening to the flows of peoples, culture, and trade. As a site of writing in many languages, Singapore exemplifies the concerns of world literature: interlinguistic practices, migration, networks of publishing and audiences in which the global continually returns.This chapter uses the concept of translocality to enable two intellectual moves. First, it moves us beyond a binarism between city and port, structure and fluidity in Singapore literary studies, in which literary texts are always seen as promoting fluidity as a critique of structure, rather than as acts of building, self-making and development. Second, the translocal experience of Singapore may offer a heuristic for the study of world literature, in which dystopian accounts of the imbrication of markets, reading publics, prizes, and creative writing programs with neoliberalism are often countered through utopian close readings of the transcendent possibilities of individual literary texts.

Millions of Germans helped to transform much of North America during the 19th century, and smaller numbers did similar things across Latin America, in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and especially Imperial Russia.As they did that, they also built and moved across networks of communication, trade, and transportation that expanded over generations. The nodal points in these extra-European networks wereoften transcultural places filled with varieties of Germans who were frequently being or becoming German plus other things.At the same time, across polycentric German-speaking Europe there were many centers, places of belonging, that often tied together people across vast regions.Many of these centers had a global reach; even when they remained modest in size and can be difficult to find on political maps, they frequently held great significance for people’s mental maps.Often discounted today, it was the notion of a German cultural community, or Kulturgemeinshaft, which recognized commonalities across the many differences that tied these disparate people and their orientations together and provided many with considerable cultural capital as they went abroad.

The specific context of urban migration in West Africa provides a fertile field from which to pluralise currents concepts of sense of place. If research on sense of place is to address the global phenomena of mobility and migration, then this requires an immediate implementation of calls to consider roots and routes and fixity and flow in the production of senses of place. This chapter presents two key findings in relation to West African migrants’ sense of place, both in relation to their place of residence and their place of origin. This first is that new migrants with weak people–place bonds have a heightened quality of life in comparison to locals. This runs counter to assumptions that strong place attachment is beneficial for well-being. The second is that migrants invest considerable efforts into maintaining sense of place in locations where they no longer reside.

Building on Ramazani’s notion of the ‘translocal’, this chapter maps the multiple voices and ‘mobile positionings’ of an early generation of poets from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa who were performing and publishing in 1950s and 1960s Britain. Though some, such as Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), or Louise Bennett (Jamaica) did not settle in Britain permanently, their respective explorations with a variety of literary/vernacular/oral influences and forms had significant impact on the themes and writings of later generations of British-born diasporic poets. The main emphasis in this chapter lies on the richness of these individual contributions, which derived from diverse contexts as well as a range of different literary, cultural, and political influences. It also shows how their respective visions – whether Lord Kitchener’s calypsonian evocation of London, Louise Bennett’s vernacular colonisation of Britain in reverse, Wole Soyinka’s sardonic commentary on the ‘colour bar’, the hybrid influences of Dom Moraes’s quiet modernism, or E. A. Markham’s various personae – coincided and made a series of significant waves across the landscape of British poetry.