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Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity, actively participating in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm on a par with European monarchies. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, this book examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture, traces its development across four centuries marked by war and the Atlantic slave trade, and finally narrates its unraveling as 19th-century European colonialism penetrated Africa. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christian visual material, the book approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries, showing that the African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to shape a novel and evolving Kongo Christian worldview. The book sheds new light on the cross-cultural interactions that created the early modern world, highlighting cultural exchanges while also taking into account the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

Nursing and Empire draws on archival research and life history interviews to focus on the migration and settlement of the Indian nurses who formed the first female dominated migration pattern from India to the United States during the Cold War. Reddy argues that this movement must be understood as part of the shifts within Anglo-American capitalist imperialism that have tied the development of nursing labor in India to processes of U.S. social formation since the nineteenth century. The book thus begins with the movement of US based single female Protestant medical missionaries to India in the nineteenth century and then details the remaking of the colonial medical mission through the Jim Crow segregation and “open door imperialism” of the Rockefeller Foundation between World Wars I and II. Framed within this context, Reddy positions Indian nurse immigration as one outcome of shifts within the international division of nursing labor at the onset of the American Century. Throughout this historical sweep, Nursing and Empire also contains a detailed analysis of the shifting stigmatization and rising status of Indian nursing labor through hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion. The result is an immigration study that examines the position of Indian nurses within labor markets as well as inside and outside of kinship networks and variously constructed communities.

Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India—both as an idea and a place—to the making of a global British imperial system. This book recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The geography of imperial thinking as well as imagined and real imperial systems did not correlate directly to the geography of imperial rule. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India’s strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to quickly materialize, Britain’s circulation of Indian manufactured goods—from umbrellas to cottons—to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, trades, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.