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This chapter introduces the overlapping, imagined notions of Jews, Vienna, and the Austrian provinces between the World Wars by examining how the national and urban representations functioned in shaping the culture of the First Republic, and explores the various reactions of Austria’s Jews to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. This chapter also introduces “Jewishness” as a category of critical analysis. It outlines how perceived differences between the “Jewish” and the “non-Jewish” formed a broad, binary system for ordering the world, much like gender’s universal (and hierarchical) codings of the “feminine” and “masculine.” The results of this analysis indicate that a deeply engrained, hierarchical framework of “Jewishness” was played an important role in how Jews and non-Jews alike made sense of a new and often chaotic world in the interwar period.

This chapter provides an overview of the career profiles of Italian legislators over the entire sample period 1948–2008. In particular, it documents the extent to which the characteristics of Italian legislators (such as their age, gender, education, occupation, and income prior to entering the Parliament) have changed over time and highlight the major differences between the First and the Second Republic. To provide a term of comparison, it also contrasts the profiles of Italian legislators and their evolution over the post-war period to those of the members of the United States Congress.

The introductory chapter outlines a theory of early cinema in Brazil and its relationship to the country’s invention of modernity. Theories and examinations of early film’s relationship to modernity have by and large focused on the medium’s links to changes and transformations wrought by the advent of industrialization. Noting that such transformations were not present in Brazil, the introduction outlines how early film in Brazil—that is, its arrival and dissemination—were linked instead to a political project impelled by the first Republican regime, one that sought to transform the country into modern nation-state of order and progress. The chapter maps ways in which this imbrication between film and this project laid the foundations for the birth Brazilian cinema and modernity in Brazil. In doing so, it provides an alternative modernity of early cinema.

Just days after the Slovak state was created, it signed with Nazi Germany a ‘treaty of protection’ and a protocol on co-operation in financial and economic matters. As a result of these measures, Slovakia would be labelled a German vassal state and the government a puppet regime. This chapter examines the nature of the wartime Slovak state and reconsiders the concept of a puppet regime and a native version of fascism (so-called ‘clerical fascism’). It examines the ways in which Germany tried to influence the Slovak government, who the German protagonists were, and how and according to what guidelines Slovak politicians reacted to these manoeuvres. It first outlines how Slovak nationalists demanded autonomy during the later years of the First Czechoslovak Republic, and then assesses the Slovak-German relations from March 1939 to the summer of 1940. By this time, the German minister of foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had labelled the Slovak case an example of ‘revolutionary foreign politics’.

This chapter argues that the First Republic was not a distinct, coherent system of government but a historical process whose chronological beginning and end are not well defined. It reveals that in fact, the fall of Louis XVI had begun the history of the First Republic, and the accession to the throne of Louis XVIII ended it. Indeed, the chapter notes that the Republic was never proclaimed and never abolished; moreover, defining the limits of the First Republic had proven difficult due to the uncertainty that surrounded concepts such as “republic” and “republicanism” at the time. Hence, the chapter offers new insights on the nature of republicanism in France, and how such a nebulous institution is defined: from its true inception at the onset of the French Revolution to the return of Louis XVIII.

This chapter is a summary of the interactions between exile and republicanism, focusing on specific moments in the history of the First, Second, and Third French Republics. Each of France's early Republics provoked migrations out of France, but each Republic also enhanced France's international reputation as the center for modern republican culture. Exiles have thus left or entered France because they held strong opinions about French republicanism, which suggests that the history of French Republics must also include the history of exile migrations, exile writers, and exile anger. The chapter then concludes with a brief reference to the foreign exiles who have gone to France because they supported republicanism as an alternative to the political systems in their own countries.

In 1921, the village of Pacoval, located not far from Santarém on the northern shore of the Amazon River, was in turmoil. In August the state government sent a special envoy to ascertain if the purchase and demarcation of Brazil nut groves were being done by the book and whether permitting its privatization was a wise policy. The protests that ensued represented a new episode in the history of black struggles for citizenship in post-emancipation Brazil, and this chapter analyzes three of their core elements. First, the Pacovalenses presented themselves as “the people of the Curuá” River and fought to keep it “free,” locating the rights of citizenship yet again in the natural landscape. Second, they tried to protect the networks of economic and political patronage that they had built since the time of slavery, which had provided a precarious but real degree of institutional leverage. Finally, in their encounters with public authorities the black peasants also portrayed themselves as “good Brazilians,” a nativist claim that mirrored Afro-Brazilian discourses in other states in those years.

This chapter presents an overview and critique of theories of Brazil’s cinematic belle epoque, which have depicted the early film period as a golden age of Brazilian filmmaking in contrast to later decades that were dominated by Hollywood’s hegemony. The chapter shows how these utopian discourses regarding the belle epoque have obscured the cinematic period’s intrinsic link to Rio de Janeiro and its modernizing reforms, reforms that were inextricably linked to the development and expansion of global capitalism.

This chapter examines the two orchestras during the interwar period of politicization. Here, stark differences can be seen in the ties between each philharmonic and its republic. The concert activities of the Berlin Philharmonic increasingly aligned with Germany’s foreign and domestic political interests, which can be understood to be a result of the orchestra’s growing dependence on local and state funds. In contrast, the Vienna Philharmonic remained a private association, and while it received subsidies, it was not obligated to fulfill direct political functions—although the ensemble did support such functions, their activities were always viewed through the lens of the “music city” topos.

This chapter traces the development of “Muslim politics” in northern Nigeria from the era of the Sokoto Caliphate through British colonial rule and the independence-era Nigerian First Republic. Drawing on the work of Hussein Ali Agrama, Mahmood Mamdani, and other critical scholars of secularism, colonialism, and law, it traces the “state-ification” of Islamic law, and the growing use of the religious and sharia as sources of political control under colonial and early independence-era government

Planners from the United States and the Republic of Vietnam initially looked to rubber as an important source of income and a way to create Vietnamese smallholders, or individuals who owned modestly sized rubber plots. Chapter 6 considers the attempts to create this class and discusses the fate of rubber plantations in Ngô Đình Diệm’s First Republic of Vietnam, which lasted from 1954 to 1963. It demonstrates the persistence of development ideologies that valued plantations over smallholder production and formal science over informal knowledge and shows the power of modernity during the process of decolonization. This chapter also examines the continuing absence of Vietnamese in the rubber industry. Between 1955 and 1965, rubber benefited from relatively peaceful conditions and Vietnamese smallholders began to take part in more significant numbers in the industry. The costs of production, the arrival of the U.S. military, and the lack of practical support, however, meant that only well-off Vietnamese could benefit from the expanding industry. This selective movement of technology shows the limits of postcolonial development and suggests that the exclusion of most Vietnamese from the industry was a product of both colonial and postcolonial modernity.

This chapter discusses the new generation of black thinkers and activists across Brazil that revised their relationship with dominant racial ideologies, rejecting the shared symbols that, in different iterations, had served as the centerpiece of black politics since the First Republic. After 1985 the return to democracy gave black activists the openings they needed to make their denunciation of the “myth” of racial democracy increasingly visible in Brazilian public life. The period of democratic transition in the mid-1980s, like the transition to democracy in the mid-1940s, was a propitious time to question an ideology that had become so closely associated with a discredited dictatorship. It was also, as at midcentury, a time of growth for black cultural and political organizations. In this new environment black groups were able to push for, and frequently win, legal prohibitions against racial discrimination as part of the rebuilding of democratic institutions.

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.

Nigeria’s postwar agricultural commodity booms in cocoa, groundnuts, and palm oil prompted export producers to demand new public goods. But exporters were politically marginalized and did not receive state-supplied transportation infrastructure or improved credit accessibility, which forestalled state building. A ruling coalition led by nationalist politicians, who lacked direct stakes in exporting, instead preyed upon resource wealth. Nigeria’s export producers could do little to oppose these antagonistic policies, as they were segmented geographically and by export commodity. Exporters could not mount a serious challenge to power holders, who could maintain power without strengthening institutions. Coalitional politics, not ethnic enmity, was at the root of Nigeria’s wanting state building during decolonization and the First Republic.