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This introductory chapter identifies the fundamental tension in global economic development: competition can produce enormous economic benefits everywhere, but its benefits are distributed unevenly, and it can also cause harm. An effective global competition law regime can protect this productive process and enhance its benefits, and it can also reduce its potential for harm. This requires a global strategy that takes into account the needs of all participants in global markets — not merely those in developed countries — and embeds competition in society. Constructing such a regime calls for analysis of previous competition law experience on both national and international levels, especially the relationships between national and transnational competition law. This book provides this kind of analysis and relates it to the insights of economics and other social sciences. Together, these two elements provide a basis for developing an effective framework for global competition.

The authors of this chapter provide an in-depth analysis of family influences, ties and obligations, in respect of older people's motivation to return to the Caribbean from the United States of America and Europe. This chapter develops a conceptual framework so that the behavioural dynamics of retirement return migration are explained more completely, if contingently. A variety of qualitative approaches, including narrative interviews, reveal that although retirement certainly may be one contributing determinant for the return home of elderly emigrants, other factors may intervene, such as transnational experiences; partnership dissolution; dependent children's migration decisions; siblings’ return to the ancestral homeland; and the desire to be close to kin and extended family. Such factors modify the patterns and processes of life course planning that underline retirement return migration in the contemporary Caribbean, and render conceptual explanations more complex and flexible in terms of timing, motives and mobilities.

The form and tone of Wilkie Collins’s fiction are strikingly different from Trollope’s. Instead of naturalism, the perception of breached heirloom sovereignty gives rise to multi-perspectival narration, elaborate plotting, and outlandish events that conduce toward an almost postmodern notion of sovereignty as porous and pluralized. Collins’s mixed-raced characters migrate to the foreground where their unconventional stories stimulate the rendering of that historically cumulative form of experience which Walter Benjamin called Erfahrung. Armadale, a novel begun midway through the US Civil War, uses fictive archeology to explore the disavowed history of Britain’s participation in Atlantic slavery, while The Moonstone, often read as a “mutiny” narrative, traces a multi-authored path to truth. Whereas Ozias Midwinter’s story excavates a submerged Atlantic experience, Ezra Jennings, a character whose crucial piebald knowledge “is entirely out of the experience of the mass of mankind” (388), enables a formal shift from detective narrative to utopian romance.

This chapter explores overseas student writing—in both English and Chinese—as embodying a specific kind of transnational crossing that articulates Asia/America into a transpacific cultural and political space. It studies The Chinese Students' Monthly, which was published by the Chinese Students' Alliance in America from 1905 to 1931, as well as the Chinese-language literary pieces about studying abroad that emerged in the early twentieth century and became a recognizable body of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, known in Chinese as liuxuesheng wenxue, or “overseas student literature.” This chapter contends that overseas student writing represents a specific kind of textual travel that weaves together American experience with Asian feelings with a double task in hand: reporting to readers at home about America and their experiences, and protesting and correcting misrepresentations of China and its people.

This chapter reconsiders the generative black feminist possibilities of prose to stage the conflict of transnational experience. It examines the short stories of Zoë Wicomb's and Pauline Melville's story collections, particularly the The Collector of Treasures (1977), You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), and The Migration of Ghosts (1999) to explore the narrative dissonance that comes from the act of sequencing and organizing various representations of gender in their contemporary forms. These texts reconstruct gender as a collection of critiques of both state and transnational power formations. The remainder of the chapter argues for the strategic use of the collection as a form—one that reorganizes how everyone might read for sequential meaning without imposing narrative coherence.

Setting forth the challenges that guide this study, Chapter 1 looks at current frameworks for transnational scholarship, noting the tendency for ethical approaches to literature and culture to isolate themselves from historicism’s focus on material conditions, and vice versa. The introduction lays out a theory of the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic which integrates artistic expression and geohistorical structure and, in doing so, calls for openness to the normative aspirations of both poststructuralism and the Enlightenment. Calling for renewed attention to literary form, the book argues for the range and intensity of nineteenth-century fiction’s aesthetic engagements with global encounter. The subsequent chapters do not so much redeem a set of novelistic conventions as prize open the category of realism to appreciate its suppleness, variety, and longevity.