Introduction: the Upper Guinea coast in global perspective / Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl — Towards a definition of transnational as a family construct : an historical and micro perspective / Bruce L. Mouser — Lusocreole culture and identity compared : the cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka / Christoph Kohl — Freetown’s Yoruba-modelled secret societies as transnational and trans-ethnic mechanisms for social integration / Nathaniel King — Contested transnational spaces : debating emigrants’ citizenship and role in Guinean politics / Anita Schroven — Identity beyond ID– diaspora within the nation / Markus Rudolf — The African other in the Cape Verde Islands : interaction, integration and the forging of an immigration policy / Pedro F. José Marcelino — Celebrating asymmetries– Creole stratification and the regrounding of home in Cape Verdean migrant return visits / Heike Drotbohm — Travelling terms : analysis of semantic fluctuations in the Atlantic world / Wilson Trajano Filho — Rice and revolution : agrarian life and global food policy on the Upper Guinea coast / Joanna Davidson — Transnational and local models of non-refoulement : youth and women in the moral economy of patronage in post-war Liberia and Sierra Leone / William P. Murphy — Expanding the space for freedom of expression in post-war Sierra Leone / Sylvanus Spencer — Sierra Leone, child soldiers, and global flows of child protection expertise / Susan Shepler — The Mandingo question : transnational ethnic identity and violent conflict in an Upper Guinea border area / Christian K. Højbjerg — Solo Darboe, former diamond dealer : transnational connections and home politics in the twentieth-century Gambia / Alice Bellagamba — Market networks and warfare : a comparison of the seventeenth century blade weapons trade and the nineteenth century firearms trade in the Casamance / Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta