At the end of the Second World War, millions of men, women, and children shared a similar experience: delousing, at the hands of Allied armies and relief agencies, to prevent the spread of infectious disease. The procedure lasted seconds. In studies of displaced populations in this period, its effects upon them are commonly presented as invasive, humiliating, and, for some, reminiscent of Nazi abuse. Adopting a wider lens, this article explores how events and developments in a global range of settings shaped demands for effective delousing as well as the character of measures devised to achieve it. Harnessing fresh perspectives on how delousing was managed, delivered, and experienced, the article also advances understanding of how refugees responded to it.

Forced migration as a reaction to National Socialism represents individual as well as simultaneously collective, transnational, and global experiences. Not only identity-forming categories but also forms of knowledge are profoundly reshaped by processes of displacement and resettlement. The paper argues that the biography of the archaeologist Grete Mostny (1914–91) offers an exemplary case study of such processes of adaptation on individual, collective, and academic levels. Due to her escape from Austria to Chile as a persecuted Jew in 1938/39, Mostny's identity as a white European (female) scholar attained a whole new significance and became the door opener for her interdisciplinary career at the interface of archaeology and anthropology in her new homeland. Her research in Chile was a product of a global event—namely mass forced emigration from Europe—as well as of factors on the micro level, such as her European descent and her academic education, which gave her certain privileges in her new environment. When Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, a new European and U.S. hegemony had already begun to dominate academia in the country, which was trying to modernise itself and move from the academic periphery closer to the centre. Mostny, the once racially persecuted scholar, fit well in this process by making use of her “European” knowledge and her networks. In 1954 she received international attention when she put together a pioneering interdisciplinary research team to study El Niño del Cerro El Plomo, a four-hundred-year-old Inca mummy found in the Andes five thousand metres above sea level. Nationally, Mostny's study contributed, beyond all measure, to the Andean state's identity, as it re-evaluated and enhanced Chile's prehistory. In a time of political and social tensions in Chile, the rediscovery of its Indigenous prehistory—even by a foreign white scholar—helped to overcome the old shadows of colonial historical research, perhaps because in the immediate present the Indigenous movement in Chile offered little potential for consensus. This article uses Mostny's transnational biography as a lens through which to detect these connected histories and entangled hegemonies in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, which have become instrumental in the formation of Chile's national identity. Moreover, the paper shows that the category of race played a central role in the field of knowledge production and career development, not only for Grete Mostny.

Between 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

This essay advocates “refugee political thought” as an autonomous category which needs to be centre-staged in global intellectual history. I concretise this by studying Bengali Hindu refugees who migrated from Muslim-majority eastern Bengal (after the Partition of British India in 1947 part of Pakistan, and after 1971, the sovereign state of Bangladesh) to the Hindu-majority Indian state of West Bengal, and occasionally their descendants as well. By studying the transnational horizons of Bengali refugees from the late 1940s to today, I posit them as part of modern global intellectual history. Bengali refugees and their descendants connected their experiences with those of refugees elsewhere in the world, seeing themselves, for example, as “new Jews.” Later, some of them aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause. Refugee politics became enmeshed with Cold War revolutionary currents. European, Soviet, and Chinese Marxist theory—and latent Lockean assumptions—propelled the everyday politics of refugee land occupation. Marxism, sometimes with Hegelian inflection, nourished the East Bengali-–origin founders of Subaltern Studies theory and Dalit (lower-caste) thought. Ultimately, this essay shows how Bengali refugees instrumentalised transnational thinking to produce new models of democratic political thought and practice in postcolonial India. I describe this as “refugee democracy.”

When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.

Societal debates about climate change have rekindled interest in environmental history approaches. This review article considers three recent books in African environmental history, on the Kruger National Park, the East African Groundnut Scheme, and on infrastructure in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Why is it important to study the empire–environment nexus? How do African experiences relate to discussions on the Anthropocene? Taking environmental dynamics into account enriches understandings of social, political, and cultural relationships and sheds light on imperialism and its complex legacies. This article makes the case for the importance of environmental history as a category of analysis, encouraging other scholars to think “with” the environment in broader debates concerning power, identity, and social change.

Historiography on the extreme violence of fin de siècle colonial wars has often remained nationally fragmented or actively invested in theories of national exceptionality. Focusing on the British, German and Dutch empires, this article seeks to understand the extreme violence as a transimperial phenomenon and asks how we can conceptualise and give empirical substance to this transimperial dimension. First, I give some indication of the degree of transimperial connectivity in the field of colonial warfare, highlighting how intensive mutual imperial observation and the individual mobility of actors fed knowledge into what Kamissek and Kreienbaum have called an “imperial cloud.” Secondly, I argue that a transimperial body of thought behind the extreme violence can be discerned on the level of colonial warfare's racialisation and the resulting specific communicative and performative aspects. Drawing on fin de siècle manuals of colonial warfare and a selection of case studies, I take the transimperial notion of “moral effect” to demonstrate how such basic notions both generated and legitimised extreme violence in colonial warfare.

Between 1918 and 1923, Istanbul was the capital of a defeated empire and occupied by the “interallied” forces composed of Britain, France, and Italy. Notwithstanding, or precisely due to, these conditions, it functioned as a vibrant hub of global communist militancy. This article explores the brief history of occupied Istanbul and discusses different agents and aspects of communist network-making. It underlines the agency of two neglected actors: a multinational body of communist sailors who connected Istanbul and its communists to European, Middle Eastern, and Soviet ports; and European and colonial soldiers stationed in Istanbul, who counterintuitively contributed to these connections. Finally, it shows how Istanbul, as the multiethnic and multilinguistic soon-to-be-former capital of the Ottoman Empire, provided a fertile ground for communist connections.

This article draws attention to the case of Aceh to analyse the mechanisms through which ideologically driven geographic imaginings obscured the role of place and class in colonial and anti-colonial violence in Indonesia. Its main perspective is the region's West Coast. In the course of the long and brutal Dutch-Acehnese war (1873–1942), the West Coast of Sumatra was transformed from a dynamic centre of trade, commerce, and religious renewal into a colonial frontier. Violent resistance persisted in this area as the Dutch involved themselves in and exacerbated local contestations for authority and resources. Colonial discourse worked to conceal these complexities, foregrounding an image of the West Coast as a remote, backwards, and inherently dangerous place, prone to a violent Muslim millenarianism.

Giovanni da Empoli's second voyage to Asia (1510–1514) was eventful and violent, characterised by the emergence of conflicting agendas among different groups of Portuguese. The Florentine merchant's long letter about the voyage is an extraordinary document, and provides insights in three important areas. First, it allows us to fill some of the gaps in the history of the early phases of Portuguese empire building, questioning the extent to which the Crown was pursuing a clear and coherent strategy that included the conquest of Malacca. Second, it problematises further our conception of “the Portuguese” by reporting episodes of Portuguese-on-Portuguese violence and opposing views on the objectives of Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean. Finally, Giovanni unequivocally expresses admiration for the international markets of Eastern city-ports and openly criticises the militarist attitude and lawless tactics of the Portuguese viceroy, Alfonso de Albuquerque, thereby inviting us to reconsider the chronology of a “cosmopolitan reaction” among Italian writers visiting South Asia.

Feeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were “made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.

A high number of migrants returned from their transatlantic sojourn to their native Hungary between the 1880s and the 1930s. Despite being pauperised and marginalised in the United States, they encountered norms and mechanisms of a democratic society and cultural patterns unknown to the rural society they hailed from. Upon returning, they implemented some of these practices. The paper investigates the durability of this cultural change and argues that the transatlantic transmission of norms was outweighed in significance by internal, regional movements.

The authors of three recent monographs, The Escape Line, Escape from Vichy, and Nearly the New World, highlight in particular the relevance of transnational refugee and resistance networks. These books shed new light on the trajectories of refugees through war-torn Europe and their routes out of it. Megan Koreman displays in The Escape Line the relevance of researching one line of resistance functioning in several countries and thereby shifts from the common nationalistic approach in resistance research. In Escape from Vichy Eric Jennings researches the government-endorsed flight route between Marseille and Martinique and explores the lasting impact of encounters between refugees and Caribbean Negritude thinkers. Joanna Newman explores the mainly Jewish refugees who found shelter in the British West Indies, with a focus on the role of aid organisations in this flight.

This article surveys previously underexamined American and British intelligence networks that operated in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and demonstrates the relevance of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to the larger history of the Netherlands, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary Atlantic. The Dutch Republic's favourable geographic location, its postal services, its sophisticated press, and its mercantile economy made it an ideal place to extract information and build intelligence networks, shaping power politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Additionally, this article illustrates how these Anglo-American intelligence networks affected the Dutch Republic and the revolutionary Atlantic. In the late 1770s, American revolutionaries successfully deployed their intelligence network to unleash a propaganda campaign that aimed to convince the Dutch public of their cause. By infiltrating the liberal and sophisticated Dutch printing press, the American revolutionaries not only succeeded in fostering political support among the Dutch public; they also created a transatlantic intellectual exchange with the Dutch opposition that laid the foundations of the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s and ultimately the dissolution of the Dutch Republic as a whole in 1795.

This article surveys the diasporic life and legacy of the Ethiopian ecclesiastic Täsfa Ṣeyon. After examining his origins in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and the circumstances of his arrival in mid-sixteenth-century Rome, the article outlines his contributions to the evolving Latin Catholic understanding of Ethiopia. Täsfa Ṣeyon was a librarian, copyist, teacher, translator, author, and community leader, as well as a prominent adviser to European humanist scholars and Church authorities concerned with orientalist philologia sacra as it pertained to Ethiopian Orthodox (täwaḥedo) Christianity. As such, he was a key extra-European agent in the Tridentine project of Ethiopianist and Eastern Christian knowledge production. The article also surveys the complex modern legacy of Täsfa Ṣeyon's career, documenting his posthumous influence in the fields of Ethiopianist Semitic studies and Ethiopian vernacular historiography.

The scholarly discussion of archives in the premodern Islamicate world is beset by problematic generalisations. Such a view to some degree stems from a top-down view of archiving that focuses on state archives at the expense of practices of archiving occurring outside a chancery context. This article challenges the assumptions that support an enduring narrative of paucity, by examining non-chancery archival practices in Mamlūk Cairo on the eve of the Ottoman conquest in 922/1517. In doing this, it looks to some of the surviving original documentary material: legal property deeds with connections to waqf endowments whose potential to shed light on archival history has largely remained untapped. Surviving in large numbers in modern collections in Cairo, these documents contain abundant traces of their own archival histories. By presenting a micro-scale case study drawn from this material, this article shows the energetic and meticulous documentary and archival practices that surrounded property transactions in late-Mamlūk Cairo.

It is broadly assumed that attempts by the Russian state of Muscovy to establish stable diplomatic and mercantile channels to India via Central Asia were started upon the initiative of the Emperor Peter I (1682–1725). Such attempts are generally interpreted as being part of a large-scale project that reflected the growing imperial and colonial ambitions of Russia and which, in turn, entailed strong antagonism from the ruling elites of Central Asia, thereby setting a tone for relations that would continue for the next century and more of reciprocal relations between the local principalities and Russia. By exploring chancellery documents from seventeenth-century Muscovy, we find that the first diplomatic communications between Russia, Khiva, and Bukhara can in fact be dated to long before the reign of Peter I. The first Romanov tsars sought to initiate exchanges with Khiva and Bukhara as a means of establishing diplomatic and commercial ties with the Mughal emperors; at the same time, meanwhile, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara had their own reasons for pushing Muscovy to engage with Central Asia as a conduit to India. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Central Asian diplomats went to great lengths—both in diplomatic correspondence and through direct interpersonal contacts—to convince their Russian counterparts of the region's attractiveness as a source of precious Indian commodities and as a logistically convenient passage to India. Despite such rhetoric, however, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara were in fact highly reluctant to “open” the region to Russian agents: repeated attempts by Muscovy to engage in diplomatic fact-finding as a means of establishing influence in the region invariably foundered in the face of Central Asian resistance. Bukharan and Khivan circles seem, in fact, to have held out the enticing idea of “a passage to India” simply as a rhetorical device to secure recognition in Muscovy for their own diplomatic and mercantile missions.

In the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, the Yik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating the Yik Khuan Poh in its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

This article seeks to establish the value of the concept of cosmotopia to historians of intercultural connections through presenting a case study of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, which was active between 1821 and 1828. In tandem, it aims to enhance understanding of the origins of one particularly sustained set of intercultural connections: the interfaith network which developed between an influential group of Hindu religious and social reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, and western Unitarian Christians. The article focusses on the collaboration between the two leading figures on the Committee: Rammohun Roy, the renowned founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who is often described as the Father of Modern India; and William Adam, a Scottish Baptist missionary who was condemned as the “second fallen Adam” after his “conversion” to Unitarianism by Rammohun Roy, and who went on to cofound a utopian community in the United States. It explores the Calcutta Unitarian Committee's activities within the cosmopolitan milieu of early colonial Calcutta, and clarifies its role in the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, in the development of a unique approach to Christian mission among Unitarians, and in laying the foundations of a transnational network whose members were in the vanguard of religious innovation, radical social reform, and debates on the “woman question” in nineteenth-century India, Britain, and the United States. In conclusion, the article draws on the case study to offer some broader reflections on the relationship between utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism.