Traditional American historiography has dismissed the Liberian settlement scheme as impractical, racist, and naïve. The movement of Americans to Liberia, and other territorial and extraterritorial destinations, however, reveals the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that influenced movement in the African diaspora. The reaction of different African Americans to these factors influenced the political and social development of Liberia as well as the colony's image at home. Africans migrating within and beyond US borders participated in a broader movement of people and the development of settler ideology in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the impact of the late 1970s ‘breakthrough’ in human rights, as it was registered within the United Nations. It analyses the debates on human rights at the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in December 1978, and those a decade later. These two moments, among the few that invited explicit reflection from states on the meaning of human rights, and of their universality, reveal that the effects of the ‘breakthrough’ arrived at the UN after a long period of latency. Even by 1988, their manifestation was only partial, and often contradictory. The profound gap between the efflorescence in the NGO movement and the depressing stasis, or worse, elsewhere suggests the need for a more complex periodization of the 1970s as an era of decisive triumph in the ascent of human rights.

This article examines the life and ideas of Josef Schmidlin, the founder of Catholic ‘missionary science’ and the most influential German Catholic missionary theorist of the first half of the twentieth century. An admirer of the German Protestant missionary theologian Gustav Warneck, Schmidlin often appears in the historiography as a forerunner of the Protestant–Catholic ecumenical collaboration that emerged after the Second World War. Yet a close examination of his writing reveals a vigorous critic of Protestantism and the Protestant ecumenical movement. A sceptic of transnational missionary organizations, he remained a firm supporter of the German nation and imperial project. This article gestures towards both the continuities and the discontinuities between the early attempts at fostering confessional cooperation between Protestants and Catholics and the later iterations. It also examines how nineteenth-century entanglements between missions and empire shaped the ideas of Catholic missionary theory during the interwar years.

In 1921, the United States introduced national immigration quotas. Although designed to curb the arrival of ‘undesirables’ from south-east Europe, this quota system also applied to Britain and its white Dominions. By 1929, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were each allocated 100 quota places per annum. The British quota was far greater, but still struggled to meet demand. Through a focus on the Australian example, this article investigates how an immigration regime intended to bolster America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity also exposed the limits of Anglospheric kinship by closing the gates to white Britons. Although the quotas had a comparatively minor impact on Britons, their exclusion held great significance in the context of Anglo-American relations, where the rhetoric of transnational white solidarity produced expectations of unqualified welcome in the United States. After 1921, as such welcome disappeared and then failed to rematerialize, the global community of white men’s countries was shaken and remade.

Mountains and highlands are not what scholars have conventionally imagined them to be: environments that limit and constrain their inhabitants in deterministic ways. Rather, mountains and highlands provide unique opportunities for people to engage in creative transformation of their societies. Highland communities are connected to a wider world, and they radically remake and experiment with their landscapes, settlements, and societies. Mountains serve as birthplaces and testing grounds for statecraft, urbanism, irrigation, and monumental landscape engineering. Here we explore the diversity of highland communities by analysing the latest archaeological and historical discoveries from three regions across Southeast Asia: the Kulen mountains (Cambodia), the volcanoes of central Java (Indonesia), and the Ifugao highlands (the Philippines). We find that, far from being a negative image of the ‘civilized’ lowlands, mountains were creative, diverse, dynamic, and well-connected places. This compels us to change the way we conceive of today’s highland communities and their relationships to modern nation-states.

This essay situates the Harlem Renaissance in a world-historical context by building on the global perspective offered by the architect of that renaissance, Alain Locke. It demonstrates that contemporaries like Locke saw the Harlem Renaissance to be a local episode in a broader phenomenon of racial and national renaissance that included post-war developments in Ireland and Mexico. The core argument is that American progressives found in these renaissances three distinct models for defining the proper relationship between race and nation: in the Irish case, a racially homogeneous nation-state premised on a repudiation of the colonizer and his culture; in the Mexican case, a syncretic nation-state based on the cultural and biological fusion of the colonizer and colonized; and in the Harlem case, a pluralist nationstate that held in balance otherwise relatively autonomous races.

We live in an age of increasingly abundant statistical information. The advent of more large data sets obtained from household surveys, as well as from population censuses, labour force surveys, economic censuses and so on, has facilitated reasonably accurate estimates of income and expenditures for households in many parts of the world. These estimates can in turn be used to estimate a number of distributional indicators, as well as estimates of relative and absolute poverty. In addition better census coverage has permitted estimates of infant and child mortality rates, life expectancies, literacy rates and indicators of educational attainment. Such data have in turn been used to estimate composite indicators of wellbeing such as the Human Development Index, not just for entire countries but often for regions within countries as well.

The transnational campaign against the Italian invasion of the Ethiopian Empire (1936–36) has been widely acknowledged as a turning point for antiracist and anticolonial political organizing in the African continent and diaspora. This article seeks to reconstruct the South Asian participation in the Hands Off Ethiopia protests, to expand historical knowledge of the early-twentieth-century development of Afro-Asian solidarity ties as well as the intersection of anti-Fascist and anticolonial struggles. It examines the institutional responses to the invasion on the part of the Indian Legislative Assembly, and a series of demonstrations, local meetings and boycotts whose implications reverberated in the local and international press as well as in the concerns of British colonial authorities. As will be argued, this mobilization was fueled by feelings of racial solidarity, anti-imperialist analyses, anti-caste critiques, scriptural interpretations and religious universalisms.

As the post-colonial Global South was weaving together the Third World Movement in the 1950s, it was also struggling to arrive at a common definition of colonialism. Since the movement was primarily premised on anti-colonial sentiments, redefining the term ‘colonialism’ could change its parameters. This article examines debates between three Asian leaders – Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno, and Sir John Kotelawala – who proposed three different meanings of colonialism. These definitions were informed by distinct ways that the colonial experience was remembered in their respective countries. Each definition was meant to redirect the energies of the Third World Movement towards a different vision of a post-colonial global order. The three leaders debated this question in major Afro-Asian conferences of the mid-twentieth century. Their disagreements represented a foundational fissure in the movement. Relying on primary sources from multiple countries, this article recovers a political dialogue within the Global South unmediated by the West, which is often ignored by the scholarship.

This article analyses the resilience of domestic textile production in Java and sub-Saharan Africa to uncover how local industries coped with the effects of broader global and colonial forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We demonstrate that many domestic handicraft manufacturers managed to survive due to specific competitive advantages. Strategies of product differentiation, responsiveness to shifting consumer needs, and flexibility in manufacturing methods enabled local producers to remain competitive in confrontation with mounting imports from early factories, typically constituting cheap, but lower quality and less unique products. Some local manufacturers could even compete based on price given the very low labour costs associated with seasonally-oriented handicraft production, which raises questions about the extent of the comparative advantage enjoyed by early-industrializing nations in the Global North. The capacity of domestic textile producers to remain competitive amid colonial policies aimed at capturing local markets – and raw cotton sources – highlights not only the importance of product differentiation and the specificity of local demand, but also the agency exercised by both producers and consumers under colonial rule.

In the global ideological movements of the early twentieth century, notably communism, new political concepts moved across different cultures. Together with the process of internationalization, this led to problems concerning the translation and interpretation of linguistic terms. Based on little-studied sources deposited in the Comintern archive in Moscow, this article shows that, although the members of the newly formed Malayan Communist Party (1930) were virtually all Chinese, it became the first organization to discuss directly the possibility of a multi-ethnic Malayan nation within the borders of the Malay Peninsula. As the Comintern encouraged the establishment of ‘national’ communist parties, the ambiguity of the Chinese word minzu resulted in the emergence of a discourse regarding the Malayan ‘nation’, which would be liberated from colonialism under communist leadership.

Building on recent research into the religious aspects of the Cold War and the humanitarian efforts of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in early twentieth-century Europe, this article locates the historical origins of religious anti-communism in late imperial Russian reactions to the revolution of 1905–07. It explores the interactions of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals, especially Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, with prominent YMCA leaders such as Donald A. Lowrie and Paul B. Anderson, both of whom were mainline Protestants. Using Russian and US archives, the article documents the networks and mechanisms through which Berdyaev influenced his YMCA contacts. It shows that he shaped their efforts to fight communism in the interwar period and early Cold War through the promotion of religious values, or what Anderson referred to as ‘a Christian solution to international tension’. This concept was derived from early twentieth-century Russian ideas about the opposition between Christianity and ‘nihilism’ or ‘humanism’ as integral worldviews.

This article traces the global humanitarian sector’s late twentieth-century embrace of human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. Drawing on evidence from NGOs in three Anglophone states (Britain, Canada, and Ireland), it examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the breakthrough for human rights activism in that period, and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. From that foundation, the article makes two claims. First, it argues that the ‘triumph’ of human rights in the late twentieth century was the product of a complex set of diplomatic, intellectual, and ideological factors that were of global, rather than simply of Western, origin. Second, by tracing what could and could not be done in the name of humanitarianism, the article brings us closer to understanding how even the most outwardly progressive vision of intervention was produced within a very specific – hierarchical and paternalistic – imagining of the Global South.

The historiography of the twentieth-century refugee typically unfolds as a tale of national displacement followed by international surrogate protection. This article challenges that narrative by reframing the modern refugee as an emerging category of statistics and demography. Focusing on the world’s first international refugee survey, which was led by former British colonial administrator John Hope Simpson in 1937–39, the article situates the attempt to count and classify refugees across borders within scientific debates on global population control and white resettlement. While refugees’ mobility initially eluded established parameters of national demographic measurement, Hope Simpson drew on precedents of census work and migration schemes within the British Empire to counter their unpredictability. Revealing how the tenet of colonial demography shaped mid-century views on the ‘refugee problem’, the article broadens the space of refugee history beyond nation states and international institutions and emphasizes the relevance of statistics in turning refugees into a global post-war category.

This article explores the attitudes and policies of the International Missionary Council (IMC) concerning Africa and African Americans. It aims to revise historical scholarship that views the ecumenical missionary movement as originating in white Western missions and guided by the goals of post-war internationalism. It argues that the IMC, founded in 1921 as the central institution for coordinating Protestant missions around the world, developed an ecumenical definition of pan-Africanism. This definition cast African Americans from the US south in the role of ‘native’ leaders in the formation of indigenous churches in Africa. With this racialized version of Christian indigenization, the IMC excluded African Christian groups that sought to form their own churches. It promoted, instead, European colonial projects and missionary societies that aimed to use African American missionaries to counter the incendiary ideas of pan-Africanism.

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studies of contemporary Islamic societies demonstrate the relative autonomy of commoners’ religious observance, and the tendency of elites towards accommodation. Evidence from a recently Islamized region in East Africa shows that, rather than following elite converts, ordinary villagers initiated rural Islamization. They learned from coastal Muslim ritual rather than scripture, and evoked Islam to challenge social hierarchies and assert a more egalitarian social ethos. The possibility of similar processes also exists in other sites of gradual Islamization.

The article looks at the entanglement of the international ecumenical movement and Latin American Protestantism in the ‘long 1960s’. It investigates the influence and significance of Latin American liberation theology for the churches and theology around the world. During this period, it was particularly the World Council of Churches (WCC), a worldwide fellowship of Christian churches, which strengthened the efforts of churches from the ‘Third World’ to identify their own theological issues and questions. In this way, the WCC strongly supported Latin American Protestant church leaders and theologians in giving specific attention to their own context. The article argues that the ‘boom’ of Latin American Protestantism within the WCC in the 1960s and early 1970s brought into the global ecumenical movement both new theological concepts, such as revolution and liberation, and individuals exiled from Latin America. Yet this contextual and emancipatory approach revealed at the same time fundamental differences and conflicts between churches of the North and South.

The structure of the USA and the countries that emerged from the remains of Gran Colombia ultimately took different shapes from those suggested in the era immediately after independence, particularly in regard to the extent of each state's fiscal and monetary capacities. This article applies Oszlak's model of ‘stateness’ to the early financial and monetary histories of the USA (roughly 1776–93) and Gran Colombia (roughly 1819–35) to assess and compare the role of financial and monetary capacities in long-run state consolidation and economic development. The US was ultimately more successful than Gran Colombia at adapting its financial and monetary capacities and institutions, creating better conditions for the attainment of ‘stateness’, stronger economic growth, and greater endurance as a national entity. The comparison ultimately suggests a reciprocal relationship between the legitimization of a state's authority (that is, state consolidation) and the development and solidification of fiscal and monetary capacities.

Visions of media spanning the globe and connecting cultures have been around at least since the birth of telegraphy, yet they have always fallen short of realities. Nevertheless, with the internet, a global infrastructure has emerged, which, together with mobile and smartphones, has rapidly changed the media landscape. This far-reaching digital connectedness makes it increasingly clear that the main implications of media lie in the extent to which they reach into everyday life. This article puts this reach into historical context, arguing that, in the pre-modern period, geographically extensive media networks only extended to a small elite. With the modern print revolution, media reach became both more extensive and more intensive. Yet it was only in the late nineteenth century that media infrastructures penetrated more widely into everyday life. Apart from a comparative historical perspective, several social science disciplines can be brought to bear in order to understand the ever more globalizing reach of media infrastructures into everyday life, including its limits. To date, the vast bulk of media research is still concentrated on North America and Europe. Recently, however, media research has begun to track broader theoretical debates in the social sciences, and imported debates about globalization from anthropology, sociology, political science, and international relations. These globalizing processes of the media research agenda have been shaped by both political developments and changes in media, including the Cold War, decolonization, the development of the internet and other new media technologies, and the rise of populist leaders.