This article traces the history of one geographical concept, hinterland, through changing political contexts from the 1880s through the 1970s. Hinterland proved a valuable tool for states attempting to challenge the global territorial order in both the Scramble for Africa and the postwar world of nation-states. In the context of German territorial demands in East Africa, colonial propagandists used hinterland to knit together the first longue-durée histories of the Indian Ocean to cast Zanzibar as a failed colonial power and win control of the coast. In the 1940s, Indian nationalists revived hinterland as a concept for writing about the Indian Ocean, utilizing the concept to link areas far from the ocean to an informal Indian empire that could be rebuilt to its premodern glory through naval expansion. In both contexts, hinterland provided a geographical framework to challenge British dominance on the Indian Ocean. The shifting meaning and usage of the term indicates continuities in territoriality between the Scramble for Africa and postwar internationalism.

This article examines Libyan–US relations through the historical lenses of decolonization, international law, the Cold War, and the international political economy. The Libyan government exercised its newfound sovereignty in the postwar era through the negotiation of ‘base rights’ for the US government and ‘oil rights’ for corporations owned by US nationals. They did so in conjunction with other petrostates and through international organizations such as the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Libyan leaders’ strategy of using sovereignty to promote corporate competition relied on connections with similarly situated nations, and it was through global circuits of knowledge that they pressed the outer limits of economic sovereignty. At the same time, the US government consistently accommodated Libyan policies through Cold War arguments that linked the alliance with Libya to US national security. Those deep foundations of sovereignty and security created the conditions for the transformation of the global oil industry after Libya’s 1969 revolution.

The League Against Imperialism (LAI) was an international organization active from 1927 to 1937 that brought together communists, socialists, nationalists, trade unionists, and pacifists in order to coordinate their myriad ‘assaults against empire’. Founded with the support of the Communist International, the LAI at its peak had a membership of several hundred people, from every inhabited continent, among them prominent interwar activists and future heads of state. The organization aspired both to become an international movement and to coordinate specific instances of mass struggle. Exploring both aspects shows how the LAI interwove the global and the local in interwar anti-imperialist movements. This article draws from recent work on interwar anti-imperialism and internationalism as well as work on struggles for economic sovereignty in the 1960s–70s to argue that a critical aspect of the LAI’s anti-imperial politics concerned the relationship between political independence and the world economy. Through an examination of LAI members’ writings and public addresses, we can observe this relationship through the staging of their own claims for self-rule and control over land, labour, and resources.

Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which Black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.

Cooperative departments and organizations were a ubiquitous but rarely studied aspect of British colonial governance in the twentieth century. The Co-operative College in Britain provided specialized training in colonial cooperation to students from across the British Empire. The cooperative movement was a key part of the emergence of regimes of development in the decades between the 1920s and 1960s, reflecting their emphasis on modular solutions deployed by experts in an increasingly homogenizing ‘developing world’. However, the colonial and post-colonial students at the Co-operative College were also critical of colonialism and capitalism, participating in the anti-colonial internationalist effort to create a more just post-imperial world. As post-colonial governments retained cooperative structures, the former students of the Co-operative College used the movement as a counter-balance to the larger forces of nationalism and neo-colonialism.

With the rise of post-colonialism during the latter part of the twentieth century, more focus has been given to non-western perspectives (the so-called nativist turn). In the case of Indian Ocean trade during the early first millennium CE, the view that ‘Roman’ merchants and sailors were the near-exclusive movers of goods, who were also (indirectly) responsible for commercial developments within South Asia, has largely fallen into abeyance. Rightly, the agency of those in South Asia has been acknowledged. The present article goes beyond this basic premise and considers how we can assess evidence demonstrating the role played by sailors and merchants from South Asia. In particular, it is suggested these merchants and sailors played an important role in connecting the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal regions.

The Auckland Islands, a subantarctic archipelago 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, were the setting for one of the stranger episodes in the global history of colonial expansion. From 1849–52, these remote, inhospitable islands were governed and settled by a chartered company. The project was driven by lofty ambitions to simultaneously create a flourishing settler colony and unlock vast new whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean; the reality was a commercial disaster plagued by bitter internal disputes and a speedy abandonment. Drawing on the methods of global microhistory, I argue that the colonization of the Auckland Islands was a pivotal moment in the integration of the Southern Ocean world into global processes of governance, mobility, and trade. This anomalous case contributes to recent scholarship on ‘company-states’ and the central role of such hybrid polities in processes of cross-regional interaction and globalization.

Popular support for the League of Nations spread around the world in the interwar period but it did not spread evenly. Instead, it was concentrated in white-majority countries: both in Europe and beyond in the form of settler societies around the world. This article explores the relationship between the League movement and white supremacy in one such community: Australia. Citizens in that country combined their allegiance to the League with their beliefs in white supremacy: about the need to restrict immigration through the ‘White Australia’ policy; about the rationale of them ruling over non-white peoples in the territories they held under League ‘mandate’; and about their treatment of Indigenous Australians. In short, they were ‘white internationalists’. Australia’s white internationalists were relatively few. But they reveal a global history of popular white internationalism. Interwar Australians might have been some of the most blatant white internationalists but they were far from the only ones.

Despite the growth of studies on slavery and slave trade outside the Atlantic world in recent years, especially in the early modern Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, our knowledge of regional price levels and their development remains surprisingly underdeveloped. This article questions how the price of enslaved people developed in the multi-directional and multi-faceted Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago slave trade, how this compared to the Atlantic world and what this tells us about slave trade and slavery in different parts of the world. Drawing on evidence from a large variety of sources, mainly from the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world, this article expands the body of data significantly and provides for the first time a reconstruction of the level of slave trade prices and their development in several important supplying and demanding slave trade regions in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago world and compares these to the development of slave prices in the Atlantic slave trade.

Were the effects of First World War truly similar globally? A comparison of how the conflict was perceived by two extremely different groups of rural people – southern Americans of the Jackson Purchase region of far western Kentucky and Africans in the small British Protectorate of Nyasaland in south central Africa – makes their microhistories significant rather than trivial by placing them a global context. In the early twentieth century, both groups were not only rural, but removed, decidedly disconnected from each other. Yet, drawing on documentary evidence, especially interviews with the last generation of First World War survivors in both regions, offers a significant perspective on how similar their experiences actually became in the crucible of a global war. The call to arms, their recruitment and resistance to service, combat adversities and cultural experiences, post-war disillusionments and triumphs, and especially the economic consequences of their war provide penetrating insights into the wide-ranging ordeals and opportunities that this first truly global event offered peoples worldwide.