This article narrates the development of a set of ideas and provocative imagery about population growth and movement that has shaped the way people think about world politics. It represented humanity in terms of populations that could and should be controlled to prevent degeneration and preserve civilization. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this discursive tradition supported a series of political projects that aimed to either exclude those deemed able to subsist on less and reproduce more or regulate reproduction worldwide. Conceiving of the world in terms of populations – rather than nation-states – led people to think of new ways in which it might be divided, unsettling diplomatic alignments and alliances. But it also contributed to critiques of state sovereignty, since population problems were said to affect everyone and require a united response. This intellectual history helps illuminate some of the local and parochial reasons why people began to ‘think globally’.

The aim of this paper is to compare international migrations in two different periods of history, both of them marked by a rapid increase in the trend: the first period runs from 1870 to 1914, and the second from 1965 to 2000. Historical and current migration system maps are compared, together with their different combinations of push and pull factors, and of coerced and free migrations. The various repercussions that international migrations have on demographic structure and on the economic systems of the sending and receiving countries are counterbalanced by a number of significant analogies that occur at the microlevel (individual and community) of the mechanisms governing the decision to migrate, and of migrants’ identities and behavioural patterns. The final section shows that migrants in both periods retain ties to both their old and new countries (as indicated by remittances and return migration), despite the major obstacles that stand in the way of the free circulation of international migrants today. This suggests that an analysis of migration systems, emphasizing ongoing interactions of various sorts between sending and receiving areas, is superior to either a model based on the presumption that assimilation will occur over time or one which presumes an irreducible ‘multiculturalism’.

In 1907–1908, the British labour leader, James Keir Hardie, made a round-the-world tour, which included visits to India, Australasia and southern Africa. The support for Indian nationalism which he expressed precipitated a major international political controversy, in the course of which Hardie came under severe attack from the Right, both in Britain and in her colonies. In southern Africa, the issue, combined with Hardie’s earlier criticism of the repression of the 1906 Bambatha rising in Natal, sparked rioting against Hardie by British settlers during his visit. This article seeks to show how Hardie’s voyage illuminates the imperial politics of its moment. Hardie’s journey demonstrates how politics in the British colonies of his era took place not within local political boundaries, but in a single field which covered both metropolis and colonies. The article is a case study which helps to illustrate and develop an argument that the white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of nationally discrete entities, but were bound together into an imperial working class which developed a distinct common ideology, White Labourism, fusing elements of racism and xenophobia with worker militancy and anti-capitalism. The current paper refines this analysis of the politics of the imperial working class by situating it in relation to the rising force of Indian nationalism in the same period, and to the changes this development generated in the politics of the settler colonies and the imperial centre. In India, Hardie forged links with the dynamic new political mobilization that had followed on the crisis over the partition of Bengal. In doing so, he entered, as an ally, into the discursive struggle which Indian nationalists were waging for self-government. By taking a pro-Indian position he antagonized the British Right. Labourites in the white settlement colonies wanted to defend Hardie, as a representative figure of British labour, but were embarrassed by the fact that Hardie’s position on India went against the grain of White Labourist ideology. In southern Africa, local leaders of British labour did opt to defend Hardie. But they did so not only at the risk of alienating their members, but also at the price of being forced into direct confrontations with anti-Hardie groupings.

German political Orientalists in the era of the First World War thought that new ethnographic methods and insights would allow them to coax Muslim populations throughout the Middle East and South Asia into violent revolt against the British. The European imperial mindset insisted that non-Western peoples could be mastered and masterminded at whim. In fact, German pursuit of absolute control of Asian populations led to their loss of control, as their misrecognitions of the facts on the ground placed them in relationships of mutually-affecting lived encounter with Indian revolutionaries. While these interactions remained largely limited to the realm of military operations during the war, they opened up into ideological encounters on the radical fringes of Weimar society in the war’s aftermath. Yet far from a study of humanistic exchange or understanding, this essay seeks to historicize the meetings of Germans and Indian émigrés and show how misrepresentations and power asymmetries were endemic to the encounter between these groups.

This essay examines the role of ‘trust’ and cooperation in early modern long-distance trade. While most literature on the subject posits trust as a given attribute of long-distance merchant communities and not as a factor in need of historical explanation or analysis, this essay seeks to provide a historical explanation for the creation and role of trust in such communities. It focuses on the history of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theoretical model this essay relies upon to explain trust among Julfan Armenian merchants derives from ‘social capital’ theory as elaborated in sociology and economic sociology, as well as theory from the New Institutional Economics associated with the influential work of Avner Greif. Unlike the latter body of work, however, this essay argues that Julfan trust must be understood not solely as an outcome of informal institutions such as reputation-regulating mechanisms discussed by Greif in his work on Maghribi Jews of the medieval period, but also as a result of the simultaneous combination of both informal and semi-formal legal institutions. In the Julfan context, the essay thus focuses on a merchant arbitrage institution known as the Assembly of Merchants, which enabled Julfan merchants to generate and maintain trust, trustworthiness and uniform norms necessary for collective action and cooperation.

Tropical Africa has not fared well either in the contemporary world order or in the globalization literature that has accompanied it. Under such labels as ‘black hole’ ‘blank space’ and ‘the hopeless continent’, this part of the world seems hardly worthy of attention in the study of the connections and energies that define the twenty-first century.