This article focuses on the essays that évolués wrote and Félix Eboué presented to participants at the Brazzaville Conference in 1944 and specifically analyzes how this group of elite Africans understood and participated in debates on citizenship, empire, and rights and how they articulated their arguments about the future of French colonialism to the most important decision-makers in the francophone world. For these évolué writers, the continuation of French colonialism was a necessity with no immediate end in sight. Their arguments, which ranged from expanded citizenship rights for elites to the dangers of assimilation, captured the fraught social, political, economic, and intellectual landscapes of wartime French colonial Africa. As a result, their letters tell us a great deal about both not only their beliefs and desires for the future but also the nature of reform that Félix Eboué felt comfortable sharing at the Brazzaville Conference with other colonial administrators and stakeholders in 1944.

The Second World War, although rarely an explicit topic in Hindi literature, was a crucial moment not only in articulating the politics of the nationalist movement, but in imagining new configurations of national and international space. This article considers a brief travelogue by the poet and novelist S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ that describes a journey from Assam to the borders of Afghanistan. Although purportedly a description of travel across a historical and mythic landscape of then-undivided India, Are yāyāvar rahegā yād? [Oh Wanderer, will you Remember?] unfolds in the final moments of the war effort in India in 1945. Agyeya, who, uniquely among major literary figures, joined the British Army despite being arrested for terrorism in the 1930s, was tasked with leading a convoy of jeeps from Parshuram, Assam, to Torkham, on what is today the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, the majority of the route, through landscapes both of mythology and history as well as fuel depots and off-duty American soldiers, is narrated by the tyre of one of these jeeps. ‘Are Yayavar’ thus reveals a tense interrelationship between the unified, religio-historical space of India which the text presents the reader, and the world of international mobilization created by the war. Ultimately, Agyeya’s travelogue shows how Hindi writers engaged with the Second World War, and the ideas of space that it created, as ways of imagining the interrelations between national and international space in the first years of independence.

This article is about the experiences of three Chinese men who were involved in smuggling between India and China during the Second World War. Chen Mengzhao's rise as a leading figure in India-China smuggling in Calcutta uncovers the hidden links between the black markets in India and China during the Second World War. Gao Wenjie disguised himself as a Chinese army officer and utilized this fake identity to facilitate his smuggling business. Wang Li-an was sent to Calcutta to undertake smuggling for a Chinese government department. In telling these stories, this article argues that most smuggling in modern India and China was undertaken in transnational contexts that resulted in transnational effects. Ironically, the Nationalist government's state-building project to contain India-China smuggling ended by facilitating it. This project was further perceived by the British authorities as a Chinese conspiracy against India's sovereignty. The misunderstanding between the Chinese and British authorities led to the end of Chinese immigration to India in 1945. Overall, this article provides a new perspective to make sense of the tensions between the Chinese, Indian, and British governments during the Second World War.

Through the lens of the multinational staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS), this article argues that a technocratic programme of reconstruction evolved in the Nationalist government's wartime efforts on post-war planning, which refashioned a cadre of foreign (semi-)colonial-era experts into technocrats serving a sovereign state. This episode, in which the weakened Customs Service reclaimed its significance for the Chinese state, occurred in China's wartime capital, Chongqing. After the abrogation of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ with foreign powers in January 1943, China entered a post-treaty era, and the question of retaining long-serving foreign Customs Service employees perplexed Nationalist leaders. Eventually, China's huge post-war need for foreign expertise, networks, and imports led to a moderate staff reorganization of the CMCS, with foreign technocrats being kept on and other bureaucrats either shifted to advisory positions or being forced to retire. Technical expertise provided a new guise for the European and American presence in post-imperialist China. Taking the rehabilitation of coastal lighthouses as an example, this article demonstrates the significance of foreign technocrats to the Chinese state during the last phase of the Sino-Japanese War and in its immediate aftermath. In showing the ambition and preparations of the Nationalist government for a post-war era, this article corrects a narrative of an all-out collapse of the Nationalist government from the mid-1940s. The wartime evolution of the Customs Service further highlights the growing importance of technocrats in the decolonizing world.