Modernist art music of the interwar period takes its place among other early Australian musical modernisms. It developed within an antipodean modernity transformed by new technologies of transport and communication. Mobility – the movement of people, scores, print journalism and recordings – is central here. Using a conceptual framework informed by transnational historical approaches and expanded understandings of the unsettled and contested concept of modernism, this chapter provides a more generous reading of this musical moment long obscured by the concerns and anxieties of a young nation negotiating its complicated ties to Britain and continental Europe while searching for a distinctive culture. After tracing the emergence of a modernist musical discourse in Australia’s popular press, this chapter looks at the output of a group of composers and various forms of modernist musicking to reveal a transnational community of Australian musicians who actively participated in what can be understood as a modernist music world.

The introduction leverages the insights and interventions of world, global, and transnational histories to bring a rich world of interaction between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century to life. After overviewing the layered connections that formed the Sino–Philippine link, which is the subject of the book, the introduction turns toward methodological approaches that best expose and explore the depths of those connections. It starts this endeavor by highlighting some limitations of world, global, and transnational history, such as their tendency to be prescriptive rather than responsive, their tendency to privilege actors and institutions from the Global North, and the high cost of entry for new scholars to the field. It argues that, while these limitations are important to recognize, transnational, global, and world histories still have much to offer if they can become more accessible, flexible, and representative. Finally, the introduction outlines the approach of the book, which adopts an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected approach to world history that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender.

Mexico City in the mid-1920s was a crucial gathering point for Latin American anti-imperialists. This chapter retraces the emergence of a common agenda among Communists, radical Mexican peasant movements, and exiled dissidents from across the region, focusing on the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) and its publication, El Libertador. While it drew on the region’s deep anti-imperialist traditions, the convergence that took place in the wake of Mexico’s 1910–1920 Revolution was decisively shaped by transnational connections with the Communist International, which served as a conduit to anticolonial movements across the world. In the second half of the 1920s, LADLA and El Libertador not only animated movements for regional solidarity – notably against the US occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti – they also showcased a newly global anticolonial sensibility, drawing parallels between Latin America’s situation and those of peoples subject to direct or indirect colonial rule in Africa, India, and China.

The introduction sets out the theoretical, methodological, and empirical basis for this study. This research explores the evolution of Irish nationalism in Britain through four thematic lenses: the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, the British Empire. Read collectively, these analytical frameworks can sharpen historical perspectives on the ideological development, communal function, and individual expression of Irish nationalism. To explore the history of the Irish in Britain between 1912 and 1922 is to interrogate a ‘crisis of (national) identity’ in terms of both ‘self’ and ‘other’. Original conceptual frameworks are supported by ‘new’ methodological approaches. Following the linguistic turn of the ‘new’ political history, this study explores representations of Irish nationalism in Britain in the ‘cultural’ spaces between ‘high politics’ and ‘history from below’: political platforms, texts, and languages. This study investigates the Irish Home Rule and republican movements using underutilised archival sources. The T.P. O’Connor papers, Art Ó Briain papers, and Catholic Herald newspaper series collectively establish a robust archival foundation by which to evaluate the significance of Irish nationalism in Britain during the Irish Revolution. The book is divided into five chapters which chronologically, and thematically, examine Irish nationalism in Britain between 1912 and 1922.

This conclusion elaborates three implications of the arguments of this book. First, it argues that the importance of exchange diplomacy in Sino-American rapprochement demonstrates the limits of Henry Kissinger’s understanding of rapprochement as dictated by geostrategic maneuvering and high-level diplomacy. We need, this conclusion posits, a more holistic account of Sino-American diplomacy to fully explain the development of that relationship through the 1970s. Second, this conclusion argues that the interconnection between Sino-American exchange and high diplomacy offers a case study of the value in connecting transnational and diplomatic history – an insight that has implications for both fields. Third and finally, the conclusion reflects on the lessons we can draw from the US-China exchange relationship of the 1970s in understanding the prospects for Sino-American cooperation in the twenty-first century.

This introduction outlines the central argument of this book: diplomacy via cultural and scientific exchange was critically important to the changing relationship between the societies and governments of China and the United States between 1969 and 1978. This argument challenges the established account of Sino-American relations in this period: as determined by summit diplomacy between the top leaders in Washington and Beijing. Instead, this book reveals how a far broader and more diverse cast of Chinese and Americans—athletes, musicians, scientists, and many others—played a central role in the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Transnational societal contacts were interactively connected to high diplomacy between the US and Chinese governments and these two tracks of Sino-American diplomacy were mutually constitutive. This introduction places this argument in the context of the historiography of US-China relations and provides a sense of the scale and nature of Sino-American cultural and scientific exchange in this period.

Chapter 5 examines how the Great Plague Scare unfolded in the entangled colonial empires of France and Spain. Despite their intertwined histories in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic, few works in the English language have focused on Franco-Spanish colonial relations. The chapter describes the orders coming from the metropoles for dealing with the threat of plague and analyzes how those on the ground ultimately responded. In the end, it answers the question, what was different in the colonies? It opens in Fort Royal, Martinique, where a major scandal unfolded when a French vessel arrived from the Languedocien port of Sète. What I call the “Sète affair” offers the opportunity to examine the “spirit of sedition” that endured in the French Antilles well before the Age of Revolution. The chapter then transitions to plague-time violence and Franco-Spanish relations in the Caribbean and demonstrates that the demands of the metropole were not always in line with the needs or wants of the people in the overseas colonies. On the surface, disaster centralism during the Plague of Provence seemed to extend from Europe to the colonies, but on the ground, local needs and economic concerns often outweighed the demands of a far-flung ruler.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

The introduction lays out the book’s main arguments and themes, and compares the Royal Navy to the two different contexts which it straddled: the maritime world, and the armed forces. Naval service was more strictly regulated and anchored in the structures of the state than work in the merchant marine, and it was invested with explicit national and patriotic meaning. However, it also differed from service in the Army, as it required a good proportion of recruits to have specialised skills, and usually integrated them all into mixed crews, rather than establishing separate ‘foreign’ units. The Navy’s peculiar status, suspended between the military and national on the one hand, and the maritime and transnational on the other, is what makes it an important case study. If ‘foreign Jack Tars’ were in some senses mercenary fighters, they were also primarily – like ‘British’ Jack Tars themselves – a transnational, mobile, and often highly professionalised seafaring workforce. Studying them in the crucial historical juncture of the French Wars allows us to present a transnational history of a national institution, expose the compromises and contradictions underlying the power of modern states, and probe and deconstruct the very meaning of the term ‘foreigner’.

This chapter introduces and contextualizes the book's focus on the Portuguese retornados or returnees and argues that by spotlighting their history, we illuminate the remaking of the Portuguese nation in a world after empire. Via Portugal’s returnees, we grasp how decolonization reshaped Western European societies – their demographic makeup, their laws and institutions, their notions of the national community, their political communication, and their public memories.