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  3. Global and International History

The Global and International History series seeks to publish cutting-edge work at the intersection of the new International History and the new World History. Its editors are interested in projects that go beyond traditional units of analysis and adopt frameworks that are transnational, international, or global. The series editors encourage submissions that bring historical perspective to bear on such topics as empire and its legacies, anticolonialism, globalization and international governance, and transnational diffusions of ideas and practices.

  • General Editors: Erez Manela, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Heather Salter, Northeastern University, Boston

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18 results in Global and International History

An International Anomaly
  • Colonial Accession to the League of Nations
  • Thomas Gidney
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, was carried forward, allowing colonies to accede as member-states. Colonies such as India, Ireland, Egypt, and many more were afforded a tokenistic representation at the League in Geneva during the interwar years, decades before their independence. Thomas Gidney unites three geographically distinct case studies to demonstrate the evolution of Britain's policy from a range of different viewpoints, exploring how this policy came into being, and why it was only exploited by the British Empire. He argues that this membership shaped colonial norms around sovereignty and international recognition in the interwar period and to the present day. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

States-in-Waiting
  • A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization
  • Lydia Walker
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • After the Second World War, national self-determination became a recognized international norm, yet it only extended to former colonies. Groups within postcolonial states that made alternative sovereign claims were disregarded or actively suppressed. Showcasing their contested histories, Lydia Walker offers a powerful counternarrative of global decolonization, highlighting little-known regions, marginalized individuals, and their hidden (or lost) archives. She depicts the personal connections that linked disparate nationalist struggles across the globe through advocacy networks, demonstrating that these advocates had their own agendas and allegiances, which, she argues, could undermine the autonomy of the claimants they supported. By foregrounding particular nationalist movements in South Asia and Southern Africa and their transnational advocacy networks, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization—the unfinished and improvised ways that the state-centric international system replaced empire, which left certain claims of sovereignty perpetually awaiting recognition. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Anticolonial Transnational
  • Imaginaries, Mobilities, and Networks in the Struggle against Empire
  • Edited by Erez Manela, Heather Streets-Salter
  • Published online:
    10 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • This volume is the first to explore transnational anticolonialism as a general global phenomenon that spanned the entire twentieth century. Its collected essays model both a broadening of the issues under consideration and the collaboration necessary to do justice to the scope of this vibrant field. They showcase new work by scholars who explore the anticolonial transnational in multiple geographical regions, from a variety of perspectives, and at many different times across the long twentieth century. Revealing that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, these essays also demonstrate that centering transnational connections can change our understanding of the anticolonial past. The legacies of transnational anticolonial strategies and networks fundamentally shaped the present. Together, these essays present a fresh, kaleidoscopic view of the geographical, chronological, and thematic possibilities of the global anticolonial transnational.

African Activists in a Decolonising World
  • The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966
  • Ismay Milford
  • Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • As wars of liberation in Africa and Asia shook the post-war world, a cohort of activists from East and Central Africa, specifically the region encompassing present-day Malawi, Zambia, Uganda and mainland Tanzania, asked what role they could play in the global anticolonial landscape. Through the perspective of these activists, Ismay Milford presents a social and intellectual history of decolonisation and anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on multi-archival research, she brings together their trajectories for the first time, reconstructing the anticolonial culture that underpinned their journeys to Delhi, Cairo, London, Accra and beyond. Forming committees and publishing pamphlets, these activists worked with pan-African and Afro-Asian solidarity projects, Cold War student internationals, spiritual internationalists and diverse pressure groups. Milford argues that a focus on their everyday labour and knowledge production highlights certain limits of transnational and international activism, opening up a critical – albeit less heroic – perspective on the global history of anticolonial work and thought.

Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982
  • Florian Wagner
  • Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • In 1893, a group of colonial officials from thirteen countries abandoned their imperial rivalry and established the International Colonial Institute (ICI), which became the world's most important colonial think tank of the twentieth century. Through the lens of the ICI, Florian Wagner argues that this international cooperation reshaped colonialism as a transimperial and governmental policy. The book demonstrates that the ICI's strategy of using indigenous institutions and customary laws to encourage colonial development served to maintain colonial rule even beyond the official end of empires. By selectively choosing loyalists among the colonized to participate in the ICI, it increased their autonomy while equally delegitimizing more radical claims for independence. The book presents a detailed study of the ICI's creation, the transcolonial activities of its prominent members, its interactions with the League of Nations and fascist governments, and its role in laying the groundwork for the structural and discursive dependence of the Global South after 1945.

Saving the World?
  • Western Volunteers and the Rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex
  • Agnieszka Sobocinska
  • Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021
  • From the 1950s, tens of thousands of well-meaning Westerners left their homes to volunteer in distant corners of the globe. Aflame with optimism, they set out to save the world, but their actions were invariably intertwined with decolonization, globalization and the Cold War. Closely exploring British, American and Australian programs, Agnieszka Sobocinska situates Western volunteers at the heart of the 'humanitarian-development complex'. This nexus of governments, NGOs, private corporations and public opinion encouraged continuous and accelerating intervention in the Global South from the 1950s. Volunteers attracted a great deal of support in their home countries. But critics across the Global South protested that volunteers put an attractive face on neocolonial power, and extended the logic of intervention embedded in the global system of international development. Saving the World? brings together a wide range of sources to construct a rich narrative of the meeting between Global North and Global South.

Race, Rights and Reform
  • Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War
  • Sarah C. Dunstan
  • Published online:
    01 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Sarah C. Dunstan constructs a narrative of black struggles for rights and citizenship that spans most of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of people and movements from France and the United States, the French Caribbean and African colonies. She explores how black scholars and activists grappled with the connections between culture, race and citizenship and access to rights, mapping African American and Francophone black intellectual collaborations from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to the March on Washington in 1963. Connecting the independent archives of black activist organizations within America and France with those of international institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Comintern, Dunstan situates key black intellectuals in a transnational framework. She reveals how questions of race and nation intersected across national and imperial borders and illuminates the ways in which black intellectuals simultaneously constituted and reconfigured notions of Western civilization.

Anarchists of the Caribbean
  • Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion
  • Kirwin R. Shaffer
  • Published online:
    24 April 2020
    Print publication:
    14 May 2020
  • Anarchists who supported the Cuban War for Independence in the 1890s launched a transnational network linking radical leftists from their revolutionary hub in Havana, Cuba to South Florida, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Panama Canal Zone, and beyond. Over three decades, anarchists migrated around the Caribbean and back and forth to the US, printed fiction and poetry promoting their projects, transferred money and information across political borders for a variety of causes, and attacked (verbally and physically) the expansion of US imperialism in the 'American Mediterranean'. In response, US security officials forged their own transnational anti-anarchist campaigns with officials across the Caribbean. In this sweeping new history, Kirwin R. Shaffer brings together research in anarchist politics, transnational networks, radical journalism and migration studies to illustrate how men and women throughout the Caribbean basin and beyond sought to shape a counter-globalization initiative to challenge the emergence of modern capitalism and US foreign policy whilst rejecting nationalist projects and Marxist state socialism.

The Development Century
  • A Global History
  • Edited by Stephen J. Macekura, Erez Manela
  • Published online:
    03 September 2018
    Print publication:
    06 September 2018
  • This anthology offers a cutting-edge perspective on how development has shaped the history of the modern world. Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela have gathered together leading historians to examine development on the international, regional, and national levels, as well as local manifestations of development initiatives and transnational organizing on behalf of alternative approaches. Themes include the relationship between empire and development, the role of international institutions, the influence of the Cold War, decolonization and post-colonial development strategies, reform and resistance to development, development and global health, and the ecological effects of development. The Development Century examines how ideas and discourses about development have shaped its practices on the ground; explores the ways in which policymakers and experts attempted to implement development through specific institutions and policies; and analyzes development initiatives and their effect of local environments and people.

The Rinderpest Campaigns
  • A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century
  • Amanda Kay McVety
  • Published online:
    13 August 2018
    Print publication:
    23 August 2018
  • Amanda Kay McVety has written the first history of the international effort to eradicate rinderpest - a devastating cattle disease - which began in the 1940s and ended in 2011. Rinderpest is the only other disease besides smallpox to have been eradicated, but very few people in the United States know about it, because it did not infect humans and never broke out in North America. In other parts of the world, however, rinderpest was a serious economic and social burden and the struggle against it was a critical part of the effort to fight poverty and hunger globally. McVety follows the deployment of rinderpest vaccines around the globe, exploring the role of the environment in the understanding of development, internationalism, and national security. She expands the standard Cold War narratives to show how these concepts were framed not only by economic and political concerns, but also by biological ones.

Comrades against Imperialism
  • Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism
  • Michele L. Louro
  • Published online:
    22 February 2018
    Print publication:
    01 March 2018
  • In this book Michele L. Louro compiles the debates, introduces the personalities, and reveals the ideas that seeded Jawaharlal Nehru's political vision for India and the wider world. Set between the world wars, this book argues that Nehru's politics reached beyond India in order to fulfill a greater vision of internationalism that was rooted in his experiences with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist mobilizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Using archival sources from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia, the author offers a compelling study of Nehru's internationalism as well as contributes a necessary interwar history of institutions and networks that were confronting imperialist, capitalist, and fascist hegemony in the twentieth-century world. Louro provides readers with a global intellectual history of anti-imperialism and Nehru's appropriation of it, while also establishing a history of a typically overlooked period.

Volkswagen in the Amazon
  • The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil
  • Antoine Acker
  • Published online:
    12 October 2017
    Print publication:
    21 September 2017
  • From 1973 to 1987, Volkswagen's (VW) 140,000 hectare 'pioneer' cattle ranch on the Amazon frontier laid bare the limits of capitalist development. These limits were not only economic, with the core management of a multinational company engaged in the 'integration' of an extreme world periphery, but they were also legal and ethical, with the involvement of indentured labor and massive forest burning. Its physical limits were exposed by an unpredictable ecosystem refusing to submit to VW's technological arsenal. Antoine Acker reveals how the VW ranch, a major project supported by the Brazilian military dictatorship, was planned, negotiated, and eventually undone by the intervention of internationally connected actors and events.

Oil Revolution
  • Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization
  • Christopher R. W. Dietrich
  • Published online:
    04 July 2017
    Print publication:
    16 June 2017
  • Through innovative and expansive research, Oil Revolution analyzes the tensions faced and networks created by anti-colonial oil elites during the age of decolonization following World War II. This new community of elites stretched across Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria, and Libya. First through their western educations and then in the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, these elites transformed the global oil industry. Their transnational work began in the early 1950s and culminated in the 1973–4 energy crisis and in the 1974 declaration of a New International Economic Order in the United Nations. Christopher R. W. Dietrich examines how these elites brokered and balanced their ambitions via access to oil, the most important natural resource of the modern era.

Latin America and the First World War
  • Stefan Rinke
  • Published online:
    09 March 2017
    Print publication:
    09 February 2017
  • Using a broad variety of textual and visual sources, Latin America and the First World War goes beyond traditional diplomatic history and analyzes the global dimension of the history of the Great War. Filling a significant gap in transnational histories of the war, Stefan Rinke addresses political, social, and economic aspects as well as the cultural impact of the war on Latin America and vice versa. Rinke's meticulous research is based on sources from the nineteen independent states of the entire subcontinent and promises to be the most comprehensive examination to date of Latin America before, during, and immediately after the war.

Envisioning the Arab Future
  • Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967
  • Nathan J. Citino
  • Published online:
    02 March 2017
    Print publication:
    17 February 2017
  • Decades before 9/11 and the 'Arab Spring', US and Arab elites contended over the future of the Middle East. Through unprecedented research in Arabic and English, Envisioning the Arab Future details how Americans and Arabs - nationalists, Islamists, and communists - disputed the meaning of modernization within a shared set of Cold War-era concepts. Faith in linear progress, the idea that society functioned as a 'system', and a fascination with speed united officials and intellectuals who were otherwise divided by language and politics. This book assesses the regional implications of US power while examining a range of topics that transcends the Arab-Israeli conflict, including travel, communities, gender, oil, agriculture, Iraqi nationalism, Nasser's Arab Socialism, and hijackings in both the United States and the Middle East. By uncovering a shared history of modernization between Arabs and Americans, Envisioning the Arab Future challenges assumptions about a 'clash of civilizations' and profoundly reinterprets the antecedents of today's crises.

Humanitarian Invasion
  • Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan
  • Timothy Nunan
  • Published online:
    18 December 2015
    Print publication:
    26 January 2016
  • Humanitarian Invasion is the first book of its kind: a ground-level inside account of what development and humanitarianism meant for Afghanistan, a country touched by international aid like no other. Relying on Soviet, Western, and NGO archives, interviews with Soviet advisers and NGO workers, and Afghan sources, Timothy Nunan forges a vivid account of the impact of development on a country on the front lines of the Cold War. Nunan argues that Afghanistan functioned as a laboratory for the future of the Third World nation-state. If, in the 1960s, Soviets, Americans, and Germans sought to make a territorial national economy for Afghanistan, later, under military occupation, Soviet nation-builders, French and Swedish humanitarians, and Pakistani-supported guerrillas fought a transnational civil war over Afghan statehood. Covering the entire period from the Cold War to Taliban rule, Humanitarian Invasion signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of international history.

Anti-Imperial Metropolis
  • Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism
  • Michael Goebel
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    25 August 2015
  • This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international and global history as well as migration, race and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.

Of Limits and Growth
  • The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century
  • Stephen Macekura
  • Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    15 July 2015
  • Of Limits and Growth connects three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the United States' support for economic development and modernization in the Third World. It links these trends by revealing how environmental NGOs challenged and reformed the development approaches of the US government, World Bank, and United Nations from the 1960s through the 1990s. The book shows how NGOs promoted the use of 'appropriate' technologies, environmental reviews in the lending process, development plans based on ecological principles, and international cooperation on global issues such as climate change. It also reveals that the 'sustainable development' concept emerged from transnational negotiations in which environmentalists accommodated the developmental aspirations of Third World intellectuals and leaders. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States' and World Bank's development policies.